Master Class I

An Anthology of Anthropogeny

Featured Speaker: Professor Tatum Simonson, Professor Pascal Gagneux, Nicholas Nelson, Ph.D. Candidate, Professor Rachel Mayberry, Professor Frederico Rossano

Established at UC San Diego in 2008, CARTA (Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny) is an international cooperative research forum exploring questions of human origins through transdisciplinary interactions and collaborations. As the word “anthropogeny” implies, CARTA’s primary goal is to apply transdisciplinary approaches to explaining two age-old questions regarding humans: Where did we come from? How did we get here? In this series of talks, five prominent UC San Diego scholars, all CARTA members, will address different topics related to human origins research.

October 2: Human High-Altitude Adaptation

Professor Tatum Simonson
 
This lecture focuses on how permanent high-altitude residents have adapted to low oxygen levels in the Himalayan, Andean and Ethiopian highlands. Important biological factors are key to these adaptations, which vary among continental groups. Recent studies show that different changes lead to similar adaptations in high-altitude Tibetan and Peruvian individuals. These discoveries enhance our knowledge of human evolution and provide valuable insights into how our bodies respond to low oxygen, which is important for health and treating heart and lung diseases.

October 16: The Planet-Altering Ape

Professor Pascal Gagneux
 
This lecture will address how humans became “the planet-altering ape” that is now causing the sixth mass extinction and climate change crises and will discuss how we can become “the planet-protecting ape.” The evolutionary lineage leading to humans underwent many defining changes since our last common ancestor with chimpanzees: we became bipedal; exploited diverse ecosystems; evolved into top predators; developed complex tools; tamed fire; and developed our most powerful social tool language. These traits allowed our species to colonize every ecosystem and produce cumulative culture, which in turn shaped much of our biology. Humans now drive the sixth mass extinction and climate change. Will our capacity for prosocial behavior, empathy, imagination and behavioral flexibility allow us to find urgently needed solutions for averting these existential crises?

October 30: An Anthropogeny Graduate Specialization Experience

Nicholas Nelson, Ph.D. Candidate
 
This lecture will share the experience of working towards a Ph.D. in biology at UC San Diego with tales and insights gleaned as a student of human origins in CARTA’s Anthropogeny graduate specialization. Nicholas Nelson investigates the neuroscience of chronic pain, yet his most impactful graduate school experience was found outside of the lab. He will share how digging and hunting for food and singing and dancing around the fire with a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania while on the Anthropogeny Field Course has been an enormous gift that enhanced his studies and shaped him as a biologist and a person trying to do right in the world.

November 13: How Language In The Environment Shapes The Child’s Brain

Professor Rachel Mayberry

Professor Mayberry studies the development and psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic processing of language structure in the visual modality. Her main research uses American Sign Language and deafness to investigate the linguistic and neural correlates of childhood language deprivation. She has pioneered research on the relation between sign language acquisition and reading development, the development of iconic gestures in bilingual children’s two spoken languages and the effects of speech stuttering on gesture expression.

November 27: Animal Communication

Professor Frederico Rossano

This lecture will explore how different animal species communicate and what is similar and different between human communication and other animals’ ways of communicating. It will review different types of animal signaling, the informative vs. manipulative functions of communication, when and why non-human animals communicate and the rarity of the vocal learning abilities of humans in the animal kingdom. While presenting examples from several animal species (primates, ravens, bees, dolphins, dogs and cats), we will outline how studying animal communication can provide a window into their minds and enhance our understanding of our companions on this planet. 
 

Presenter Biography

Presenter: Tatum Simonson is an Associate Professor and the John B. West Endowed Chair
in Respiratory Physiology in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep Medicine and
Physiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She has a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Genetics from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. Her research relied on physiological genomics to understand responses to hypoxia in highland populations of Tibet and Peru.

Presenter: Pascal Gagneux is the Executive Co- Director of CARTA and a Professor of Pathology and Anthropology at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Zoology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. His research focuses on the evolution of primate molecular diversity and how it is shaped by reproduction and infection. See his website: https://www.pascalgagneux.com/

Presenter: Nicholas Nelson is a UC San Diego Biological Sciences Ph.D. candidate in Axel Nimmerjahn’s lab at the Salk Institute. His research interests lie in the interface of the nervous and immune systems, and his thesis investigates how glial cells in the spinal cord regulate nervous system homeostasis and inflammation during the development of chronic pain. More broadly, he is interested in what shaped the evolution of the human mind – what cellular and molecular actions underlie cognition in mammals and what factors fueled the emergence of the human mind’s unique (or not so unique) flaws and capabilities. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University.
 

Presenter: Rachel I. Mayberry is a Professor of Linguistics at UC San Diego, Director of the Laboratory for Multi-Modal Language Development and an Associate Director of CARTA.  Her research has been contiguously funded by Canadian and American granting agencies, and she was recently given the Distinguished Alumni Research Leadership Award from the McGill University School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. She has a Ph.D. from McGill University, an M.Sc. from Washington University and a B.A. from Drake University.

Presenter: Federico Rossano is Associate Professor in the Cognitive Science Department at UC San Diego and the director of the Comparative Cognition Lab. His current research adopts a comparative perspective on social cognition (cross-ages, cross-cultures and cross- species) and is focused on the development of communicative abilities in human and non-human animals (in particular non-human primates, dogs and cats).

Coordinator: Steve Clarey