The UC Irvine program in Religious Studies presents: "Compassion: lessons from ‘man’s’ closest living relatives"
Department: Religious Studies
Date and Time: November 19, 2015 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: HIB 135
Event Details
The UC Irvine program in Religious Studies invites you to attend its upcoming guest lecture:
“Compassion: lessons from ‘man’s’ closest living relatives"
Presented by Amy Parish, USC
Can apes apologize? Can monkeys mourn their dead? Darwinian feminist and biological anthropologist Amy Parish, a world expert on our closest living relatives—bonobos—will take us into the lives of (other) primates and explore how empathy and fairness work in monkeys and apes. She’ll navigate the nature/nurture divide, addressing contentious topics like morality, shame, ethics—the roots of our capacity to show compassion.
Dr. Amy Parish is an interdisciplinary scholar at University of Southern California and is a world expert on bonobo social and sexual behavior. She has also studied the mating system of white-handed gibbons in Thailand and is currently interested in female mate choice decisions in humans. In all of her research, Dr. Parish uses an evolutionary, bio-cultural, feminist, and interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the origins of human behavior. Her work has been featured in Ms. Magazine and she has appeared on Nova, National Geographic Explorer, NPR, and Discovery Health Channel productions. She gives numerous public lectures, including: a keynote address at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas; moderating an event at the L.A. Library in honor of the 50th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique; and lectures in the SALT (Studies in Arts, Literature and Theology) series at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. She is a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. In summer 2011, she completed a workshop led by Alan Alda on how to effectively communicate science to the public.