This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication On the Origin of Species and I thought that I should write a brief post on https://neuroanthropology.net/ to mark the occasion before the year is up. During my fieldwork in Brazil I did some work tangential to my thesis and went out looking for sites which had previously been painted by Conrad Martens (Botafogo Bay) and Augustus Earle (Salvador da Bahia). Earle and Martens were painters on board the Beagle during its famous voyage in the 19th century. Last week I looked at population growth in Brazil as a case-study of urbanisation, pollution and the future of developing countries. This week, I would like to share with you a visual comparison of what Brazil looked like over 150 years ago and what it looks like today.

Before: Botafogo Bay, Rio de Janeiro, 1842-1843             After: Botafogo Bay, Rio de Janeiro, April, 2009
Lithograph: W. Loeillot (26 x 37 cm)                                      Photo: Paul H. Mason

Brazil was Darwin’s first landfall on board the HMS Beagle. 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, what has happened to the landscape since the voyages of Charles Darwin? The above photos of Rio (Darwin’s second landfall on board the Beagle) demonstrate just a very small example of what has happened in that period. The city of Rio has had to claim land from the sea in order to accomodate a growing population, construct tall high-rise buildings to fit in more people and consequently Botafogo bay has become so polluted that on the three occasions I visited this beach I saw no one enjoying a swim. Since Darwin’s publication, carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 10 000% per year, the human population is almost seven times larger, and we are fast-tracking ourselves into the next great evolutionary bottle-neck of natural history. What modes of thinking, cultural practices and social behaviours must change as we face our greatest challenge to population thinking? 

Continue reading “150 years since the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859)”

How will you complete this quote?

“…the theories, technologies and findings of molecular biology, evolutionary developmental biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, linguistics and anthropology can be productively combined to…” 

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Here’s this week – top, mind, teaching & new media, anthropology, and science & life.

Top of the List

David L. Chandler, Rethinking Artificial Intelligence
A broad-based MIT project that aims to reinvent artificial intelligence for a new era. By going back and fixing mistakes, researchers hope to produce ‘co-processors’ for the human mind.

Petra Boynton, Celebrating This Blog’s Fifth Birthday!
“Sex educator, Agony Aunt, Academic” – here’s to five more years!

Sandra Kiume, Brain-Based Sex Differences
Mythbusting sex differences in the brain. Includes a video with Lise Eliot.

Sarah Kershaw, Addiction on 2 Fronts: Work and Home
Explains why Dr. A. Thomas McLellan accepted the nomination to be the government’s number two drug-control official – his life and his research surrounded by addiction.

Jessica Palmer, Beautiful Hunger
A YouTube video on swarming sea creatures. Another great one from Bioephemera is Eat Your Veggies.

ScienceDaily, First Evidence of Brain Rewiring in Children: Reading Remediation Positively Alters Brain Tissue
New white matter from 100 hours of reading – communication matters!

Mind

Benedict Carey, Study Suggests Methods and Timing to Treat Fears
Testing variations in extinction training for traumatic memories/associations – the sooner the better. Ed Yong provides greater depth about the actual research.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #93”

All eyes in the world should be on the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference as we wait with a stuttering heartbeat to learn about the policies that will guide humanity through the next great evolutionary bottleneck. The topic I will be keeping an eye on is overpopulation.

Overpopulation is the greatest ethical problem we face as a species as we begin to recognise our pivotal impact on the planet and start to actually do something about carbon emissions, pollution and poverty. If there weren’t so many of us, our levels of consumption would be reduced, our effluent would be minimised and our cultural habits would be manageable. But how do we go about ethically addressing the issue of population growth? I find it hard to condone China‘s one-child policy, but could the rest of the world be owing carbon credits to China in light of new research which shows that for every $7 spent of family planning we can reduce more than one tonne of CO2 emissions? One thing is clear, reducing the world’s population is a necessity but it is an issue that can only be approached through education not enforcement. A decade of lost opportunities to increase contraceptive prevalence was noted as recently as the 1980s (Diczfalusy, 1991). It is clear that now, more than ever, widespread distribution of family planning and contraceptive technology is crucial to our future on this planet.

To what degree is our concern about climate change altruistic? I do not believe that we are concerned about the health of our planet as much as we are concerned about our existence on it. At the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, are we discussing what changes need to be made or merely what changes we are prepared to make? And if so, how effective will such egocentric, ethnocentric and anthropomorphic changes be?

There are a few things I would like to know about the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Did the attendees travel by plane or did they sail the northerly trade-winds to Denmark? Will the menu be meat free? Are they travelling by car from their hotels to the conference? Or will they choose public transport? I’m not sure if meat, cars and planes are things that many people are willing to go without! Slipping on a condom, however, might just be the barrier between our greed and our hypocrisy. During the UN conference, there will need to be unbiased decisions about what measures we need to go to, which cultural habits will be sustainable and what solutions we can implement in order to reduce our impact on the ecology of our world.

Continue reading “Copenhagen Climate Change”

How would you complete this quote?

  

“To some extent, in a variety of imperfect ways, individually and collectively, we have the means to…”

 

 

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Our regular readers may recall a post about the Mind & its Potential conference in late October and a reference to this conference in the weekly “Complete this quote”. The Vajrayana institute organised and hosted their annual “Mind & its potential” conference this week. There were a choice of two pre-conference workshops, two packed days of presentations, a gala dinner that raised well over $7000 for the Lifehouse foundation and eight post-conference workshops. It was a fantastic jam-packed week of meaty brain-related presentations and workshops! Some of the biggest stars from the Brain Sciences and Buddhist traditions were on stage for an incredible show of collaboration, integration and contemplation. With my long-held interests in Buddhism and the brain, this conference was a must-see event for the latest developments in both areas. 

Continue reading “Mind & its Potential”