Catalog

Darwin and Design

Literature MIT CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 21 lectures

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

Syllabus

  1. 1 Lecture 1: Darwin and Design
  2. 2 Lecture 2: Alice in Wonderland
  3. 3 Lecture 3: Genesis, Aristotle, and the Emergence of World Views
  4. 4 Lecture 4: Voltaire and the Accidental World
  5. 5 Lecture 5: Hume's Dialogues: Revealed Religion vs. Empirically-Based Religion
  6. 6 Lecture 6: Philo and the Limits of Analogy
  7. 7 Lecture 7: William Paley and his Legacy
  8. 8 Lecture 8: Adam Smith "Wealth of Nations" (1776): The Idea of an Oeconomy
  9. 9 Lecture 9: Malthus and the Compound Interest World
  10. 10 Lecture 10: Malthus and the Compound Mind
  11. 11 Lecture 11: Darwin and the Economy of the Natural World
  12. 12 Lecture 12: Natural Selection
  13. 13 Lecture 13: Darwinian Synthesis
  14. 14 Lecture 14: Darwin's "The Descent of Man" (1871)‏ and Human Culture
  15. 15 Lecture 15: Naturalism and Utopia: Samuel Butler's "Erewhon"
  16. 16 Lecture 16: Butler and Technological Autonomy
  17. 17 Lecture 17: Evolution and Cybernetics
  18. 18 Lecture 18: Alan Turing and the Thinking Machine
  19. 19 Lecture 20: Dualism and Personality in Post-Evolutionary Fiction
  20. 20 Lecture 21: T. H. Huxley and the Two States
  21. 21 Lecture 22: H. G. Wells "The Time Machine" and The Final Utopia

Course materials