(piano music)
- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bi-pedal, naked, large brain.
Long the master of fire, tools and language.
But still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable.
Yet, filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from our shared understanding
of the past.
CARTA brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible by the generosity
of humans, like you.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome, everybody, to the CARTA Open Symposium,
Public Symposium, on Awareness of Death
and Personal Mortality,
and its implications for anthropogeny.
I'm Rusty Gage, and I'm one of your,
one of the co-organizers of CARTA, in general.
CARTA is founded on these basic principles,
of what are the oldest questions regarding humans.
Who are we?
What are we doing here?
Where did we come from?
How did we get here?
And, where are we going?
Most of these questions are not really tractable
in modern scientific sense of things.
We focus in on a couple of them
that we believe resonate with multi-disciplinary approach
to understanding.
So, where do we come from?
And, how did we get here?
The term that we've used to coin our interest
is anthropogeny, or explaining the origin of humans.
And it is currently defined in the Oxford English Dictionary
as the investigation of the origins of humans.
But the term harks back to 1839,
and Hooper's Medical Dictionary
and the study of the generation of man.
A little bit about our organization.
CARTA stands for the
Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny.
As I said, I'm one of three co-directors.
Ajit Varki at the School of Medicine at UCSD
and Margaret Schoeninger, who's the past
Chair of Anthropology at USCD.
Importantly, Pascal Gagneux is our Associate Professor
in Pathology, he's also the Associate Director.
We have a fabulous staff that's been working with us
for many years to make this whole process run smoothly.
Most importantly, Linda Nelson, Ingrid Bernischke-Perkins,
Kate Kaya, Vishu Nandigam and Jesse Robie,
who's been helpful, all of them have been helpful
in so many ways.
The fun thing about this meeting,
and this approach to understanding the origins of man
are that, it's a cross-disciplinary organization.
And many of you that have attended our conferences
in the past have seen that we blend humanities,
biological sciences, engineering, physical and chemical
sciences, as well as the social sciences,
together to answer some of these important questions.
Our mission, that we've sort of come to,
after having been involved in lots of other organizations
in the past, is to use all the, is this set
of mission statements that we put together,
that we hope you'll appreciate.
So we use all rational and ethical approaches
to seek all verifiable facts from all relevant disciplines
to explore and explain the origins of the human phenomenon.
While minimizing complex organizational structures
and hierarchies, and avoiding unnecessary paperwork
and bureaucracy.
(laughter)
So, many of you, I see, can appreciate
the importance of that.
And in the process, we hope to raise awareness
and understanding of the study of human origins
within the academic communities,
but at the public at large.
And that's what these afternoon talks on Friday
are meant to achieve.
We want a special thanks to the G. Harold
and Leila Mathers Charitable Foundation
in New York.
The current Executive Director is Howard Chester.
This organization has, for many years, been the major
benefactor for this meeting.
And we are deeply indebted to their commitment.
We'd also like to give a special thanks
to Annette Merle-Smith, who's with us today.
Raise your hand, please.
(laughter)
For her support of the Graduate Specialization
in Anthropogeny.
Which some of you are aware of, but it's really
a terrific program we support this cross-disciplinary
research for the students in the program.
We have a new fund, a Memorial Symposium Fund
that we've begun, on honor of Jim Handelman
who passed away recently.
And the plan is to endow this in the future.
And already we have a good list of people
that have appreciated these symposiums over the years
that have donated to this.
And we're looking for more.
On a broader scale, we would like to thank,
or on a more micro-scale, we'd like to thank the sponsor
of today's symposium for closed caption on YouTube,
and this is Sue Rosner, Eli Shefter and Elizabeth Lancaster.
We do have a donor list of people that are,
in general, supporting CARTA, not just the symposium,
but many of the other things we try to achieve.
And I'm just throwing up their names here.
But we're happy to say that the list is growing.
And I'll leave these up just for a moment.
You can become a member and supporter of CARTA today.
And we'll use your support to support the symposium
and other activities in this nonprofit group.
Finally, I'd like to thank those that do such
a wonderful job here at UCSD-TV.
These lectures will be recorded and made available online.
So if you didn't get everything that you wanted to
get out of these, you can watch them again
and get more out of them.
So, Rich Wargo, Matt Alioto, Marci Bretts and Jacob Parker.
And here at the Salk, we want to thank
our ever-present Kent Schnoeker,
who's back up there running everything.
And finally, give a round of applause to Ed
for his wonderful piano.
(applause)
(upbeat music)