Oh, Brother, Who Art Thou? 5/22/2016 with Pascal Gagneux

Описание: Sunday Assembly San Diego is a radically inclusive secular community that meets monthly to hear inspirational talks, connect for service projects, sing songs, and generally celebrate life. Assemblies are free to attend, and everyone is welcome.

Live Better: We aim to provide inspiring, thought-provoking, and practical ideas to help people live the lives they want to lead, and to become the people they aspire to be.

Help Often: Assemblies are communities of people of action, building lives of purpose, and encouraging us all to help anyone in need and to support each other. We take on service projects together because we believe that helping makes life better.

Wonder More: Hearing a talk, singing as one, listening to readings, and even playing games helps us to connect with each other, and to the awesome world in which we live.

Our theme this month: Oh, Brother, Who Art Thou?

Speaker topic: We Are the Paradoxical Ape

Our Speaker: Pascal Gagneux, UCSD Associate Professor, Department of Pathology

Humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos more recently than these two species do with other apes. We are the paradoxical ape because we are the only species with language and self-reflexive, cumulative culture. These traits have allowed our species to take over the world and cause the extinction of vast numbers of other species, including our closest relatives. UCSD Associate Professor of Pathology Pascal Gagneux will describe how scientists are using disciplines spanning social, biological, physical, and computational sciences to try to understand the human phenomenon and the similarities to and differences from our ape brethren.

About our speaker:
Pascal Gagneux is a Swiss-American biologist trained in evolutionary biology, field primatology and molecular biology. He is Associate Professor of Pathology at UC San Diego as well as the Associate Director for CARTA, the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny, a center dedicated to "exploring and explaining the Human Phenomenon.” His scientific journey has taken him from behavioral studies of wild chimpanzees in West Africa, to non-invasive genetic studies of wild chimpanzees, to the comparative study of cell surface sugars (glycobiology) in humans and other apes and the exploration of their roles in infectious disease and in reproductive compatibility.


copyrighted song lyrics have been blurred, also our personal moment speaker is blurred as per her request to remain anonymous in video. Her audio has been preserved though.