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08.31.2008 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Everyone wants wisdom and wealth. Nevertheless, our health often gives out before we achieve them. To lengthen our lives, and improve our minds, in the future we will need to change our our bodies and brains. To that end, we first must consider how normal Darwinian evolution brought us to where we are. Then we must imagine ways in which future replacements for worn body parts might solve most problems of failing health. We must then invent strategies to augment our brains and gain greater wisdom. Eventually we will entirely replace our brains -- using nanotechnology. Once delivered from the limitations of biology, we will be able to decide the length of our lives--with the option of immortality-- and choose among other, unimagined capabilities as well." Scientific American, Oct, 1994

Subtle refinements in brain architecture, rather than large-scale alterations, make us smarter than other animals. (Scientific American)

"..We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens--a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal ... a creature capable of steering our own evolution..."

"Are original intentionality and intrinsic intentionality the same thing? We will have to approach this question indirectly, by pursuing various attempts to draw a sharp distinction between the way our minds (or mental states) have meaning, and the way other things do."

Chimps and apes are genetically so similar to humans - and their human-like gestures do remind us how close we are on the family tree - that scientists have long been puzzled why they don't live as long as we do. Diet-related evolutionary changes may explain it.

"Humans are sometimes said to be distinguished as "The Symbolic Species." A Research Highlights note in Nature point to the work of Addessi et al., who show that capuchin monkeys, who diverged from the human lineage ~35 million years ago, can be trained to use and assign value to tokens (symbols) for different items of food." (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

"Language, foresight, musical skills and other hallmarks of intelligence are connected through an underlying facility that enhances rapid movements. Creativity may result from a Darwinian contest within the brain." Published in Scientific American 271(4):100-107, October 1994

"The Baldwin effect occurs, if it ever does, when a biological trait becomes innate as a result of first being learned. Suppose that some trait is initially absent from a population of organisms. Then a number of organisms succeed in learning the trait. There will be a Baldwin effect if this period of learning leads to the trait becoming innate throughout the population." David Papineau

"Our brains are well suited for language. But how did they get that way." Calvin's review of Deacon in the NYRB

NYT

Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain. In O. Vilarroya, & F.F i Argimon, (Eds.) Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition. Rodopi, 2007, 18: 215-222.

by Trevor Stone, University of Colorado, Boulder Issues and Methods in Cognitive Science, Spring 2002; completed Spring 2003

Preview of an article by Howard Gardner from The New York Review of Books, October 9, 1997

By Harold Kalant, Werner Kalow, Steven Pinker, Reply by Stephen Jay Gould In response to Darwinian Fundamentalism (June 12, 1997) - The New York Review of Books

By Merlin Donald, Steven Mithen, Reply by Howard Gardner In response to Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange (October 9, 1997) - The New York Review of Books

Language is a spontaneously evolved emergent adaptation, not a formal computational system. Its structure does not derive from either innate or social instruction but rather self-organization and selection. Its quasi-universal features emerge from the int

Article by Terrence Deacon

Deacons' suggested reading for the conference