Darwin Blast-Off
Talking and healthy debate
Venue : Igloo Pavilion, The Quarry Park
Date : Sunday 5 July
Time : 2.30-6pm
FREE, but could get busy, venue has limited capacity.
A Sunday afternoon of no-holds-barred thinking. So here’s the format: a soap box, six stirring thinkers and 20 minutes each. What’s up for debate will be revealed nearer the day. But we can guarantee that it will be the liveliest debate in town. Stay for as long as you find things interesting…contribute, or leave, it’s up to you.
Details of each "Blast" are listed below! Click on the speakers' names for profiles.
Blast 1: 2.30–2.55
What maddens Rita Carter most is the human CONCEIT of thinking we have free will!
Scientific study has shown - QUITE CLEARLY - that everything we do is initiated by our unconscious brain (much like a knee jerk) and that what we THINK are decisions are nothing more than a kind of advance awareness of what we are about to do. But we cannot swallow this...we are so terrfically puffed up about being human, so ludicrously PROUD of our little species, that we insist that we have this special ability ( given to few other biological organisms and to no non-material ones) of being able to DECIDE what we do.
I believe we are not more in charge of our actions than a raindrop is in charge of which way it falls...and our insistanence that it isotherwise has created a vast edifice of BLAME and GUILT which justifies us in doing awful things to people who dont behave as we think they should........
The answer, I believe, is for us to REALLY get Darwin's message: we aren’t Gods, with special powers (like free will!) . We are like all other material beings: flotsam in the wind, blown by forces much greater than us and it is time we recognised it.
Blast 2: 3.15-3.40
James Le Fanu will be arguing that the most recent findings of genetics and neuroscience have confirmed the Greek playwright Sophocles’ famous axiom: 'Wonders are there many, but none more wonderful than Man.'
Blast 3: 4.00-4.25
Kevin Warwick argues: Why not Upgrade? We know that as humans we are very limited in both our physical and mental capabilities. Certainly we can use external devices such as computers and telephones to externally improve these, but we now have the opportunity to enhance our mental capabilities with neural implants. So why not have extra memory, more senses, communicate by thought and think in more dimensions?
Why not control technology on other planets just by thinking about it and upgrade our mathematical possibilities. It will open up a completely new world - far more complex, but one that we can attempt to understand through our upgrade. I am all for it - are you?
Blast 4: 4.45-5.10
Pete Moore will argue that, when talking about enhancement, we need to distinguish between social, personal and species enhancement. Muddling these categories confuses any debate. Looking at species enhancement, most proposed examples are either not possible or not desirable – or both.
Blast 5: 5.30-5.55
Sam Roberts argues that one of our distinctive features is our big brains. The evidence suggests that these big brains evolved to manage a complex, dynamic social world, with sociality at the heart of what it means to be human.
The rise of communication technology, such as mobile phones and facebook, opens up new possibilities forming and maintaining our social relationships. However, there is NO evidence - yet - that these technologies are fundamentally changing the nature of our social relationships.
Speaker Profiles:
Kevin Warwick
www.kevinwarwick.com
Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England. He works in robotics and artificial intelligence and in 2008 created a robot with a biological brain. Recently he designed an intelligent deep brain stimulator to counteract the effects of Parkinson's Disease. He is best known for his pioneering research with implants, including experimentation on himself which led to him being called the 'World's First Cyborg'.
Pete Moore is a science communicator and author of more than a dozen books that reflect on the way that science and technology has had an impact on humanity. His latest “Enhancing me – the hope and hype of human enhancement” was published by Wiley, The Dana Centre and the Science Museum.
Over the last 15 years he has contributed to national and international publications, including 'Nature' and the 'Journal of Biology'. He is developing a line in public speaking and has appeared on radio and television and has won 6 national awards for his work. Pete is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has worked as a rapporteur at private meetings in the House of Lords, and at St George's House, Windsor Castle.
Pete is a visiting lecturer in ethics at Trinity College Bristol, and a Course Tutor on the Science Communication MSc course at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He was Chairman of the Medical Journalists' Association from 2002-2005. He is a member of the Association of British Science Writers and of the Physiological Society.
Books by Pete Moore
Sam Roberts
www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/about/staff/dr-sam-roberts
Sam studied Human Sciences at the University of Oxford before going on to complete an MSc in Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Liverpool. For his PhD he moved to the University of Sussex, where he examined social referencing and visual perspective taking in Barbary macaques and chimpanzees. Sam’s postdoctoral research focuses on the structure and dynamics of social networks in humans. He is conducting an 18-month longitudinal study investigating how students’ social networks change during the transition from school to University, using mobile phone bills to track communication within the network. He is also conducting research examining what binds people together in social relationships.
James Le Fanu
www.jameslefanu.com
James Le Fanu was born in 1950 and spent his childhood in Scotland, East Africa, Yugoslavia and Cyprus. He studied the Humanities at Ampleforth College before switching to medicine, graduating from Cambridge University and the Royal London Hospital in 1974. He subsequently worked in the Renal Transplant Unit and Cardiology Departments of the Royal Free and St Mary’s Hospital in London. For the past twenty years he has combined working as a doctor in general practice with contributing a weekly column to the Sunday and Daily Telegraph. He has contributed articles and reviews to The New Statesman, Spectator, GQ, The British Medical Journal and Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. He has written several books including ‘The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine’ that won the Los Angeles Prize Book Award in 2001 and ‘Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves’ that was published in Britain and the United States in February 2009.
He has made original contributions to current controversies over the value of experiments in human embryos, environmentalism, dietary causes of disease and the misdiagnosis of Non Accidental Injury in children.
Books by James le Fanu
Rita Carter
www.ritacarter.co.uk
According to science writer, lecturer and broadcaster Rita Carter, what maddens her most is the human CONCEIT of thinking we have free will.
"Scientific study has shown - QUITE CLEARLY - that everything we do is initiated by our unconscious brain (much like a knee jerk) and that what we THINK are decisions are nothing more than a kind of advance awareness of what we are about to do. But we cannot swallow this...we are so terrfically puffed up about being human, so ludicrously PROUD of our little species, that we insist that we have this special ability (given to few other biological organisms and to no non-material ones) of being able to DECIDE what we do.
I believe we are not more in charge of our actions than a raindrop is in charge of which way it falls...and our insistanence that it is otherwise has created a vast edifice of BLAME and GUILT which justifies us in doing awful things to people who dont behave as we think they should........
The answer, I believe, is for us to REALLY get Darwin's message: we aren't Gods, with special powers (like free will!) . We are like all other material beings: flotsam in the wind, blown by forces much greater than us and it is time we recognised it".
Books by Rita Carter
- Human Consciousness
- Mapping the Mind
- Multiplicity
