The Fourth Frontier: Discovering Humanity’s Future

This event occurred on:  The human mind is the most complex entity in the known universe. That complexity evolved for a reason--It provides human populations the ability to discover new niches. But by endowing people with that marvelous superpower, evolution sowed the seeds of our possible destruction. We have discovered the means by which to steal from the future in order to thrive in the present. Self-destruction would be inevitable but for another evolutionary gift, the ability to describe alternative futures and to choose amongst them. This talk will confront the tension between these two capacities and, in order to sketch the path through our looming bottleneck, argue that believers in human liberty must do two things: confront emerging authoritarianism, and abandon the archaic distinction between political right and left. Doing both will free humanity to seek a just, sustainable and abundant future. Bio: Professor Weinstein has spent two decades advancing the field of evolutionary biology, focusing on adaptive trade-offs. He has made important discoveries regarding the evolution of cancer and senescence as well as the adaptive significance of moral self-sacrifice. He is currently at the center of a national controversy at The Evergreen State College after irate students disrupted his class in response to an email he wrote objecting to a day of absence in which white people were asked to leave campus. His critique sparked accusations of racism and demands for his firing. He wrote, “On a college campus, one’s right to speak–or to be–must never be based on skin color.”  The story has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and others. Learn more about Bret and his work at https://bretweinstein.net.