Schoff Lecture Series

the twentieth series of Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures to be given by
Herbert Terrace
Professor of Psychology

Why Two Minds Are Better Than One: The Evolution of Words

I. Mind the Gap
8:00 PM, Monday, November 12, 2012

II. Intelligence of Non-Human Primates
8:00 PM, Monday, November 19, 2012

III. Development of Non-Verbal & Uniquely Human Behavior During an Infant’s First Year
8:00 PM, Monday, November 26, 2012

The evolution of language is an intractable problem if it is assumed (à la Chomsky, 1986) that it emerged full-blown during the ~6,000,000 year period that followed the separation of humans and chimpanzees. It’s intractable because there is no biological basis for postulating so large and complex a mutation or the exaptation of another part of the brain to produce such an immediate effect. Equally serious is our lack of knowledge about the role of non-verbal social skills, also uniquely human, without which language could never have evolved. Bipedalism resulted in a reduction in the size of the pelvis, in particular, a reduction in the size of the birth canal that could no longer accommodate an infant whose adult brain would be > 750-800 cc. Other more recent anatomical changes that were favorable for the evolution of language included the loss of fur, a new method of carrying a newborn infant and a loss of pigmentation in the cornea. Because of the small size of the human pelvis, a newborn human infant differed from other non-human primates in two respects. She was smaller and she also required longer and more intensive interactions with her mother. Prolonged periods of mutual eye gaze facilitated the infant’s acquisition of a dyadic sense of ‘self’ and ‘other’ and joint attention (triadic) to particular objects. Joint attention is a non-verbal cognitive skill that is the foundation of the mechanism for assigning arbitrary names to events and objects, i.e., the evolution of vocabulary. All of these processes are uniquely human.

Herbert Terrace is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He began teaching at Columbia in 1961 and held visiting positions at the University of Sussex and Oxford University. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations and from All Souls College at Oxford University. He is the author of Nim (1979) and co-editor (with Janet Metcalfe) of The Missing Link in Cognition (2010) and Agency & Joint Attention (2013). He is currently working on a book on the evolution of language. Since 1961 his research on animal and primate cognition has been funded by NIMH, NSF, and the James McDonald foundations. He has a BA& MA from Cornell University and a PhD from Harvard University. At Columbia, he has served as the Director of Graduate Students in the Psychology Department and has taught courses on the evolution of intelligence, the evolution of language and animal cognition.

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Reception immediately following each lecture

Lectures are free and open to the public

Past Lecturers

2011
Robert L. Belknap
Professor Emeritus of Russian, Director Emeritus of The University Seminars, Columbia University

2010
Jean Howard
George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities
Staging History; Imagining the Nation

2009
Philip Kitcher
John Dewey Professor of Philosophy
Deaths in Venice:
The Case(s) of Gustav (von) Aschenbach

2007
Douglas Chalmers
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Representative Government Without Representatives: Seven Reasons to Think Beyond Electing Executives and Lawmakers

2006
Boris Gasparov
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature
The Early Romantic Roots of Theoretical Linguistics: Friedrich Shchlegel, Novalis, and Ferdinand De Saussure on Sign and Meaning

2005
Robert W. Hanning
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Serious Play: Crises of Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto

2004
Lesley A. Sharp
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociomedical Sciences
Bodies, Commodities, Biotechnologies

2003
George Rupp
President, International Rescue Committee
Globilization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community

2002
David Rosand
Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History
The Invention of Painting in America

2001
Partha Chatterjee
Professor of Anthropology
The Politics of the Governed

2000
Lisa Anderson
Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs Professor of Political Science
The Scholar and the Practitioner: Perspectives
on Social Science and Public Policy

1999
Robert Pollack
Professor of Biological Sciences
The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith

1998
Carol Gluck
George Sansom Professor of History
Past Obsessions: War and Memory in the Twentieth Century

1997
Ira Katznelson
Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History Desolation and Enlightenment
Political Knowledge After the Holocaust, Totalitarianism, and Total War

1996
Kenneth T. Jackson
Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences
Gentleman’s Agreement: Political Balkanization and Social Inequality in America

1995
Saskia Sassen
Professor of Urban Planning
Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization

1994
Charles E. Larmore
Professor of Philosophy
The Romantic Legacy

1993
David N. Cannadine
Moore Collegiate Professor of History
The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, 1700–2000