Is all persuasion self persuasion? You tell me.

The anthropologist delivered a lecture on primitive cultures.

That's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published.

Jean Baptiste Michel So how did we get to this conclusion?

Lessig Bingo. That's the point.

It gives us a completely new view of human origins and what it means to be human, all conventional theories of cultural evolution, of the origin of humans, and what makes us so different from other species.

To find out, my colleague, Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches.

LANGUAGE FESTlVALS

The ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right.

The anthropologist says old customs still prevail in the province.

Why not? I mean, that's what we do.

Archeology is a science that studies the activities of human beings and their changes through the study of the traces left by them.

We don't have a minute... Let's think about that for 10 seconds.

to change the world for the better?

Mirror neurons and imitation, emulation.

And across a whole range of fields from software, astronomy, natural sciences, vast areas of leisure and culture

Historically, for example, chopsticks according to one Japanese anthropologist who wrote a dissertation about it at the University of Michigan resulted in long term changes in the dentition, in the teeth, of the Japanese public.

If you've ever taken anthropology, you know that it's a kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be, and that there are places out there where, supposedly, everything is the opposite to the way it is here.

(Laughter)

Coal is chemically allied to diamonds.

This must be who I'm directly descended from.

I learned about Greek culture.

When we say that a language is culturally transmitted that is, that it is learned rather than inherited we mean that it is part of that whole complex of learned and shared behavior that anthropologists call culture.

It has generated considerable insight in physics, in biology and economics, but not that much in the humanities and in history.

To be honest, that journey stirred a lot of emotions.

Parting is all we need to know of hell.

People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved.

That's the first thing.

Now even that's more complicated than you think.

And you move from a discipline of engineering, you move from a discipline of chemistry, into a discipline of biology.

To use their power for good

Somebody goes to another country, says, How fascinating these people are, how interesting their tools are, how curious their culture is.

So they did anthropological research into the unfolding of artistic activity in children, and they found that, across space and time, all children exhibit the same evolution in visual logic as they grow.

Culture does not make people, people make culture.

You know, Poland hasn't changed its culture.

It's not just the cultures and the people.

Hey, we got culture.

In this case, chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks.

It's sad, but true.

And it was natural

If you go back in time about 75,000 to 100,000 years ago,

And writing your congressmen is fantastic, they tell you to write your congressman if you want something done.

So, here you have my last slide.

Why would God wire you to do something and then not have you do it?

The study of philosophy belongs to the humanities.