William H. Calvin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William H. Calvin in 2004

William H. Calvin, Ph.D., (born 30 April 1939) is a Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a well-known popularizer of neuroscience and evolutionary biology, including the hybrid of these two fields, neural Darwinism. He relates abrupt climate change to human evolution and speculates about the future.

In his book How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now, Calvin writes as an advocate of the idea that brain-based Darwinian processes are what provides brains with what we call "consciousness" and "intelligence". Calvin starts with the harmless division of brain processes into two types, those that depend on "cerebral ruts" (hardware) and those that dance more freely through the brain and so are able to function like "software".....Calvin usually calls these "firing patterns".

Calvin's more audacious step, in his research monograph The Cerebral Code, comes when he suggests that the pattern of action potentials in any particular neocortical minicolumn can be replicated and spread through the cortex like a piece of software code and be "played" on the millions of other minicolumns in the same way you can play a million copies of a CD on a million CD players......the key difference being that while all CD players are designed to do basically the same task, the various cortical minicolumns can all have their own unique "ruts" and the copies of the firing patterns are not exact duplicates.

This allows for a "cerebral symphony" rather than just a million-fold amplification of the same tune and a "survival of the fittest" process whereby those firing patterns that resonate best with the existing pool of "ruts" will dominate our consciousness and generate intelligent behavior. ("Our long train of connected thoughts is why our consciousness is so different from what came before.")

In writing about what mind will become, in A Brief History of the Mind, he notes, "We will likely shift gears again, juggling more concepts and making decisions even faster, imagining courses of action in greater depth. Ethics are possible only because of a human level of ability to speculate, judge quality, and modify our possible actions accordingly."

William H. Calvin has advanced the view that use of the Acheulean hand axe in hominids was a major factor in the evolution in human intelligence.

[edit] Books

Inside the Brain (with George Ojemann, New York:New American Library, 1980).
The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. Update 1991 by Bantam.)
The River That Runs Uphill: A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain (New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0025209205)
The Cerebral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness (New York: Bantam Books, 1990. ISBN 0-553-05707-3)
The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1991. ISBN 0-553-07084-3)
How the Shaman Stole the Moon: The Search of Ancient Prophet-Scientists: From Stonehenge to the Grand Canyon (New York: Bantam Books, 1991. ISBN 0-553-07740-6)
Conversations with Neil's Brain: The Neural Nature of Thought and Language (with George Ojemann)
How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now (New York: Basic Books, 1996. ISBN 0465072771)
The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind
Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain (with Derek Bickerton) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ISBN 0262032732)
A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN 0226092011)
A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0195159071)
Almost Us: Portraits of the Apes (2005, ISBN 1-4196-1979-9)
Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (Chicago and London: University of Chicago press, 2008. ISBN 0226092046.