Free talk on human origins, politics, globalism, and new media, 12/19 @ 2:00PM, in Milpitas

[Brian Howell]

Prof. Henry Gilbert is a former graduate student of my father:

The traveling human origins exhibition of the Smithsonian will be open much of this month at the Milpitas Library.  The library is the only place in California where the Smithsonian will be setting up a physical display, and the experience should be a good one. I was invited to talk there by the Leakey Foundation. In spite of the Templeton logo on the flyer I took the (nonpaying) gig.

The talk will be Saturday, December 19 at 2:00 p.m. It is free to all.

I will be speaking on slightly political topics, enlightenment and reason. A secular perspective is central to notions of human rights and individual liberty, and science bows to the tyranny of neither religious nor Jacobin totalitarians. The nationless concepts of democracy and freedom rely on the prevalence of reason in a society, and evolutionary notions of humanity were present in 18th Century France, England, and the nascent United States well-before the first human fossil was ever found. Secular notions of humanity lace revolutions and cross nationalities in the late 18th Century.

It is not the only time and place that humanistic ideas have emerged among humans, but without such currents of thought running deeply through a population human rights, individual liberty, and democracy cannot possibly gain traction. And these ideas cannot be coerced either. We wonder why democracy is unconvincing when we drop leaflets about it from war machines! 

How will we ever make the world understand democracy is good? We won’t. That is not the right question. The right question is ‘What information do we produce that has the potential to catalyze intellectual movements in places where a democratic republic is close? What makes such values self evident?’

I suggest that the human fossil record is one such wellspring; it is international, non coercive, ethnicity-free, and unquestionably real. It exposes incontrovertibly that no human or human designed system has any preeminent right to power. Free democracy emerges as a solution, not an imposed belief system.

The information surrounding the empirical record of human origins is thus critical. But, take it from someone in the trenches, this information is not always consistent or parsimonious. The cloud of stories surrounding human fossils can serve as much to obscure as it can to elucidate, and, while many polls show an increasing secularization of US society, in some ways this just translates to a larger uncritical audience of human origins artifice. Also, just as all media lost a bit of journalistic integrity with internet-decentralized communication, the same has happened with paleoanthropology. Social media and paleoanthropology reality television have not been good filters for the information that I have to teach my students!

So whose responsibility it is to make the information surrounding the sublimely tangible fossils of apelike pre-humans equally accessible? All of ours! Researchers, teachers, Google scholars, donors, students… in our decentralized state of information flow, the responsibility for insistence on consistency and testability is all of ours.

And, as we are very aware, the stakes are high. The forces of irrationality abound, growing and unfolding. Devotion of some part of your life to tending human origins science is a noble thing.

Hope to see you there,

Henry

Beyond Creation and Evolution: Human Origins Studies in a Secular, Media-Saturated World: Religion and science battled through the Renaissance and Age of Reason. In this struggle, science overcame, and the discovery of evolution by means of natural selection and speciation (nicely coincident with the discovery of the human fossil record) has been cast as the long-sought, final proof of a naturalistic human essence. Now there are different, bigger dangers looming that we can address with the science of human origins. What is the use of the fossil record in this new time, and how do we approach it? Can the empirical reality of the human fossil record bring people together in a world of increasing extremism? The fossil record is real, and studying these fossils to illuminate human origins has the potential to go on forever as long as fossils continue to be found, curated, and preserved. Speaker: Dr. Henry Gilbert from the Leakey Foundation. NOTE: Free and open to the public. In our Auditorium.

Henry Gilbert

Associate Professor 

Department of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Studies

CSU East Bay

Researcher, Human Evolution Research Center, UC Berkeley

[Scott Hotes]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com> wrote:

Prof. Henry Gilbert is a former graduate student of my father:

How will we ever make the world understand democracy is good? We won’t. That is not the right question. The right question is ‘What information do we produce that has the potential to catalyze intellectual movements in places where a democratic republic is close? What makes such values self evident?’

I suggest that the human fossil record is one such wellspring; it is international, non coercive, ethnicity-free, and unquestionably real. It exposes incontrovertibly that no human or human designed system has any preeminent right to power. Free democracy emerges as a solution, not an imposed belief system.

Brian, this is certainly very intriguing!

I would love to better understand how the existence of the fossil record as it pertains to our evolution is related to democracy or political science generally!!

On the face of it it would seem difficult to draw guidance directly from the fossil record.  If nothing else, it's not unreasonable to look at social structures in other species, at least as a starting point, and it's not at all clear that democracy or questions of individual liberty fall out of this, quite the contrary.

Maybe I just need to go to the talk!

Scott

[Brian Howell]

Henry is a very good speaker. I hope the talk is recorded because I'll be out of town.

Henry was my dad's last grad student, and he thought very highly of him.

--

Brian Howell
www.linkedin.com/in/bdhowell

[jack saunders]

We have been conditioned and sold on democracy since nursery school.  So it strikes us as jarring when we hear the principled case against it.  But you can hear it in the middle east.  I heard one such the other night....a Jordanian professor who liked it to scattering decision-making chits hither and yon, counting on a good result.  To him it was like a central bank sending every person one dollar.  "By the next day, most of them will be gathered up by organized schemers ready to bundle them for their purposes."  

 

When elections come in that part of the world, western diplomats must contort themselves to stay with democratic hopes, stressing a "free and fair" caveat but painfully aware that mischief looms.

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From: Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>
To: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 7, 2015 8:23 AM
Subject: [Ipse Dixit] Free talk on human origins, politics, globalism, and new media, 12/19 @ 2:00PM, in Milpitas

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[jack saunders]

I'll be out of town too.  Let me know if you get a recording.

What a date for a break-out public lecture!

 

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From: Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>
To: Scott Hotes <sah...@gmail.com>
Cc: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 7, 2015 10:49 AM
Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] Free talk on human origins, politics, globalism, and new media, 12/19 @ 2:00PM, in Milpitas

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