(gentle chamber music)
- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape,
bipedal, 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.
(electronic music)
- Well, as you've heard, Carta is a remarkable institution.
It's professed goal is to explore
and explain the origins of the human phenomenon.
Now, over the years, this has meant
looking at human evolution from many points of view.
Previous symposia have explored the role
of language, bipedalism, domestication, disease,
but I think today's meeting is the first
to be concerned with the role in human evolution of an idea.
The idea is a dreadfully simple one.
It's that each one of us is going to die,
and when we're dead, we're dead.
(crowd laughing)
Like this parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch,
we humans will be no more.
We cease to be.
We've run down the curtain, and joined the choir invisible.
We are ex-human beings.
Well, we can laugh at the parrot,
but of course, it's no laughing matter
when it comes to human death.
The German photographer, Walter Schels,
who's taken photos of people
in the terminal stages of illness,
shortly before they died, and then a day later.
On the left, is a living human being.
On the right, an ex-human.
The living humans understood all too well
what was soon to happen.
Some were sad, some were angry, some were at peace,
some believed, with Peter Pan, that to die
would be an awfully big adventure,
but all understood that as persons,
they were soon to be annihilated.
So, when did the idea of personal mortality
first become current among our ancestors,
and what were the consequences
for human's evolutionary trajectory?
Is it true, as it's been claimed,
that once humans became aware of their own mortality
everything changed?
Is it true that the idea of death
became the well-spring of human activity?
Well, we'll shortly be hearing
from our distinguished speakers
about the psychological, practical,
even magical, techniques that humans have devised
to deny that death is indeed the final destiny of man.
But, this is an evolutionary symposium,
so we're going to start with questions
about the development of death awareness,
how it evolved in the history of our species,
and how it still evolves in each one of us
as individuals today.
Voltaire wrote in his philosophical dictionary,
"The human race is the only one that knows
that it must die, and it knows this
only through its experience.
A child brought up alone and transported
to a desert island would have no more idea of death
than a cat or a plant."
Well, he's making two important claims here.
First, that humans alone among animals
do understand about death.
And second, that this understanding is not innate.
Each of us has to acquire it by watching and listening
to what goes on around us.
Little Elmira here was just 17 months-old.
It seems safe to assume that she
didn't know she was about to die.
But, what about Janique?
He was six years-old.
Paul Harris, the leading developmental psychologist
from Harvard, will be telling us about research
on just when, and how, children do in fact
find out about death, and what kind
of interpretations they put on it.
How much do children work out for themselves?
How much do they rely on what they're taught?
And later, Rita Astuti, a brilliant social anthropologist
will discuss the influence of the local culture of belief,
how children can be taught to turn the facts on their head,
and to see death not as an end, but a beginning.
But, do we really have to be taught about death?
Could someone, man or animal, learn the biological facts
about death, and their own mortality just by looking?
That's to say, by observing others die,
by recognizing their own likeness in them,
and then simply putting two and two together.
Well, if this kind of learning is possible,
why should it be restricted to human beings?
The answer is that it may not be.
We'll hear from Dora Biro,
Royal Society Research Fellow at Oxford,
about evidence for some sort of death awareness
in chimpanzees.
And then Jack Marzluff,
Professor of Wildlife Science at Washington University,
will tell us about how crows, too,
try to puzzle out the meaning of the death
of their conspecifics.
Now, no one has yet tried teaching
the meaning of death to a chimpanzee,
but back in the days when scientists
rated the linguistic abilities of chimps
rather more highly than most of us do now,
David Premack did discuss the possibility.
He wrote, "Can I tell the ape that it will die?
If we succeeded in communicating this information
to even one animal, saw its hair stand on end,
heard it moan, we would know we'd provided
the necessary conceptual elements.
But, what if, like man, the ape dreads death
and will deal with this knowledge
as bizarrely as we have - with the invention
of ritual, myth, and religion?
Until I can suggest concrete steps
in teaching the concept of death without fear,
I have no intention of imparting the knowledge
of mortality to an ape."
Well, Premack was getting ahead of the facts here,
as he often did.
Still, this passage does raise interesting questions,
or rather, begs them.
First, Premack assumes that humans
do in fact fear death in a hair-raising way.
And, second, he assumes that ritual, myth, and religion
have enabled human beings to conquer that fear.
Well, we have the world's expert
on the psychology and neuroscience of fear, Joe LeDoux,
to discuss what kind of fear
fear of death actually is, if it's a fear at all.
But whether it's a fear, or more properly,
an anxiety, there's no question
that it leaves its mark on us, and long has done so.
We're privileged to have Lord Colin Renfrew from Cambridge
to review the archeological evidence
for when death-defying practices first arose
in human history.
So, here's the big question,
how have such bizarre practices
actually been essential to the survival of our species?
Without them, would death-aware human beings
have become paralyzed by fear?
Sheldon Solomon, one of the architects
of Terror Management Theory will tell us, "Yes."
But, the Co-Director of Carta, Ajit Varki,
has his own ideas about this.
Ajit thinks that what saved our species
was not so much the invention of cultural defenses,
as an evolutionary change in the human brain.
Mind over reality, denial.
And then finally, my own role
in the afternoon's proceedings,
will be to discuss the unexpected phenomenon
of human suicide.
So, we have a rich afternoon ahead of us
of science, and philosophy,
and despite the dark material, I hope you'll find it fun.
(applause)
(electronic music)