After a painfully long break, we are happy to announce the first live talk as part of the “Fruits of Ethology” guest talk series!
Date: 14th September, Tuesday, 3.30 pm
Location: The talk will be live! ELTE, South Building, 7.110, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/c
Title: How To Think Scientifically?
The human is an odd ape. We are a community-loving primate that, as if in a science fiction movie, somehow ended up with giant neurone computers on top of our necks. Even more bizarrely, we regularly pass on patterns from one head to the next using pressure waves in our planet’s atmosphere. Wow. And often, these patterns are represented in a book or on a screen, so that they can be passed on between long-dead people too. No whale, bee, or chimp can do this. There is no other being that comes near.
Our amazingness does not end there. As far as we know, and let’s stop here for a second and admire that we can know this, we are the only beings in the universe that think that there is such a thing as the universe. We even have a shared map of it. Your universe and my universe are likely to be shockingly similar to each other. How is this possible? Is it a miracle?
This talk tells the natural history of thinking about the world, the evolutionary story of knowing something about what is out there. In the ultimate navel-gazing exercise, we will tell what science knows about scientific thinking, not as a philosophical abstraction, but rather a behavioural phenomenon. Glorified group-think in lab coats, but it works.
All welcome!
Márta Gácsi & Ádám Miklósi