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HOW COOKING MAKES US HUMANS

For my third topic for this project, i have decided to write about How Cooking Made us Humans(Stream How Cooking Made Us Human with Professor Richard Wrangham by Bridging the Gaps: A Portal for Curious Minds | Listen online for free on SoundCloud). A conversation between Professor Richard Wrangham who is the speaker and Dr. Waseem Akhtar, the host. I chose this topic because it focuses on Human origin and evolution which is very important because studying our origin provides insights into our biological history and functions. It also highlights how humans have benefited from being able to adapt to their immediate environment.

Some of the lessons learnt from the above conversation about How cooking makes us humans include: (i)Human are incapable of relying on raw wild food because we don't have the digestive capacity for it. (ii)Being able to cook our own food gave us a whole series of new adaptations e.g physiological, behavioral and anatomical. (iii)Human beings started cooking about 250,000 years ago. (iv) Raw food is good for fat people who are looking to lose weight.

The guest speaker, Professor Richard Wrangham (born 1948, PhD, Cambridge University, 1975) is Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and founded the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in 1987. He has conducted extensive research on primate ecology, nutrition, and social behaviour. He is best known for his work on the evolution of human warfare, described in the book Demonic Males, and on the role of cooking in human evolution, described in the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Together with Elizabeth Ross, he co-founded the Kasiisi Project in 1997, and serves as a patron of the Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP)[1]. Below is a list of some of his research and field experiences:

1968 Oxford Bongo Expedition to Kenya, studying ecology of bongo, Boocercus euryceros, and land management of Cherangani Hills. Numerous small grants. Three months.

Assistant biologist in Kafue National Park, Zambia, studying behavioral ecology of waterbuck, Kobus defassa. Nine months.

1969 Oxford University Expedition to Kenya, studying insectivore ecology at high altitude. Numerous small grants. Three months.

1970-1971 Research assistant in Gombe national Park, Tanzania, studying behaviour of chimpanzees Pan troglodytes. Twelve months.

1971-1973 Research student in Gombe National park, Tanzania, studying chimpanzee behavioural ecology. W.T. Grant Foundation. One Year.

1975 Behavioural ecology of gelada baboons, Theropithecus gelada, in Simien National Park, Ethiopia. Science Research Council. Five months. (This study was funded for three years. It was aborted because of political turmoil.)

1976-1977 Field supervision of primate studies in Rwanda (gorillas) and Kenya (baboons). Two months.

1978 Laboratory studies of primate diets, Cambridge. Bedford Fund, King's College. One month.

1978-1979 Behavioural ecology of vervet monkeys, Cercopithecus aethiops , in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Science Research Council. Eight months.

1980-1981 Ecology and social organization of Balese and Bambuti people. Ituri forest, Zaire. National Science Foundation, L.S.B. Leakey Foundation. Nine months.

1983 Experimental study of primate feeding behaviour, San Diego Zoo and Los Angeles Zoo. Two months.

1984 Field study of chimpanzee medicinal plants, Gombe National Park, Tanzania; and pilot study of chimpanzees in Kibale Forest, Uganda. L.S.B. Leakey Foundation. Two months.

1986 Chimpanzee field site reconnaissance in western Uganda. Rackham Grant (University of Michigan).[2]

[1] Richard W. Wrangham (Foreword by of In the Shadow of Man) (goodreads.com)

[2] https://www.discoverlife.org/who/CV/Wrangham,_Richard.html

[rilwansbloggg]

ORIGIN OF MATHEMATICS AND MATHEMATICAL THINKING

My second topic for this project is Origin Of Mathematics and Mathematical Thinking(Bridging the Gaps – Origin Of Mathematics and Mathematical Thinking with Dr. Keith Devlin) by Dr. Keith Devlin hosted by Dr. Waseem Akhtar. I decided to write about this topic because we must always remember how privileged we are in this modern times of scientific learning. We are so used to making use of well-formulated scientific theories and expressions that we rarely stop to consider the work put in by their creators.

The following lessons can be learnt from studying the origin of mathematics and mathematical thinking: Unlike language, mathematic is quite difficult to learn because it is not an innate feature in human. The difficulty in learning it comes from it being abstract because most mathematical concepts are are outside our lived experience. Finally, mathematics was invented by a combination of roles played by Leonardo (inventing the first computing evolution in Italy in the 13th century) and Steve Jobs at Apple Computers (inventing the Macintosh which marked the world's second evolution of personal computers ).

The guest speaker is Dr. Keith Devlin, a Consulting Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University and now co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford’s Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute, founded in 2006. He is also a member of Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), an important research center for work in computational linguistics, computer science, and mathematics. Devlin received his bachelor’s (special) in mathematics at Kings College, London and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Bristol in 1971. (Erik J. Larson, 2022). Some of his research works include:

Logic and information (1991) (797)

Bridging the Gaps – Origin Of Mathematics and Mathematical Thinking with Dr Keith Devlin

A weak version of ◊ which follows from 2ℵ0<2ℵ1 (1978) (190)

Aspects of Constructibility (1973) (148)

The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved And Why Numbers Are Like Gossip (2000) (135)

Infosense: Turning Information into Knowledge (1999) (129)

The Souslin problem (1974) (128)

On the Singular Cardinals Problem (1981) (117)

The Joy of Sets (1993) (109)

Marginalia to a theorem of Silver (1975) (107)

WHY UNIVERSITIES REQUIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENTS TO TAKE MATH (2003) (104)

The joy of sets : fundamentals of contemporary set theory (1993) (101)

Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Medium for Learning (2011) (99)

Mathematics, the science of patterns : the search for order in life, mind, and the universe (1994) (93)

Situation theory and situation semantics (2006) (91)

Goodbye, Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind (1997) (88)

Writing across the curriculum. (1981) (83)

Fundamentals of contemporary set theory (1979) (75)

THE COMPUTER MODELLING OF MATHEMATICAL REASONING (1986) (61)

The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern (2008) (56)

A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form (2009) (52)

Mathematics : The New Golden Age (1988) (52)

PROPER FORCING(Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 940) (1983) (46)

The Computer as Crucible: An Introduction to Experimental Mathematics (2008) (45)

Using video games to combine learning and assessment in mathematics education (2015) (45)

Introduction to Mathematical Thinking (2012) (41)

Some weak versions of large cardinal axioms (1973) (39)

Language at Work: Analyzing Communication Breakdown in the Workplace to Inform Systems Design (1996) (37)

Surveys in set theory: THE YORKSHIREMAN'S GUIDE TO PROPER FORCING (1983) (36)

The Combinatorial Principle (1982) (35)

The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution (2011) (35)

The Math Instinct: Why You're a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs) (2005) (32)

The Millennium Problems : The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time (2002) (29)

Souslin Properties and Tree Topologies (1979) (27)

A note on the normal Moore space conjecture (1979) (26)

Viewpoint: the real reason why software engineers need math (2001) (24)

Modeling Real Reasoning (2009) (20)

Bibliography

Erik J. Larson, P., 2022. Keith Devlin | Academic Influence. [online] Academicinfluence.com. Available at: <https://academicinfluence.com/people/keith-devlin> [Accessed 3 October 2022].

[rilwansbloggg]

HISTORY OF INFORMATION

My first topic for this project is History Of Information by Professor Paul Duguid. I selected this topic (Bridging the Gaps – History of Information with Professor Paul Duguid) because I consider it important to understand how information came to being and how it has evolved over the years. The speaker gives an account of information over the years, it's impact on human in modern times and how it's various forms can be a blessing and a curse to the society.

Some lessons learnt from the discussion include: Information can have different meanings, depending on the field of study. Information has also become very important in terms of problem solving because people tend to know exactly what to do when they have the right information. Access to the right information can be a form of liberation for marginalized groups.

The guest speaker is Professor Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley; a professorial research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London; a visiting fellow in business history in the School of Management at York University (UK), and an honorary fellow of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development at Lancaster University School of Management. He has also held teaching positions at Santa Clara University, Copenhagen Business School and Ecole Polytechnique. His current research interests include the history and development of trademarks and the history of the concept of information. Below is a list of some of his recent publications and talks:

Information: A Historical Companion by Waseem Akhtar for his podcast "Bridging the Gaps: A Portal for Curious Minds." The podcast can also be found on SoundCloud .

No More Sucking Up to Zuckerberg: Behavioural Science Plus Profit-Driven Analytics Equals Disaster. TLS April 2, 2021

Information: A Historical Companion co-edited with Ann Blair, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton. Princeton University Press, forthcoming, 2021.

"Introduction" to Information: A Historical Companion. Princeton University Press, forthcoming, 2021.

"Communication, Computation, and Information," chapter 12 in Information: A Historical Companion. Princeton University Press, forthcoming, 2021.

Early Marks: American Trademarks before U.S. Trademark Law.Business History, 2018.

Storm Clouds: The Persisting Problem of Sexism in Tech. TLS May 18, 2018

The Social Life of Information Third Edition, 2017, updated with a new preface by the authors and a new introduction by David Weinberger.

Information Empires, Attention Merchants, and the Public Sphere.Le Libellio d'Aegis 2017 13(1).

Freedom with Information, Review of James Cortada, All the Facts,TLS September 28, 2016. [listen to podcast with TLS editor Stig Abell]