Session 16

Episode 5(1) - Our evolution, social cognition & socio-tech organization

Thursday, September 17, 2015 - 5:30 PM

Seminar Room B309, Engineering Block B

This begins the last, largest and most complex episode in my fugue, where I explore from a biological rather than a technological point of view the emergence and evolution of humanity from a family of tool-using apes.

Some 4 million years one among several species of apes began to evolve the cultural capacity to share hyper-exponentially growing volumes of complex technical knowledge about the world. This knowledge gives us and our organizations the strategic power to control the entire biosphere of Planet Earth and the mineral and atmospheric resources supporting the biosphere.

The episode presents a step-by-step evolutionary hypothesis explaining how modern humans came to be and how the development of the cultural transmission of knowledge among groups led to the emergence of modern social and economic organizations.

Topics for this sessioni of the Meetup includes:

• Basic concepts of evolutionary and comparative biology
• A review of the material evidence about our ancestry and early evolution
• I'll also say a bit about Homo naledi, described as a new species of human in a paper published this week by Lee Berger et al. The description, based on more than 1550 parts of more than 15 individuals found in a nearly inaccessible chamber of the Rising Star cave system near Johannesburg South Africa, is of a hominid species with a chimpanzee sized brain and a mosaic of features with resemblances to Australopithecus and early Homo. There is no dating evidence, but the features suggest this species may have been very close to the stock from which all Homo (humans) evolved.