Daniel Lieberman: Humans Evolved Big, Costly Brains
California Academy of Sciences - California Academy of Sciences
How and why is the human body the way it is? What did evolution adapt our bodies for? And how is the human body changing today? To address these questions, this lecture will examine the major evolutionary transformations that shaped the human body since we diverged from the apes, and how our bodies have further evolved and changed for the better and the worse since the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. As we try to chart a better future for the human body, thinking about our evolutionary past is more relevant than ever for preventing the expanding burden of chronic diseases whose symptoms we must increasingly treat.Daniel Lieberman is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences, a Harvard College Professor at Harvard University, and a member of the Scientific Executive Committee of the LSB Leakey Foundation. He was educated at Harvard (AB '86, PhD '93) and Cambridge (M.Phil. '97). His research is on how and why the human body is the way it is, with particular foci on the origins of bipedalism, how humans became superlative endurance runners, and the evolution of the highly unusual human head. Lieberman has published 3 books and more than 100 articles. His latest books are "The Evolution of the Human Head (Harvard University Press, 2011), and "The Story of the Human Body" (Pantheon, 2013).