SCCR Annual Meeting

Michael E. Lamb is Professor and Head of the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He received a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University (1976), honorary degrees from the Universities of Goteborg (1995) and East Anglia (2006), awards for his scholarly contributions from the American Psychological Association (1976, 1978), the American Family Therapy Association (1987), the University of Utah (1985, 1986), and the US Vice-President (1996), before receiving the James McKeen Cattell Award from the Association for Psychological Science for Lifetime Contributions to Applied Psychological Research (2004). He has authored or edited about 40 books, including The role of the father in child development (1976, 1981, 1997, 2004, in press), Infant-mother attachment (1985), Development in infancy (1982, 1987, 1992, 2002, in press), Hunter-gatherer childhoods (2005), Parenting and child development in non-traditional families (1982, 1999), Developmental psychology (1984, 1988, 1992, 1999, 2005), Investigative interviews of children (1998), Child sexual abuse: Disclosure, delay and denial (2007), and Tell me what happened: Structured investigative interviews of child victims and witnesses (2008) as well as many professional articles.

Presentation Title:
The Evolution of Human Languages

Thursday evening, February 18, 2010)

Dr. Murray Gell-Mann
Nobel Laureate in Physics (discoverer of the quark) &
Distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute
California Institute of Technology

Murray Gell-Mann is one of today's most prominent scientists. He is currently Distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute as well as the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 1955. In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the author of The Quark and the Jaguar, published in 1994, in which his ideas on simplicity and complexity are presented to a general readership.

Professor Gell-Mann was a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation from 1979-2002 and is a board member of the Wildlife Conservation Society. From 1974 to 1988, he was a Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian Institution. He belongs to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations; he is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. He was on the U.S. President's Science Advisory Committee from 1969 to 1972 and the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology from 1994 to 2001.

Gell-Mann's interests extend to historical linguistics, archeology, natural history, the psychology of creative thinking, and other subjects connected with biological and cultural evolution and with learning. Much of his recent research at the Santa Fe Institute has focused on the theory of complex adaptive systems, which brings many of those topics together. Currently Professor Gell-Mann is spearheading the Evolution of Human Languages Program at the Santa Fe Institute. Another focus of his work relates to simplicity, complexity, regularity, and randomness. He is also concerned with how knowledge and understanding are to be extracted from the welter of "information" that can now be transmitted and stored as a result of the digital revolution. Professor Gell-Mann lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and he teaches from time to time at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.