William H. Calvin, Ph. D. , (born 30 April 1939) is a Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Events 313 - Roman emperor Licinius unifies the entire Eastern Roman Empire under his rule Year 1939 ( MCMXXXIX) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. See Washington (disambiguation for other uses The University of Washington, founded in 1861, is a public research University He is a well-known popularizer of neuroscience and evolutionary biology, including the hybrid of these two fields, neural Darwinism. Neuroscience is a field devoted to the scientific study of the nervous system Foundations of modern biology There are five unifying principles Neural Darwinism, a large scale theory of brain function by Gerald Edelman, was initially published in 1978 in a book called The Mindful Brain (MIT Press He relates abrupt climate change to human evolution and speculates about the future. Climate change is any long-term significant change in the “average weather” that a given region experiences Human evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the part of biological Evolution concerning the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct Species
In his book How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now, Calvin writes as an advocate of the idea that brain-based Darwinian processes are what provides brains with what we call "consciousness" and "intelligence". A Book is a set or collection of written printed illustrated or blank sheets made of Paper, Parchment, or other material usually fastened together Charles Robert Darwin (February 12 1809 &ndash April 19 1882 was an English naturalist, who realised and demonstrated that all Species of life The brain is the center of the Nervous system in animals All Vertebrates and the majority of Invertebrates have a brain Consciousness has been defined loosely as a constellation of attributes of Mind such as Subjectivity, Self-awareness, Sentience, and the Intelligence (also called intellect) is an Umbrella term used to describe a property of the Mind that encompasses many related abilities such as the capacities Calvin starts with the harmless division of brain processes into two types, those that depend on "cerebral ruts" (hardware) and those that dance more freely through the brain and so are able to function like "software". Hardware is a general term that refers to the physical artifacts of a Technology. . . . . Calvin usually calls these "firing patterns".
Calvin's more audacious step, in his research monograph The Cerebral Code, comes when he suggests that the pattern of action potentials in any particular neocortical minicolumn can be replicated and spread through the cortex like a piece of software code and be "played" on the millions of other minicolumns in the same way you can play a million copies of a CD on a million CD players. In Neurophysiology, the action potential is a self-regenerating Wave of Electrochemical activity that allows Nerve cells to carry a signal A cortical minicolumn is a vertical column through the cortical layers of the brain comprising perhaps 80&ndash120 Neurons except in the Primate A Compact Disc (also known as a CD) is an Optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio . . . . . the key difference being that while all CD players are designed to do basically the same task, the various cortical minicolumns can all have their own unique "ruts" and the copies of the firing patterns are not exact duplicates.
This allows for a "cerebral symphony" rather than just a million-fold amplification of the same tune and a "survival of the fittest" process whereby those firing patterns that resonate best with the existing pool of "ruts" will dominate our consciousness and generate intelligent behavior. ("Our long train of connected thoughts is why our consciousness is so different from what came before. ")
In writing about what mind will become, in A Brief History of the Mind, he notes, "We will likely shift gears again, juggling more concepts and making decisions even faster, imagining courses of action in greater depth. Ethics are possible only because of a human level of ability to speculate, judge quality, and modify our possible actions accordingly. "
William H. Calvin has advanced the view that use of the Acheulean hand axe in hominids was a major factor in the evolution in human intelligence. Acheulean (also spelled Acheulian,) is the name given to an Archaeological industry of Stone tool manufacture associated with prehistoric Hominins A handaxe is a bifacial Lower and Middle Paleolithic core Tool.
Books
- Inside the Brain (with George Ojemann, New York:New American Library, 1980).
- The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. Update 1991 by Bantam. )
- The River That Runs Uphill: A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain (New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0025209205)
- The Cerebral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness (New York: Bantam Books, 1990. ISBN 0-553-05707-3)
- The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1991. ISBN 0-553-07084-3)
- How the Shaman Stole the Moon: The Search of Ancient Prophet-Scientists: From Stonehenge to the Grand Canyon (New York: Bantam Books, 1991. ISBN 0-553-07740-6)
- Conversations with Neil's Brain: The Neural Nature of Thought and Language (with George Ojemann)
- How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now (New York: Basic Books, 1996. ISBN 0465072771)
- The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind
- Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain (with Derek Bickerton) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Derek Bickerton (born March 25, 1926) is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Manoa ISBN 0262032732)
- A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN 0226092011)
- A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0195159071)
- Almost Us: Portraits of the Apes (2005, ISBN 1-4196-1979-9)
- Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (Chicago and London: University of Chicago press, 2008. ISBN 0226092046.
External links
- William Calvin's website includes many articles and slides.
- "The Great Climate Flip-flop" is his cover story for the Atlantic Monthly.
- "The Fate of the Soul" in Natural History magazine.
- "Abrupt Climate Jumps and the Evolution of Higher Intellectual Functions during the Ice Ages," chapter for R. J. Sternberg, ed. , The Evolution of Intelligence (Erlbaum, 2001), pp. 97-115.
- He coined the term "Darwin machine" in "The brain as a Darwin Machine" in Nature (1987). A Darwin machine (a 1987 coinage by William H Calvin, by analogy to a Turing machine) is a machine that like a Turing machine involves an Iteration process
- "The Six Essentials? Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality," Journal of Memetics 1:1 (1997).
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