Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon in 2008.

Terrence W. Deacon is an American anthropologist (Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, Harvard University 1984). He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.

Theoretical interests

Prof. Deacon's theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at multiple levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, social processes, and focusing especially on how these different processes interact and depend on each other. He has long stated an interest in developing a scientific semiotics (particularly biosemiotics) that would contribute to both linguistic theory and cognitive neuroscience.

Fields of research

Deacon's research combines human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. His work extends from laboratory-based cellular-molecular neurobiology to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language and language origins. His neurobiological research is focused on determining the nature of the human divergence from typical primate brain anatomy, the cellular-molecular mechanisms producing this difference, and the correlations between these anatomical differences and special human cognitive abilities, again, particularly language.

He plans to focus his future research on isolating elements of the developmental genetic mechanisms that distinguish the human brains from other primate brains, and attempting to study the cognitive consequences of human brain differences using in vivo brain imaging.

Work

His 1997 book, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain is widely considered a seminal work in the subject of evolutionary cognition. His approach to semiotics, thoroughly described in the book, is fueled by a career-long interest in the ideas of the late 19th-century American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. In it, he uses the metaphors of parasite and host to describe language and the brain, respectively, claiming that the structures of language have co-evolved to adapt to their brain hosts.

His new book, Incomplete Nature, explores the properties of life, the emergence of consciousness, and the relationship between evolutionary and semiotic processes. It is scheduled to be released November 2011.

Other publications

• Deacon, T.W. (1990). "Rethinking mammalian brain evolution." Am Zool 30:629–705.
• Deacon, T.W. (1997). "What makes the human brain different?" Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 26: 337-57.
• Deacon, T.W. (2001). "Heterochrony in brain evolution." In Parker et al. (eds.), Biology, Brains, and Behavior. SAR Press, pp. 41-88.
• Deacon, T.W. (2006). "Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub." Chapter 5 in P. Clayton & P. Davies (Eds.), The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion. Oxford University Press, pp. 111–150.
• Deacon, T.W. (2010). "A role for relaxed selection in the evolution of the language capacity." PNAS.107:9000-9006.

External links

• Interview with Terrence Deacon on the co-evolution of language and the brain
• Participants: Terrence W. Deacon, a biography in connection with his participation in “God, Matter, and Information: What is Ultimate?”, a 2006 symposium in Copenhagen.