Androids Zombies Brains

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.

Deacons' suggested reading for the conference

"..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..."

Damasio, A. (2003) "Feelings of Emotion and the Self," Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1001, 253-261.

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

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

Article by Terrence Deacon Draft of chapter to be published in B. Weber & D. Depew (eds.) Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect. Reconsidered. MIT Press, 2003

"The research in the journal Nature Neuroscience by Professor Seth Grant, Head of the Genes to Cognition Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, suggests that it is not size alone that gives more brain power. Instead, he found that, during evolution, increasingly sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses - notably by providing more connections in the brain - allowed development of animals with more complex behaviours. " (Telegraph)

Krach S, Hegel F, Wrede B, Sagerer G, Binkofski F, et al. (2008) Can Machines Think? Interaction and Perspective Taking with Robots Investigated via fMRI. PLoS ONE 3(7): e2597. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002597

Metabolic changes responsible for the evolution of our unique cognitive abilities indicate that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its capabilities. Research published today in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology adds weight to the theory that schizophrenia is a costly by-product of human brain evolution.

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

Hawks J, Wang E. T., Cochran G. M., Harpending H. C., and Moyzis R. K., Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution, PNAS (early online) doi:10.1073/pnas.0707650104

Canadian psychologist, Merlin Donald, explains the evolution of humans' uniquely collective mind as he outlines his theory of the evolution of human consciousness:

"The knowledge argument aims to establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties. It rests on the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being. It is one of the most discussed arguments against physicalism."