Join the College of Arts and Sciences and the Jacksonville Zoo for a lecture bridging the sciences and humanities.
Joseph Call, University of St. Andrews, Psychology and Neuroscience lecture will discuss what makes a human: a perspective from comparative cognition. In his book, the Descent of Man, Darwin postulated that cognitive differences between human and nonhuman animals were a matter of degree rather than of kind. This was a provocative idea that sparked a vigorous debate that has persisted until our days, regularly fuelled by new discoveries in comparative cognition and the various alternative explanations that they invariably trigger. In this talk I will present some of the empirical evidence that scientists have amassed regarding the cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals in the last three decades. I will focus primarily on research on memory, reasoning and language in primates, although I will also include some data on birds and dogs. My choices are not random. I chose those topics and species because they are precisely those that Darwin used to make his argument about the evolutionary continuity of mental abilities. The goal of my talk is twofold. First, to examine Darwin's original ideas against the backdrop provided by modern research on animal cognition. Second, to use this evidence to examine our assumptions and draw conclusions about what makes us human.
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