Darwin's Legacy | Lecture 9

November 17, 2008 lecture by Russell Fernald for the Stanford Continuing Studies course on Darwin's Legacy (DAR 200). Dr. Fernald discusses how social behavior changes the brains of fish, animals, and humans to adapt to situations typically involving mating behaviors. The lecture is concluded with a panel discussion with Eric Knudsen and Charles Junkerman.

Stanford Continuing Studies:
http://csp.stanford.edu

Stanford University:
http://www.stanford.edu/

Stanford Channel on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/stanford

Category:

Education

Tags:

• history
• science
• biology
• social
• humanities
• philosophy
• education
• evolution
• nature
• origin
• of
• species
• natural
• selection
• life
• organism
• environment
• anthropology
• medicine
• underwater
• behavior
• brain
• gender
• animal
• imprint
• regio

[ryanb9]

Thanks so much to Stanford University for this series!! Fantastic!!

[blaziermissy]

Take a child and isolate them from supernatural belief to adulthood and see if they believe in a god.

Behavior and belief is culturally influenced by the environment we're reared in.

[sayedzeeshan]

@blaziermissy Guess what! Your wish came true goo.gl / rKFnM

[blaziermissy]

@14oren No one can be 100% sure there are no mermaids either....there will ALWAYS be some idiot that would put more emphasis on being debatably correct than to focus on evidence for or lack thereof.

NO ONE can be 100% there is one (mermaid) or isn't one either, doubt is natural to normal human beings.

[anthonycarl2020]

do i have a.d.d., or is professor dirzo 8:45 really hard to understand? at 16:16 he tries to make a funny and gets a bleak reply from the audience. its like he's getting a raging "brainer"over fernald or something hehe...

[akrulla]

@14oren That's not the definition of atheism.

[unassumption]

@14oren

note - i don't disagree that we technically have to be agnostic toward the existence of the external world, etc, but its not something we tend to live by or consciously take notice of, plus we can be much more certain the things our perceptions (Which need explanation) are most simply and coherently interpreted in terms of are likely to be true, than things which do not conform to as many perceptions or only do so in a convoluted way involving many assumptions. 50:50 agnosticism copout

[unassumption]

@14oren

Unless you consciously consider yourself agnostic toward "2+2=4" and "A=A," your being incredulously vague with regards to your true beliefs when it comes to whatever specific definition of god is being debated. If you accept ockham's razor and inferential logic usually, why not in the case of God?

You wouldn't accept that we can't disprove a world eating serpent called "sea" because another definition of 'sea' is true, don't let god's slippery definition fool u, some r true, some not

[unassumption]

@14oren

Both of these refer to belief, a subjective state we can be 100% sure of, cognito ergo sum.

Psychological doubt has nothing to do with epistemic certainty. Over-certainty seems to be more prevalent in nature - few doubt the existence of the external world despite epistemic uncertainty- though this varies.

There's no such thing as a theist either (by this definition) as you can never be 100% sure there is no God.

Unless your this agnostic about