July 10, 2001
SETI Institute Scientist Chosen for Faculty Seminar on Altruism
Douglas Vakoch, the SETI Institute's resident Social Scientist, has been selected as one of the participants in a faculty seminar to be held in July 2001 at Calvin College on the topic "Biology and Purpose: Altruism, Morality, and Human Nature in Evolutionary Theory."
During the month-long seminar, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, Vakoch will focus on his individual research project entitled "Construction of Interstellar Messages Describing the Evolution of Altruistic Behavior," which he will present at a follow-up conference in May 2002. Participation in the seminar is by invitation only, following a competitive evaluation process.
Vakoch will construct
interstellar messages describing the evolution of human altruism.
Vakoch will participate in the faculty seminar along with fourteen other scholars from academic institutions in North America, Europe, and South America. Fellow participants in the seminar will include researchers from a range of disciplines, including physics, biology, psychology, theology, philosophy, and history, including renowned scholars such as Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. The interdisciplinary nature of the seminar will be facilitated by distinguished researchers from varied backgrounds, who will serve as lecturers and mentors. These seminar leaders will include behavioral ecologist Richard Alexander (University of Michigan), psychologist Malcolm Jeeves (University of St. Andrews, Scotland), biochemist Niels Gregersen (Aarhus University, Denmark), theologian Kevin Van Hoozer (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (State University of New York at Binghamton). The seminar is being coordinated by Philip Clayton, Professor of Philosophy at Sonoma State University and Jeffrey Schloss, Professor of Biology at Westmont College.
Vakoch's seminar project will draw on his on-going research on interstellar message design, as well as his psychological experiments on the evolution of language. The goal of this project is to explore ways to go beyond traditional methods of creating interstellar messages that focus on mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Instead, Vakoch will construct interstellar messages describing the evolution of human altruism. Specifically, he will examine ways that biological and psychological accounts of altruism might also convey something about philosophical and theological notions of love.
Vakoch has a long-standing interest in ethical and policy issues in SETI, with a particular emphasis on the question of whether humankind should reply to a signal we might some day detect from extraterrestrial intelligence. (Although the SETI Institute encourages discussion of reply messages even before signal detection, the Institute does not transmit signals to extraterrestrials.) In addition, Vakoch has used both historical and psychological survey approaches to understanding possible religious responses to detecting life beyond Earth. In addition to his role as the SETI Institute's Social Scientist, Vakoch is also affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis.
For an overview of the possible cultural impact of detecting a signal from extraterrestrials, see the book Social Implications of the Detection of an Extraterrestrial Civilization.
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