A seminar on evolution and the mind
My seminar this semester will be examining the evolution of language and stone tool manufacture, building from first principles in evolutionary theory. I'm doing something entirely new for me; the students and I will be building a wiki. That forum will put a large proportion of the output of the class online.
I have been reviewing papers for the course for some time now, with many of them appearing here. I'll be stepping up those efforts, while showing how these "first principles" help to illuminate some problematic aspects of human cognitive evolution. The course begins with a presentation of the core ideas of selection on life history traits, evolutionary game theory, and information theory. Over the next month or so, I will be writing up some guides to these areas of theory and posting them.
Courses offered, Spring 2007:
It's time for another semester to begin, and I'm looking forward to meeting all my new students. My introductory course, Anthro 105, is meeting Monday morning, and it is likely to be the first class of the semester for many students. Of course, with another 6 inches of snow, I may be missing a few.
My courses this semester are:
- Anthropology 105, Principles of Biological Anthropology
- Anthropology 603, Seminar in Evolutionary Theory
I'm going to let this run onto the main page, which may be a bit unusual for regular readers who aren't used to reading much about my classes. A lot of the content over the next few months will be related to my seminar, so this is a bit of a heads-up.
Anthropology 105
Welcome to the course page for Anthropology 105, spring 2007. I'm looking forward to a great semester.
Are you looking for the lecture outlines? You can find them on the Learn@UW site for the class. I can't link directly in, since a login is required for enrolled students, but I can give you a link to the main login page.
Also at that site, you will be able to find an online copy of the syllabus with important dates, some online quizzes, and other course materials -- including the discussion papers for Honors students.
If you have questions about the class at any time, be sure to ask your TA or myself and we will do everything we can to assist you!
Biology of mind :: course description
This course is a broad, interdisciplinary introduction to the evolution
of the brain and mind. This inquiry is focused on humans, with
comparisons drawn from primates and other mammals. The pursuit of an evolutionary account of the mind depends on answering several fundamental philosophical and empirical questions.
From an empirical perspective, the course addresses the following questions:
- How does the structure of the brain impact the function of the mind?
- What variation in mental function occurs among present-day humans?
- What delineates the variation between species in brain structure and function?
- What is the nature of the systematic structure of mental functioning?
- To what extent is the variation in mental function inherited genetically?
- What were the minds of ancient people and fossil hominids like?
To answer these questions, different functions of the mind are reviewed in a comparative context. The mental functions that are shared between humans and other mammals broadly are differentiated from those that set humans apart, including language, consciousness, self-awareness, culture, and many others. The foundations of these advanced cognitive features are explored in the mental lives of other creatures. Several models will be presented for the evolution of such characteristics from simpler neural and psychological structures. In addition, direct evidence from the fossil and archaeological records is considered as a possible indication of the sequence of human mental evolution.
From a philosophical perspective, the course also pursues several other questions:
- Is the mind coextensive with the brain, and does it include significant non-brain elements?
- What part does culture play in the determination of human minds, and does culture present a significant non-evolutionary mechanism of change?
- Are minds and mental representations commensurable between individuals?
- How do developmental changes in the brain and mind impact individuality, and does such an impact have social and evolutionary consequences?
While the empirical questions may yield to observation and experiment, these philosophical problems ultimately can be answered only through the application of logic. Nevertheless, their answers may significantly inform our understanding of the nature of mental evolution, by delineating boundary conditions for evolutionary change of the mind while highlighting other causes of change.
Together, these two bases of inquiry present a broad perspective on the biology of the mind. The subject matter is spread across the four cross-listed fields and others, including philosophy, computer science, genetics, and paleontology. This interdisciplinary base creates a demanding learning experience, recognized by the high level of the class, challenging written assignments, guest lectures by experts in their respective fields, and both primary and secondary readings. No students in the class can be expected to be expert in all the areas covered, and for this reason the course presents some introductory material important to the interdisciplinary understanding of the issues. For some students such material will be old hat, but please understand that students in different majors may never have been exposed to the fundamental concepts of your field, and may be unable to proceed without them. Almost certainly there will be other course components that are new to you but old hat to someone else.
The interdisciplinary nature of the course also ensures that every student may get something different out of it. Although the course goes through a systematic survey of issues related to the biology of the mind, the learning experiences of different students and what they take away to their respective fields may be very different. For this reason, the written assignments in the course attempt to promote dialogues between students in different fields and to allow the fuller development of individual perspectives.
Biology of mind :: course schedule
September 5 Course introduction: biology, evolution, brains, and minds.
Sept. 7 Philosophy of mind, the mind-body problem. Kim, "Mind-body problem, 40 years later"
Sept. 12 Proximate and ultimate causes of mental phenomena. How is mind a phenotype? Mayr, "Cause and effect in biology."
Sept. 14 Adaptationism, exaptations, spandrels, and behavioral
evolution. Gould and Lewontin, "The Spandrels of San Marco..."
Sept. 19 Neurons, building nervous systems, vertebrate brains. Northcutt, "Understanding vertebrate brain evolution".
Sept. 21 Mammalian brain specializations and genetics.
Sept. 26 Mammalian social groups and social behaviors.
Sept. 28 Culture and communication in mammals, focusing on primates.
October 3 Primate minds
Oct. 5 Early hominid brain evolution and behavioral evidence
Oct. 10 Toolmaking, archaeology, and the brain
Oct. 12 Evolution of brain size and anatomy in Homo
Oct. 17 Archaeology, Neandertals, MSA, and the Upper Paleolithic
Oct. 19 Symbolic culture, information processing, and intelligence
Oct. 24 Biosemiotics and information theory
Oct. 26 Developmental plasticity, "evo-devo" and the mind
Oct. 31 Learning and the Baldwin effect
November 2 Emotions and action
Nov. 7 Language development, pidgins and creoles
Nov. 9 Evolution of language
Nov. 14 Language, consciousness, and cognition
Nov. 16 Art and perception
Nov. 21 Sleep, dreams, and consciousness
Nov. 23 No class, Thanksgiving break
Nov. 28 Altered states
Nov. 30 Animal consciousness
December 5 Cognition and culture
Dec. 7 The aging mind
Dec. 12 Artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and minds
Dec. 14 Last day of class. Student choice lecture.
Welcome to Anthropology 304
This is the course page for Anthropology 304, "Heredity, Environment, and Human Populations," at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Lecture notes (old powerpoint files by PDF) are available below. They are divided into six parts. I have also made two of my own book chapters available. The first one, chapter 2, covers genes, selection, and drift including some material on Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Chapter 3 discusses gene flow, FST and race.
Course materials:
Syllabus
Part 1 lectures
Part 2 lectures
Part 3 lectures
Part 4 lectures (race)
Part 5 lectures (eugenics to behavioral modification)
Part 6 lectures (genetic engineering, rights and culture)
Chapter 2, "Genetic change in populations"
Chapter 3, "Population structure and race"
Study guide 1
Anth 100 has started!
For those of you who aren't students, my section of the very, very large undergraduate lecture course, General Anthropology, has started today. Regular blogging will be a bit light as I get it running this week. New stuff related to the course will be posted on the blog, but predated so it won't show up on the front page.
For those of you who are students and are finding the weblog for the first time, welcome! Please feel free to look around as much as you like. You can find the course-specific material by clicking here. Old Powerpoints for the course are posted here and at Learn@UW. Look over the next few days for readings.
Australopithecines!
Welcome to the home page for Anthro 604, "Australopithecines!" This page keeps a list of pages within this site that are useful for the course, as well as external links of relevance. Thus, this welcome page itself is fairly bare-bones. If you have any problems accessing the content, please contact the instructor (i.e., me).
Accessing the electronic reserves for the course
Hominoid phylogeny and genetics overview
An essay on Ardipithecus in light of new remains from Gona
Courses offered :: spring 2005:
Principles of Biological Anthropology (Anthropology 105)
Australopithecines (Anthropology 604)
Textbook chapters available
The text for the course is my own textbook, Biological Anthropology FAQ. Each chapter corresponds to a lecture, beginning with chapter 2. These are available by installments over the next couple of weeks, both here and at Learn@UW.
Chapters available now:
Chapter 2, "Genetic change in populations"
Chapter 3, "Population structure and race"
Chapter 4 will not be available before the exam. My apologies for the delay in this chapter.
Chapter 5, "Evolution of the primates"
Chapter 6, "Primate behavior"
Chapter 7, "Early hominids"
Chapter 8, "The emergence of Homo"
Check back again for updates!
Welcome to Anthropology 490!
This is the website for the course Anth 490: "The Rise of Genius". If you are enrolled in the course, you know what it is about. If not, feel free to look around.
Course materials:
Welcome to Anthropology 100!
This is the information zone for the third section of Anthropology 100 this fall, Biological Anthropology. I'm glad you found it, in spite of any redirects and turnarounds!
You may be wondering where you've ended up. I'm the instructor for the biological section of the class, and this site is my weblog. On the main page, I review lots of recent news in biological anthropology -- especially my own research topics: human evolution and genetics. The blog is updated at least daily, and usually more. If you want to find out more about me or my work, you can check out my information page, or read the weblog.
I have written a text for this section of the course, called Biological Anthropology FAQ. The book is specialized to this part of the course, and especially the way that I teach it. Most texts are way too long for a ten lecture sequence. I've made this one just the right length, with one short chapter for every lecture. I think it will be much more useful than the other books I could have assigned, but if not, at least it's free! It will be available from the library e-reserves November 1, just before the section begins.
I am also providing a full set of old lecture slides, which you can find by scrolling down or, if not, by clicking the link.
Again, welcome! You won't see me posting updates for the course until November. But in the meantime, feel free to look around. You may even find that you want to major in biological anthropology!
Anthropology 100 :: lectures available:
The following sets of Powerpoint slides were used in a previous semester of the course. I will not be using the same slides this semester. Instead, I will be using slides that have a lot more pictures, and a lot fewer words.
Click here for old Powerpoints!
Some students find it very useful to have the terms, definitions, and essential points outlined on slides during a lecture. When I started teaching this class, I did just that: I put together slides with all the important terms, site names, and descriptions of central concepts. These slides represent the product of that effort.
But man, it was boring! For one thing, I had to wait until everybody had written everything down before I could change the slide. For another, not very many words will fit on a slide, so I couldn't put everything in the most interesting order. And a slide full of text tends to put people to sleep. So the students really liked the slides because they helped with notes and exams. But it was less than fulfilling for me, and I suspect many of you.
Then I realized: if I just give you these slides before lectures, I don't have to show them during lectures! Instead, I can show lots of cool pictures like sabertooth cat jaws crunching on fossil skulls, and chimpanzees ripping up monkey carcasses. Maybe even some video clips. And I won't have to worry so much about whether students can write down everything, because it will all be there in these slides!
So I'm providing them to you here for your convenience -- you can print them out and take them to lectures with you. They contain lots of essential definitions, names, and places, in the order presented in lectures. I hope that may save you a lot of writing, and may even let you kick back and listen. They may not be all the notes you'll need, but along with the FAQ, they should cover just about everything.
Remember: these won't be the same slides that you see during lectures. I've got great pictures and multimedia, with video clips and 3-d rotating figures. Don't go thinking you can skip class and still understand it all -- this stuff is not going to be covered in discussion sections! And the exam would be really dull if I just included stuff from these slides and the textbook. What's the use of lively lectures without a lively exam?
One more thing: I have compressed these files a lot, but some of them are still fairly large. Occasionally people tell me that they couldn't download them onto their computer. I have found two different kinds of problems. Sometimes your computer may start to download a file, but not tell you. So check your download folder, it may already be there. Other times, students have disconnected their computer before the file finishes downloading. I haven't yet seen a problem that wasn't fixed in one of those ways.
But computers and browsers are always changing. If you do have trouble, please let me know so I can get everything ironed out.
Biology of mind :: lectures available:
- Syllabus
- Lecture 1, September 2: Course introduction
- Lecture 2, September 7: Mind-body problem, causation in biology
- Lecture 3, September 9: Mind and phenotype, neural underpinnings of mental phenomena
- Lecture 4, September 14: Neurons, building nervous systems, vertebrate brains
- Lecture 5, September 16: The adaptationist program: critique and defense
- Lecture 6, September 21: Mammalian brain evolution
- Lecture 7, September 23: Mammalian social groups
- Lecture 9, September 30: Culture and communication in primates
- Lecture 10, October 5: Early hominid evolution and brain
- Lecture 11, October 7: Early Homo brains and behavior
- Lecture 12, October 12: Archaeology, brains, and the mind
- Lecture 13, October 14: More archaeology; Neandertals
- Lecture 14, October 19: Symbolic culture, information processing, and intelligence
- Lecture 15, October 21: Developmental plasticity
- Exam; no lecture 16
- Lecture 17, October 28: Learning and the Baldwin effect
- Deric Bownds lectures 18 and 19; no notes available
- Lecture 20, November 9: Emotions and action
- Lecture 21, November 11: Language development
- Lecture 22 and 23, November 16 and 18: Evolution of language
- Lecture 24, November 23: Art and perception
- Ruth Benca lecture 25; no notes available
- Lecture 26, December 2: Animal consciousness
- Lecture 27, December 7: Consciousness
- Lecture 28, December 9: Altered states and variation in consciousness
Biology of mind :: Paper 2/3
I have had a couple of questions about the next paper, and wanted to post the information again to clarify. The paper will have the due dates of the original paper 3. This means that two copies of a draft are due Thursday, November 11 for distribution to classmates. The reviews of these are due Tuesday, November 16, with the final draft due on Tuesday, November 23.
Your topic may follow either assignment 2 or assignment 3. Please let me know immediately if you have any topic-related questions.
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks