[Paleopsych] 2006 William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture

[David Smith]

The New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary 
Psychology sponsors an annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture on 
some aspect of the interface between evolutionary biology and human 
nature.  Since its inception in 2002, Hamilton lectures have been 
delivered by Robert Trivers (2002), Steven Pinker (2003), Richard 
Alexander (2004) and Daniel Dennett (2005), and have attracted an 
audience of scientists, academics and the general public from all over 
New England.

NEI's 2006 William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Dr. 
David Haig, who will be speaking on 'The Divided Self: Brains, Brawn and 
the Superego'.  The lecture will be held on April 28, 2006 at 7PM, at 
the Portland Campus of the University of New England in Portland, Maine. 
Further details of this and other NEI events open to the public will be 
posted, in due course, on our website at http://www.une.edu/nei

David Livingstone Smith
Director, NEI

*The Divided Self: Brains, Brawn and the Superego*

Biologists have traditionally viewed animals as machines and their 
brains as fitness-maximizing computers, and have emphasized the 
competitive struggle /between/ organisms. By contrast, psychologists and 
novelists have often portrayed minds as subject to internal division, 
and have often highlighted the conflicts that occur /within/ 
individuals. Now biologists have begun to recognize conflicts between 
genes within a single individual, an organism at odds with itself.  I 
will illustrate this with the example of conflicts between maternally 
and paternally imprinted genes: genes that are expressed only when 
inherited from one's mother and those expressed only when inherited from 
one's father.

*David Haig, Ph.D.* is Professor of Biology in Harvard University's 
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.   He is an 
evolutionary geneticistwith a particular interest in genomic imprinting 
and relations between parents and offspring.  He was born in Canberra, 
Australia, and did graduate research the evolution of plant cycles at 
Macquarie University in Sydney. After completing his PhD, Dr. Haig went 
to Oxford where he further developed his ideas on genomic imprinting and 
developed an interest in the conflicts between mother and fetus during 
human pregnancy. He then moved to Harvard, where he was nominated for 
the Harvard Society of Fellows, and where he continues his interest in 
conflicts within the genome. He is the author of /Genomic Imprinting and 
Kinship/ ( Rutgers, 2002) as well as numerous scientific papers, many of 
which are available on his web page at 
http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/haig/HaigHome.htm
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