"I talk a lot about ape-to-human evolution and what sort of darwinian brain wiring allows us, in just a split second, to shape up a better thought. But the urgency of the climate situation has caused me to spend most of my recent efforts on climate science, both interpreting it for general readers and researching carbon sequestration schemes that would be big, quick, and secure."
WILLIAM H. CALVIN, Ph.D., is a theoretical neurobiologist, Emeritus Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research interests include the recurrent excitatory circuitry of cerebral cortex used for split-second versions of the Darwinian bootstrapping of quality, the four-fold enlargement of the hominid brain during the ice ages, and the brain reorganization for language and planning during "The Mind's Big Bang" which occurred about 50,000 years ago, long after our brains had reached their current size.
He is the author of 14 books, mostly for general readers, about brains and evolution including The Throwing Madonna, The Cerebral Symphony, The River That Runs Uphill, The Cerebral Code, Conversations with Neil's Brain (with George Ojemann), and How Brains Think. His book with Derek Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain, is about syntax. A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change is about paleoanthropology, paleoclimate, and considerations from neurobiology and evolutionary biology. It won the 2002 Phi Beta Kappa book award for science. A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond is about the mind’s big bang. His first all-climate book is Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change. In the works is A Climate Surprise is Like a Heart Attack.
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