<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; "><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</i></span></font></b></font></div><div align="CENTER"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Georgia" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;"><b><i><br></i></b></span></font></div><div align="CENTER"><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman"><font size="4"><span style="font-size: 14pt; ">with discussion by:</span></font></font></div><div align="CENTER" style="font-size: 16px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Georgia" size="6" style="font-size: 28px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 23px; "><b>David Depew</b></span></font></div><div align="CENTER"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Georgia" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;"><b><i>The University of Iowa</i></b></span></font></div><div align="CENTER"><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; "><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></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></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%"><br></span></font></font></div></div></span></div></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></span></span></font></div></div></div></span></div></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>