Request lecture
What factors shape our character, our intelligence or our personality? For decades, we have considered that evolution was and should be a theory unrelated to the study of man and his behavior. Human beings have a handful of mental faculties that have led us to develop a language, and with it a culture, that far surpasses that of any other species on the planet. Along with this, we have developed behaviors that are apparently completely unrelated to evolution. Literature, art, democratic societies, mathematics, science... The influence of culture on our behavior is undeniable. However, we must never lose sight of the fact that these mental faculties, each and every one of our behaviors, are manifestations of an organ, the brain, whose design and structure is the result of millions of years of evolution, just as it is the evolution of our lungs or our heart.
In this conference it will be seen how the theories of Darwinian evolution have allowed us and allow us now to study and explain aspects of our behavior that we believe are the result of our culture, such as our sense of beauty, our morality or our aptitude for mathematics. To Darwin, we owe a theory that is providing answers to some of the oldest and most important questions we face as a species: What makes us human?
Brief CV
Pau Carazo, is a full time professor of the Department of Zoology at the University of Valencia. He has a PhD (2010) on the evolution and function of communicative signals at the same university. In 2011 he obtained a prize from the Australian Government "Endeavor Award" for a postdoctoral stay at Macquarie University (Sydney) to study the evolution of cognition in reptiles. In 2012 he moved to the University of Oxford on a European “Marie Curie” scholarship, where he spent two and a half years studying the evolutionary interaction between sexual conflict and aging (in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster). In 2015 he joined the University of Valencia with a Ramón i Cajal scholarship. He is currently a researcher at the Laboratory of Behavior and Evolution in the Etology Unit of the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology of the University of Valencia.
More information
- http://paucarazo.com
- They plan to study whether the physiological cost of sexual frustration can accelerate evolution
- A research of the Cavanilles Institut with vinegar flies proves that sexual frustration can accelerate the evolution
- La evolución es un hecho tan indiscutible como que la Tierra no es plana
Social networks
- @paucarazo
- @BehavEvolLab
- @ICBiBE_UV
- @BiologiquesUV
- @CdCienciaUV
- @MednightGTS
Request lecture
Stimulating scientific vocations is a project of the Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit of the University of Valencia, which has co-funding from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.
