by Donna Haraway Frontier practices of the 21st century are always announcing new worlds, proposing the novel as the solution to the old, figuring creation as radical invention and replacement, rushing toward a future that wobbles between ultimate salvation and destruction but has little truck wi

The way the public hears about conservation issues is nearly always in the mode of ‘[Beloved Animal] Threatened With Extinction’. That makes for electrifying headlines, but it misdirects concern. The loss of whole species is not the leading problem in conservation.

This public Lecture took place on March 24, 2014 at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Dr. Donna Haraway was invited to give a keynote presentation as part of the research-creation working group think-tank event.

More information is available at http://researchcreation.ca

This event was supported in part by the Kule Institute for Advanced Study.

Where Will The Next Pandemic Come From? And How Can We Stop It? | Popular S

Please Subscribe To The Evolution Documentary YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/EvolutionDocumentary

BBC Documentary List: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6F572017231B7548

Broadcast (2011) If you have ever wondered what would happen in your own home if you were taken away and everything inside was left to rot, the answer is revealed in this programme which explores the strange and surprising science of decay. For two months, a glass box containing a typical kitchen and garden was left to rot in full public view within Edinburgh Zoo. In this resulting documentary, Dr George McGavin and his team use time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old. Decay is something that many of us are repulsed by, but as the programme shows, it's a process that's vital in nature. And seen in close up, it has an unexpected and sometimes mesmerising beauty.

The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this, Pääbo suspects, is because it has never been properly framed. “The challenge is to address the questions that are answerable,” he told me. Pääbo’s most ambitious project to date, which he has assembled an international consortium to assist him with, is an attempt to sequence the entire genome of the Neanderthal. The project is about halfway complete and has already yielded some unsettling results, including the news, announced by Pääbo last year, that modern humans, before doing in the Neanderthals, must have interbred with them. Once the Neanderthal genome is complete, scientists will be able to lay it gene by gene—indeed, base by base—against the human, and see where they diverge. At that point, Pääbo believes, an answer to the age-old question will finally be at hand. Neanderthals were very closely related to mo

"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . ." The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted by most experts on human evolution until very recently – in fact still is by some. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it like this: "There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilisation we've built with the same body and brain."

The Cro-Magnons were the creators of the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira – the ice age hunter gatherers whose art astounds us ("We have learned nothing," said Picasso, after seeing Lascaux). They were modern humans who entered Europe only about 40,000 years ago, and there, despite the hostile ice age environment, created the first artistically sophisticated culture. But that wasn't the end of human evolution. 

We human beings persist in thinking of ourselves as a unique species, endowed with special insight into a universe that we can manipulate. In fact, this notion is based on unexamined myth.

Humanity doesn't exist

At one time ranked among Britain's most influential scientists, the crystallographer J D Bernal (1901-71) recognised no limits to the power of science. A lifelong Marxist and recipient of a Stalin Peace Prize, Bernal believed that a scientifically planned society was being created in Soviet Russia; but his ambitions for science went far beyond revolutionising human institutions. He was convinced that science could bring about a transformation in the human species - a planned mutation in which human beings would cease to be biological organisms.