Celebrating Darwin's legacy

What is it that makes the human brain different from the brain of our closest relative, the chimpanzee, besides the larger size? What are the origins of empathy, fairness and cooperation? What constitutes culture in humans and other species, and how far back can we trace it?

Some of the world’s leading scholars of evolution – including many from Emory – will gather to discuss these questions during the conference on the Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture Nov. 12-13. The free, public event – held in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth – will give an overview of the latest discoveries in biological, cognitive and cultural studies of evolution.

“We are taking the conceptual and theoretical tools that Darwin gave us and putting them in the midst of contemporary thought and controversies,” said Robert McCauley, director of the Emory Center for Mind, Brain and Culture, which is hosting the event. “We’re taking a forward look at Darwin’s legacy.”

Award-winning science writer Matt Ridley, author of “Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code” and “Nature via Nurture,” will deliver the keynote address, “Darwin in Genes and Culture,” at 1 p.m. on Thursday.

Click here for more details of the two-day event.

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Gestures may point to speech origins

Did speech evolve from vocal chords or bodily movements?

Body movement, particularly with the hands, appears to be ingrained in human communication. “All humans gesture. They gesture when they talk on the phone, they gesture even if they know the other person can’t see them,” says primatologist Amy Pollick. She is studying evolutionary precursors to speech in chimpanzees at the Yerkes Living Links Center at Emory.

“Chimp vocalizations can actually be quite complex, but they don’t have as many vocalizations as they do gestures,” she says.

Watch an interview with Pollick in this excerpt from a Swedish documentary. Photo at top shows a scene from the documentary, "On the Road with Homo Sapiens."

Ape murder-suicide leads to human drama

A conniving kingmaker and his young protégé conspire to overthrow a popular king. Their plot fails, so they murder him instead. The kingmaker then installs his protégé as ruler. The young king does not properly reward his mentor, however, so the kingmaker selects a new protégé. Together, they torment the young king to the point of madness. He throws himself into the palace moat and drowns.

The brutal power struggle reads like a Shakespearean tragedy, but it actually happened on an island of captive chimpanzees at a Holland zoo during the late 1970s. Emory primatologist Frans de Waal documented the events in his best-selling book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes."

And now, in a strange case of art aping life, the true story has been turned into a fictional play – with human actors taking the names and roles of the chimpanzee characters.

“We are all apes,” is the central message of “Hominid,” (photo at top shows a rehearsal) playing at Emory Nov. 12-22. Theater Emory commissioned Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater to create the evolution-themed work – a collaboration of playwrights’ imaginations and de Waal’s research. Scenes from a documentary by Bert Haanstra of the chimpanzees are also woven into the stage performance.

“We tell the story as though it’s a human story,” says Ariel de Man, the play’s project director. After receiving her theater degree from Emory in 1998, de Man co-founded Out of Hand, which specializes in working with scientists to translate their research.“There is so much science happening right here in our midst in Atlanta that the general public doesn’t know about,” she says. “Scientists are trained to do research, but they’re not trained to communicate to a non-science audience.”

“Hominid” sets the murder-suicide in a 1920s garden party. “The characters are athletic and graceful and charming,” de Man says. “The point is, it doesn’t matter how educated or sophisticated you are – we are all apes. We are inviting the audience to think about what that means.”

Top evolution scholars from Emory and abroad will also be speaking on campus next week, during a conference, "The Evolution of Mind, Brain and Culture."

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An inside look at outrage

What makes a suicide bomber tick?

“Outrage is a distinct emotional state, but almost nothing is known about its physiological effect on functional systems of the brain,” says neuroeconomist Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy.

Berns is leading a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of the brain when sacred values are perceived as being attacked or diminished. The U.S. Air Force and Navy are funding the study, focused on beliefs about religion, government policy, and other values that evoke strong feelings.

“Given the importance of sacred values and the potential for triggering violent conflict, it is important to understand how sacred values become intertwined in decision making,” Berns says. He believes that knowledge of how the brain reacts to irreverence of closely held beliefs could help lead to peaceful solutions during conflict negotiations.

“The Department of Defense is aware that it does no good to bomb a building if it creates more terrorists,” Berns says, “so it is keenly interested in understanding what drives an emotional reaction that is so strong that it has the potential to obliterate rational thinking. The outcome of this study could be a fist step in bringing people together who have opposing value systems.”

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Star-crossed queen gets twinkle in her eye

Cassiopeia, a vain queen in Greek mythology, bragged that she and her daughter Andromeda were so beautiful that they put the sea nymphs to shame. Naturally, this boast angered Poseidon, who sent a sea monster to destroy her realm. The queen’s disgrace is also evident in her constellation. She sits in a chair that rotates around the North Star, putting her in an undignified upside-down position half the time.

At least she has something interesting to look at – within her gaze lies a Delta Scuti variable star. Emory astronomer Horace Dale identified the star’s classification last week, during an exercise of the advanced astronomy lab he teaches, and it was officially entered into the Variable Star Index on Oct. 22.

A variable star is one that changes its luminosity over short periods of time. In layman’s terms: It twinkles. And we’re talking a true twinkle, as opposed to the false twinkle-effect that the Earth’s atmosphere gives stars. When the first variable star was identified in 1638, it disproved theories by Aristotle and others that the stars were eternally the same and fueled the astronomical revolution sparked by Galileo’s telescope in 1609.

A Delta Scuti pulsating variable is an older star with gases that are rapidly expanding and contracting in both spherical and oblong shapes. Out of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy, only about 400 are known Delta Scuti. Dale is credited with identifying two of them, including another one in the Cassiopeia constellation that entered the index in 2007.

“Not many people are looking for them,” Dale says, explaining that it's painstaking work to identify one. Changes in luminosity must be measured over time to produce a light curve, such as the graph, above, from Dale’s most recent find.

Dale is on a mission to identify more. “I think it’s very important,” he says. “If you want to find out who we are, you have to look at the stars first, because that’s where we came from. Where do you think you got all the carbon in your body? It’s a product of the nuclear fusion process of stars. Carl Sagan said it best: We are made of star stuff.”

No bones about it: A great place to work

The Scientist magazine's readers ranked Emory as the 5th Best Place to Work in Academia in the United States. The ranking was based on a survey of more than 2,350 life scientists with a permanent position in an academic, hospital, government or research organization. The scientists represented 94 US institutions and 25 institutions from the rest of the world.

Emory ranked especially high in the categories of "peers" and "job satisfaction." The top four institutions were Princeton University, University of California-San Francisco, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. The top international institution was the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.

Read the full survey results.

A new twist on an ancient story

“Evolution is a theory that we have more experimental evidence for than any other theory, and yet 50 percent of the population of the United States doesn’t accept it,” said David Lynn, professor of chemistry and biology, during a recent Creativity Conversation with choreographer David Neumann. “Maybe we’ve taken the wrong path in talking about evolution. In science we do a good job of conveying facts, but not a good job of telling the stories – what makes it human.”

Lynn’s research focuses on the origins of life. His desire to find new ways to explain science to the public inspired him to collaborate with Neumann, and the Seattle troupe Lelavision, as they developed dance performances. Their works, including Lelavision's "Warm Pond" (see photo), recently premiered in Atlanta.

“I was deeply influenced by the manner in which evolution operates and using those structures – contingencies and chance operations – in the structure of the dance,” Neumann said. “Sometimes when you utilize chance there’s a fantastic discovery.”

Watch a video of the conversation between Lynn and Neumann:


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