Adapted to a Symbolic Niche: How Less became more in Human Evolution

Terrence W. Deacon delivers a lecture on the neuroscience and development of the human capacity for language and musical perception. Prof. Deacon is the Chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests lie in the field of brain development and evolution, the origins of language, and bio-cultural evolution. Many of these interests are found in his book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain (1997). His lecture presented here, on the formation of human language and symbolic thought, is a part of the Shulman Lectures in Science and the Humanities delivered at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University.