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As Darwin correctly surmised in his Descent of Man, humans descended from
African apes. Today we know that like their larger brained, bipedal
"cousins", Great Apes also use tools and exhibit a rudimentary understanding
of causality and Theory of Mind. However, other apes fall short of humans in
intention-reading and cooperation. This lecture intends to explain the speaker's belief on why the psychological and emotional underpinnings for apes to
care so much about what others intend and feel, emerged as a byproduct of
shared parental and alloparental care and provisioning of young, what socio-biologists refer to as "cooperative breeding". According to widely accepted
chronology, large-brained, anatomically modern humans evolved in the last
200,000 years while behaviorally modern humans, capable of symbolic thought
and language evolved more recently still within the last 100,000 or so
years. However, the speaker argues that emotionally modern humans, newly interested in
the mental and subjective states of others and characterized by pro-social
impulses to give and share, emerged far earlier along with what, for an ape,
was an unusual mode of rearing young.
Speaker: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy; this event is open to the public and free of charge. Refreshments to follow.
Sponsored by: The Women's Studies Program, the Departments of Psychology,
Anthropology, and Biology and the Darwin Bicentennial Contact |
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