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Crawford Lecture
December 4, 2007. Great Hall of the People, 7:30pm
The Sir John Crawford Memorial Lecture is a highlight of the
CGIAR Annual General Meeting. Named in honor of a founding father
of the CGIAR, and sponsored by the Australian Government, it seeks
to challenge those involved in agricultural research for
development to think outside the proverbial box and to consider the
broader issues and trends that affect, or are affected by, their
scientific work.
The 2007 Crawford Lecturer was William H. Calvin, a theoretical
neurobiologist and Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in
Seattle, USA. His insights into the evolution of human intellectual
capacity are especially relevant to the CGIAR, as it seeks more
effective ways to confront complex challenges, such as climate
change, rural poverty and emerging issues.
About William H. Calvin
 Dr. Calvin has written a dozen books
for general readers as well as occasional magazine articles,
including "The emergence of intelligence" for
Scientific American (1994) and "The fate of the
soul" for Natural History (2004). His 1998 cover
story for The Atlantic Monthly, "The
great climate flip-flop," grew out of his long-standing
interest in abrupt climate change and how it influenced the
evolution of a chimpanzee-like brain into a more human one. This is
also the topic of his 2002 book,
A Brain for All
Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change
, which
won the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award for Science.
His neurobiology research interests primarily concern the
neocortical circuits used for detailed planning, presumably
utilizing a milliseconds-to-minutes version of the same Darwinian
process seen in the immune response and species evolution on longer
time scales. His research monograph,
The Cerebral Code: Thinking a
Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind
(MIT Press, 1996)
concerns Darwinian processes in neural circuitry that can operate
on the time scale of thought and action to resolve ambiguity and
shape up novel courses of action.
Starting out in physics at Northwestern University, he then
branched out into neurophysiology via studies at MIT, Harvard
Medical School and the University of Washington (Ph.D., Physiology
and Biophysics, 1966).
This page was updated on December 10th, 2007.
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