Steven Pinker – The Cognitive Niche (3/6)

Steven Pinker Lecture – April,6 2009

The Origins Symposium will inaugurate the new Origins Initiative at ASU. In partnership with The Science Network, this unprecedented event will bring together 70 of the worlds leading scientists and scholars, including 8 Nobel Laureates, and the worlds pre-eminent scientific public intellectuals, for three days of panels directed at exploring important outstanding research questions, and will be capped by several remarkable ociate activities, including a full day of public lectures and panels at the 3000 seat Gammage Auditorium on ASUs Tempe campus.

The Origins Initiative is a university-wide, transdisciplinary endeavor that supports research, education, and outreach ociated with mysteries at the forefront of knowledge. It will focus on deep and foundational questions ranging across the entire spectrum of scholarship, from evolutionary biology to nanotechnology, from anthropology to cosmology, exploring the origin of the universe, stars planets, life, consciousness, culture and human institutions.

ASU currently houses a unique set of interdisciplinary centers of research excellence. The Origins Initiative will provide a unifying umbrella to foster and extend the work of these groups and explore new, symbiotic interdisciplinary relationships that can help answer key research questions. By combining extensive disciplinary expertise with the opportunity to bring in outside scholars for extended programs, host seminars and workshops on selected topics, foster graduate and postgraduate research, create new curricula and engage in significant outreach programs, the Institute will work to develop new solutions to outstanding problems, and will also help direct a national and international discussion of important origins issues.

Duration : 0:10:0

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