The Leakey Foundation

Our Inner Scientist
2015-11-17 18:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Public Works, 161 Erie Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Join Alison Gopnik for an evening exploring how understanding babies’ and young children’s ability to acquire abstract knowledge has transformed how we view human nature itself.
Human beings have a longer childhood than any other animal, and during this childhood we are helpless and dependent. This long period of helplessness is responsible for our uniquely human consciousness and our ability to learn and imagine. Our long protected childhood gives us the opportunity to learn and play, which helps us plan and work as adults, and special features of our young brains give us remarkable learning abilities. In fact, even the youngest babies have learning abilities that are more powerful than those of the smartest scientists and most advanced computers.

The Fastest Evolving Regions of the Human Genome
2015-11-11 18:30 - 19:30 | The Houston Museum of Natural Science, 5555 Hermann Park Drive, Houston, TX, 77030, United States
Although a child can tell the difference between a chimp and a man, identifying the specific DNA mutations that make us human is one of the greatest challenges of biology. The genomic sequence is approximately 3 billion letters long, with millions of mutations and rearrangements specific to humans. Using computational algorithms to compare our DNA to that of chimpanzees, other mammals, and Neanderthal and Denisovan fossils, we learned that the human genome did not evolve especially fast. Instead, it seems that a few mutations in critical places had big effects. Most of these “Human Accelerated Regions” are not genes, and science had no clue to their function when they were discovered a decade ago. New techniques in stem cell biology, genome editing, and high-throughput molecular biology are allowing us to discover the functions of the fastest evolving regions of the human genome and dissect how individual DNA mutations altered these functions to make us human.

Being Human with Robert Sapolsky
2015-10-26 18:00 - 20:30 | Public Works, 161 Erie Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
What makes us human? Join world renowned neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky for an evening exploring one of the most fundamental questions about our existence.
Being Human mixes short talks from great minds with fun hands-on experiments, drinks, conversation, and storytelling. Each month we’ll investigate different aspects of our evolution, our behavior, and the human experience. This month, Stanford biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky offers a fascinating and funny look at human evolution and behavior.

2015 Trip to South Africa
2015-05-03 - 2015-05-13, 2015-05-03 00:00 - 2015-05-13 23:59 | CA
Leakey Foundation Fellows traveled from from Cape Town to Johannesburg to see extraordinary rock art, archaeological, and paleoanthropological sites.
https://youtu.be/O8gtbGpKYKYVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Leakey Foundation Tour of South Africa 2015 (https://youtu.be/O8gtbGpKYKY)

Olduvai Gorge and the Origins of Human Ecological Dominance
2015-04-22 19:00 - 20:00 | California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Dr 94118, San Francisco, CA, 94118, United States
Intelligence and technology have made humans one of the most adaptable species, and also the most ecologically dominant. With this dominance we have surpassed levels of planetary sustainability and are causing a modern mass extinction.
In this lecture, Rob Blumenschine describes nearly 30 years of research at Olduvai Gorge that sheds light on the origin of these capabilities in the earliest stone-tool maker, Homo habilis. In habilis we see the emergence of brain sizes larger than those of apes and the distinctly un-primate-like behaviour of competing with large carnivores for food. New methods for understanding this novel adaptation suggest that our ecological dominance had its beginnings in a tool and food procurement strategy that placed our ancestors at the base of the carnivore hierarchy and exposed them to great predation risk.

Why Walk on Two Legs? The Pros and Cons of Bipedalism
2015-04-01 19:00 - 20:00 | American Museum of Natural History, 56 West 81st St., New York, NY, 10024, United States
Join us for an evening of science, cocktails and conversation at SciCafe at the American Museum of Natural History. Wednesday, April 1 at 7:00. Admission is free and registration is recommended.
Walking on two legs, or ‘bipedalism’, is one of the key characteristics defining humans and our early ancestors. But what an odd way to walk and run. In this SciCafe, join Museum Curator Brian Richmond and Jeremy DeSilva from Boston University in exploring the great advantages of walking on two legs that allow us to be human, as well as the unfortunate consequences of evolving bipedalism from a body plan designed to walk on four, not two, legs.

Medicine Without Evolution is like Engineering Without Physics
2015-03-03 18:30 - 19:30 | The Houston Museum of Natural Science, 5555 Hermann Park Drive, Houston, TX, 77030, United States
Evolutionary medicine uses the basic science of evolutionary biology to improve the understanding, prevention and treatment of disease. Instead of just asking how the body works and why it goes awry, it also asks why natural selection left us with so many traits like wisdom teeth and the narrow birth canal that leave us vulnerable to disease. The old answer–the limits of natural selection–is important, but there are five other important explanations for vulnerability.
Randolph Nesse, a founder of the field, will give examples to illustrate all six reasons, with a focus on cancer, infectious diseases, and emotional disorders. He will explain why the field is growing so quickly, its prospects for providing a deeper understanding of disease, and how scientists and clinicians can join the effort to bring evolutionary biology to bear on the problems of medicine.
