Event #4 - What Makes Us Human?

The UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics hosted the “What Makes Us Human?” symposium on Friday, November 15, 2013 from 1:00pm – 5:00pm at the Neurosciences Research Building. The purpose of this event was to share multidisciplinary approaches to elucidate what makes us human, through research in linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and comparative genomics. Although humans share a similar genetic make-up with other species like apes, humans have distinctive traits. The symposium shows how science and art is combined to distinguish to us what makes us unique.

After the event!

Rob Kurzban, an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania, presented his research on “Strategic Morality”. He discussed moral judgment as a strategic factor that can be either stable traditional principles or state-like computations of strategic interest. Kurzban wanted to show us that the latter is actually more prominent. He did this through three studies: a short time (typist and checker test), dependent on time of day (pre/post lunch survey and social welfare), and over a span of time (drug use, political views, and sexuality). Essentially, what humans believe is right is probably what benefits them the most. Logically, this makes sense. But I am more optimistic about human society. This reminds me of Youtube social experiment videos. For example, DmPranksProductions launched a video called “Losing Wallet (Social Experiment)”. An actor would drop his wallet and he would walk away with hopes that someone around would return it. Although the experiment does not exactly align with the concept of strategic morality due to factors like confrontation and environmental manipulation, it does show that society would generally do the right thing leaning more towards the stable traditional principles.

Losing Wallet (Social Experiment) by DmPranksProduction.

Carol Padden, a Sanford I. Berman Professor of Language and Human Communication and Associate Dean in the Division of Social Sciences at UCSD, presented her 30 plus year research on “Genetics, language, and culture: A comparison of two village sign languages”. I admire her and her dedication to sign languages. In her research, she portrayed to us how language is emerged in small societies. Words are built through “handling”/”imaginary object” or “instrument”/”body part as object”. Different tribes use different methods to create words. It's cool because this relates to my Unit 7 – Neuroscience + Art blog post. In my post, I discussed how language can affect the perspective of the user.

Demonstration of CTSL Signers during Padden's presentation.

If I could go back in time, I would like to advertise this event more. The event should have had a full-house! It was like a compilation of the later half of the course and also gave insight to our human uniqueness.

Q&A Session.

Yours truly,

Calvin Cam

Works Cited

Cam, Calvin. “Unit 7 – Neuroscience + Art.” Blogspot, 12 Nov. 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2013. <http://calvincdesma9.blogspot.com/2013/11/unit-7-neuroscience-art.html>.

DmPranksProduction. “Losing Wallet (Social Experiment).” Youtube, 29 Aug. 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojqCFt5uwrc>.

Kurzban, R., Dukes, A., and Weeden J. “Sex, drugs and moral goals: reproductive strategies and views about recreational drugs.” RSPB, 22 Mar. 2010. Web. 30 Nov. 2013. <http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/12/rspb.2010.0608>.

Manson, Joe and Fessler, Dan. “What Makes Us Human?” UCLA .Institute for Society and Genetics, Web. 30 Nov. 2013. <http://socgen.ucla.edu/events/what-makes-us-human/>.

Santiago-Batista, Raquel. “Handling versus Instrument: A crosslinguistic study of sign language morphology.” Web. 30 Nov. 2013. <http://taller.iec.cat/LSC/bibliografia/Santiago_dissertation.pdf>.