Skeptics talk evolutionary psychology 10/18 2pm
Posted on | September 23, 2008 | Comments Off
| October 18, 2008 | ||
| 2:00 am | to | 3:00 am |
If you aren’t familiar, the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PHACT) is the local science skeptics group. They aren’t (entirely) a group of cranky humbugs and debunkers. In fact, they are jolly bunch of freethinkers and science geeks. They host monthly lectures Fall through Spring at the Community College of Philadelphia.
Unfortunately, I was away when they sent out their latest newsletter and missed blogging the John Allen Paulos event this past weekend. They’ve been after him forever.
Fortunately, you can go to their October event to see Penn’s Rob Kurzban. Rob’s an evolutionary psychologist and heckuva good speaker.
Saturday, October 18, 2008 – We the Person: Evolutionary Psychology and the Many Branches of your Brain. A central tenet of evolutionary psychology is that the mind consists of a large number of specialized systems, operating semi-autonomously. Here I will review the basic principles of the adaptationist approach to understanding human cognition and argue that 1) a great deal of what goes on in the human mind is not accessible to consciousness, 2) many parts of the human mind are not designed to generate true beliefs, 3) human minds frequently contain mutually incompatible cognitive representations isolated from one another, 4) making the very idea of a unified “self” suspect, and, finally, that 5) these ideas, taken together, explain the omnipresence of human inconsistency, including moral hypocrisy. Dr. Robert Kurzban, an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP), is a leading authority on Evolutionary Psychology and will discuss that aspect of Human Evolution. For more information about Dr. Kurzban’s work see http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~kurzban/.
PHACT meets 2:00 PM on the third Saturday of most months at Community College of Philadelphia, 17th and Spring Garden Streets, West Building Room W2-48. Meetings are free and open to the public
unless otherwise noted. Parking is free at all PhACT events at CCP. Enter the college parking
lot on 17th Street, which is one way south-bound. At the meeting be sure to get a free parking
voucher from Dr. Cattell.
