This lecture focuses on how permanent high-altitude residents have adapted to low oxygen levels in the Himalayan, Andean, and Ethiopian highlands. Important biological factors are key to these adaptations, which vary among continental groups. Recent studies show that different changes lead to similar adaptations in high-altitude Tibetan and Peruvian individuals. These discoveries enhance our knowledge of human evolution and provide valuable insights into how our bodies respond to low oxygen, which is important for health and treating heart and lung diseases.
Osher Biennial Master Class I: An Anthology of Anthropogeny
Wednesday, October 02, 2024Abstracts
Abstracts
This lecture will address how humans became “the planet-altering ape” that is now causing the sixth mass extinction and climate change crises and how we can become “the planet-protecting ape.” The evolutionary lineage leading to humans underwent many defining changes since our last common ancestor with chimpanzees: we became bipedal; exploited diverse ecosystems; evolved into top predators; developed complex tools; tamed fire; and developed our most powerful social tool: language. These traits allowed our species to colonize every ecosystem and produce cumulative culture, which in turn shaped much of our biology. Humans now drive the sixth mass extinction and climate change. Will our capacity for pro-social behavior, empathy, imagination, and behavioral flexibility allow us to find urgently needed solutions for averting these existential crises?
This lecture will share the experience of working towards a Ph.D. in biology at UC San Diego with tales and insights gleaned as a student of human origins in CARTA’s Anthropogeny Graduate Specialization. Nicholas Nelson investigates the neuroscience of chronic pain, yet his most impactful graduate school experience was found outside of the lab. He will share how digging and hunting for food and singing and dancing around the fire with a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania while on the Anthropogeny Field Course has been an enormous gift that enhanced his studies and shaped him as a biologist and a person trying to do right in the world.
Why talk to babies? To grow their brains!
Babies don’t talk to us, so why should we talk to them? Do they understand us better when we use high pitched and simplified baby talk? Why do we so often use baby talk with babies anyway? Do babies get confused when we use more than one language with them? Does using sign language help or hurt babies’ language development? Recent research provides answers to these questions, showing how babies learn language and what happens to their brains when they do. This talk gives a broad overview of how the language in the environment affects brain development, especially the language system, a hallmark of human evolution.
This lecture will explore how different animal species communicate and what is similar and different between human communication and other animals' ways of communicating. We will review different types of animal signaling, the informative vs. manipulative functions of communication, when and why non-human animals communicate and discuss how rare are the vocal learning abilities of humans in the animal kingdom. While presenting examples from several animal species (primates, ravens, bees, dolphins, dogs and cats) we will outline how studying animal communication can provide us with a window into their minds and enhance our understanding of our companions on this planet.
