"Language and Complexity: Evolution Inside Out"

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Terrance Deacon

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ELIZABETHTOWN, PA (03/12/2010)(readMedia)-- In recognition of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," Elizabethtown College presents "Language and Complexity: Evolution Inside Out" with American anthropologist Dr. Terrence Deacon. The event-which is free and open to the public-takes place at 11 a.m. Wednesday, March 24, in Esbenshade's Gibble Auditorium, at Elizabethtown College.

Deacon taught at Harvard University for eight years and is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. His seminal book "The Symbolic Species," about co-evolution of language and brain structures won several top awards and is considered a classic in the field.

The professor's research combines human evolutionary biology and neuroscience as a way of investigating the evolution of human cognition. He argues that the relaxation of selection at the organism level might have been a source of many complex synergistic features of human language capacity, and might help explain why so much language information is "inherited" socially.

Contact: Elizabeth Newell at 717-361-1309.

Elizabethtown College, in southeastern Pennsylvania, is a private coed college with degrees in liberal arts, fine and performing arts, science and engineering, business, communications and education. The hallmarks of an Elizabethtown education are academic rigor, high expectations and intellectual curiosity. Our faculty members are teacher-scholars, pursuing their academic areas of expertise while sharing that expertise with students.

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