2012 Symposium abstract: "Development, Evolution, and Why We Do Science"
Consider links between E. E. Just, the present holder of the Just chair, and ancestral grandmothers. Just's experiments showed that development is a process of interaction between organism and environment. The process of development is also central to a novel hypothesis about what happened in human evolution to amplify our primate motivations and capacities for shared intentionality and cooperation. I'll sketch a case that amplification began with grandmothering, with side effects that include our appetites for studying biology, even physics, and symposia like this one.
