AAAS Lecture, May 28, 2002.

Evolution of the Extraordinary in Human Life
May 28, 2002 6:00 PM
AAAS Headquarters Washington DC

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How can the scientific study of evolution explain "the extraordinary"
- - the human penchant for going beyond expectations and prior
standards of thinking, creativity, and action? The extraordinary in
human lives, including the search to transcend, characterizes not
just a handful of geniuses but is more common than we might at first
recognize. Standard versions of human evolutionary history, which
focus on the challenges of specific habitats such as African savanna
or the European ice ages, have difficulty explaining the transcendent
and the uniqueness of human behavior. An alternative view, which
focuses on evolution in unstable Earth environments, offers a
stronger basis for understanding the tendency of our species to
express novelty, alter our surroundings, transcend immediate
time/space conditions, and sense the ineffable and divine as part of
human life. Our complex brains, unique mental faculties, intricate
social communities, and reliance on symbolic communication and
imagination, all stem from a history of adaptation to uncertainty and
environmental risk in our ancestral world.

Speakers:
Dr. Richard Potts
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Dr. Stephen Post
Center for Biomedical Ethics, School of Medicine, Case Western
Reserve University

General Information on the Seminars
The seminar, which is free and open to the public, will be held in
the AAAS auditorium located at 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Washington
D.C. Please use the entrance on the 12th Street NW side, at the
intersection with H street, and proceed to the 2nd floor. (The New
York Avenue entrance is locked after 5:00 p.m.)

To arrive by metro: From the metro center station (access from blue,
orange, and red lines) exit to 12th and G streets. Go one block
north. Building is on the northwest corner of H and 12 St. NW.

The evening program will begin with a reception at 5:15 p.m. followed
by the keynote address at 6:00 p.m. The program will finish by 7:30
p.m.

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Received on Thu May 23 05:15:16 2002