<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br></div><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 16px; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div align="CENTER"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><font size="5"><span style="font-size: 16pt; "><hr align="CENTER" size="3" width="95%">The Center for Human Development Presents<br></span><span style="font-size: 18pt; "><br></span></font></font><font size="6"><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman"><span style="font-size: 24pt; "><b>Bruce Weber<br></b></span></font></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Georgia" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;"><b><i>CSU Fullerton</i></b></span></font></div><div align="CENTER"><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman"><b><font size="4"><span style="font-size: 14pt; "><i>Departments of Biochemistry<br></i></span></font></b></font><font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><span style="font-size: 12pt; "><br><b>Friday, November 21th <br></b></span><b><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 9pt; ">12-1pm (discussion 1-1:40pm)<br>room 003 in the Cognitive Science Building</span></font></b></font></div><div align="CENTER"><br></div><div align="CENTER"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px; "><br></span></font></div><div align="CENTER"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><b><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 9pt; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px; font-weight: normal; ">"On the Origin of Symbolic Species: The Baldwin Effect and Emergent Complexity in the Darwin Research Tradition"</span></span></font></b></font></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-center; "><div style="text-align: left; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 16px; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="text-align: -webkit-center; "><br></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-center; "><div style="text-align: left; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;">
<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;font-size: 14px; "><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Bold""><o:p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11px; ">In<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Bold""> </span><i><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Italic"">On
the Origin of Species</span></i><i><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Bold Italic""> </span></i>Charles Darwin
bracketed off both the problem of the origin of life and the issue of human
evolution.<span> </span>While he speculated
only in private correspondence with Joseph Hooker on how life might have
arisen, he did publish about human psychology and evolution in <i><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Italic"">The
Descent of Man </span></i>and <i><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Italic"">On the Expression of Emotions in
Man and Animals</span></i>.<span>
</span>However, Randal Keynes has argued that Darwin’s concerns about human
evolution were part of his creative thinking about evolution from the beginning
of his theorizing in the late 1830s.<span> </span></span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;font-size: 14px; "><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Bold""><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11px; "><span>By the time of Darwin’s death in 1882, there was what Peter
Bowler has characterized as an “eclipse of Darwin” in which Darwinism came to
mean any naturalistic explanation of biological phenomena even when
neo-Lamarckian mechanisms were utilized.<span>
</span>But the demonstration of August Weismann’s “barrier” in which the
germ-line was unaffected by somatic changes precluded such non-Darwinian notions.<span> </span>Around the turn of the twentieth century,
the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin proposed a way in which organisms
with sufficiently complex nervous systems could evolve more rapidly than
waiting for small, gradual heritable variation upon which natural selection
could act, that is, a way in which behavior and mind could be important factors
in evolution.<span> </span>In the “Baldwin
effect” organisms that learn a “trick” that gives them a selective advantage
will be likely to leave more offspring.<span>
</span>If the environment is stable enough over generational time that such a
behavior continues to have selective advantage, then any heritable change that
stabilizes the behavior or facilitates the learning of the behavior will be
selected for.<span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; "></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;font-size: 14px; "><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Bold""><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11px; "><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">In the early days of the development of the Modern
Evolutionary Synthesis (or neo-Darwinism) there was an openness to a possible
role for the Baldwin effect, but by the mid-twentieth century George Gaylord
Simpson concluded that the Baldwin effect was at most trivially true.</span><span style="font-size: 11px; "> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">This situation began to change late in
the twentieth century with the rise of work in artificial intelligence in which
computer simulations, such as those of Hinton and Nowlan, suggested the
plausibility of Baldwin-type mechanisms.</span><span style="font-size: 11px; ">
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">This was taken up and advocated by Daniel Dennett in his </span><i style="font-size: 11px; "><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Italic"">Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; "> thus given greater visibility to Baldwin’s
notion.</span><span style="font-size: 11px; "> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">About the same time
Terrence Deacon utilized the Baldwin effect in his </span><i style="font-size: 11px; "><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Italic"">The Symbolic Species
</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">to explain the rapid evolution of human language.</span><span style="font-size: 11px; "> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">Concurrently, David Depew and I, in </span><i style="font-size: 11px; "><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Italic"">Darwinism
Evolving</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">, argued that background assumptions in systems dynamics
gave insight to different phases of the Darwinian research tradition and that a
shift to complex systems dynamics allows Darwinism to encompass phenomena that
had been excluded from the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, such as the origin of
life. In a volume that Depew and I edited, </span><i style="font-size: 11px; "><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman Italic"">Evolution and Learning: The
Baldwin Effect Reconsidered</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">, we extend that argument to include the
Baldwin effect.</span><span style="font-size: 11px; "> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; ">I will argue that
the turn to background assumptions of complex systems dynamics allows a supple
Darwinism that can include a significant role for the Baldwin effect, in
particular in understanding the emergence of human language.</span><span> </span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p>
<!--EndFragment-->
</span></font></div></div><div align="CENTER"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><b><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 9pt; "><br></span></font><span style="font-size: 12pt; "><u>Everyone is welcome. <br></u></span></b><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 9pt; "><br><b>Speaker list</b> and <b>papers</b> are available at <a href="http://www.chd.ucsd.edu/seminar/f08sched.shtml">http://www.chd.ucsd.edu/seminar/f08sched.shtml</a><br><br>For any<b> questions </b>about the seminar<b> contact Katie </b>at kgwagner<a href="x-msg://479/jlparris@psy.ucsd.edu">@psy.ucsd.edu</a></span></font></font></div><div><font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 9pt; "><br> <br><hr align="CENTER" size="3" width="95%"></span></font></font></div></div></span></div></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></span></span></font></div></div><div align="CENTER" style="text-align: left;"><font size="1"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><span style="font-size: 9pt; "><font color="#0000FF"><u style="text-decoration: none;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font></u></font></span></font></font></div></div></span></div></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>