User:Wcalvin
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William H. Calvin, Ph.D.
He started out at Northwestern University, graduating with honors in physics in 1961, then spent a year at MIT and Harvard Medical School exploring what later became neurobiology. His Ph.D. was in Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Washington in 1966, under Charles F. Stevens. He has been on the faculty of the University of Washington since then, with a year as Visiting Professor of Neurobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He is perhaps best known for a dozen books on brains, evolution, and climate, mostly written for general readers. Two are research monographs, both from MIT Press. The Cerebral Code (1996) was on the neural circuitry of cerebral cortex needed for creating a high-quality plan of action, such as a novel sentence to speak aloud. This was followed by Lingua ex machina (2000) on what brain circuitry is needed for Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. Written with the linguist Derek Bickerton, it shows the intersection of neuroscience with linguistics and the study of human origins.
His interest in brain circuitry for planning novel movements of high quality led him to look at how evolutionary processes created new species and improved their “fit” with the environment. He focused on evolution as a process and started writing about his “six essential features” of a process that bootstraps quality -- and the speciation that can subsequently prevent backsliding. Seeing a need for speed in the neural circuitry, he sought an analogy in what had made the human brain enlargement so rapid (three-fold in only 2.5 million years). Climate change speeds up evolution, so back in 1984 he started going to paleoclimate lectures by the ice-core researchers.
This led to his cover story in the Atlantic Monthly (January 1998), “The great climate flip-flop.” It concerns the abrupt climate flips that have occurred several dozen times in the last 100,000 years. He explained how global warming could trigger the next flip from our present warm-and-wet mode into a cool-dry-windy-dusty climate mode (essentially a devastating worldwide drought, developing in 5-10 years’ time).
He enjoys piecing together scientific stories that involve several disciplines. A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change, his 2002 book from the University of Chicago Press did just that, looking at paleoanthropology and evolutionary dynamics to see how something might have resonated with the abrupt climate changes every few thousand years. Its final chapters are about the future prospects for our civilization and how we must shore it up against sudden shocks – not just climate flips but also pandemics, bioterrorism, and financial panics – much as cathedrals were shored up a thousand years ago using flying buttresses.
The public policy theme appears again in his 2004 book from Oxford University Press, A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond. “Where does mind go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education and new tools – but with its slowly-evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored to the ice ages? We will likely shift mental gears again, into juggling more concepts simultaneously and making decisions even faster – but the faster you go, the more danger of spinning out of control. Ethics, morals, a sense of what’s right are possible only because of a human level of ability to speculate about the future and modify our possible actions accordingly. Though science increasingly serves as our headlights, we are out driving them, going faster than we can react effectively.”
His "stealth book on evolution for Americans" is Almost Us: Portraits of the Apes.
His websites are at WilliamCalvin.com and the University of Washington faculty server.
