Speaking Dates
January 24, One World Week Forum, Warwick University, Coventry, England
February 10, Cengage Professional Development seminar, “The Language of Life: How Communication Shapes Human Development.” Washington, DC.
March 9, Cengage Professional Development seminar, “The Language of Life: How Communication Shapes Human Development.” Newport Beach, CA.
The uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran were provoked, organized, and reported to the world by communications technology—social media and mass media. Political and cultural change is driven by the power of modern
communication. Together with Eduardo Neiva, I have finished writing
The Language of Life: How Communication Drives Human Evolution. The book focuses on cultural change spurred by recent events like the uprisings in the Middle East and the Occupy Wall Street protests but the main purpose of the book is to tell the story of human evolution from a communication perspective. We explain how communication processes are key to sheer survival, sex, culture, morality, religion, and technological change.
The Language of Life: How Communication Drives Human Evolution presents an original and provocative perspective
on evolution and cultural development—past, present, and future. The book will be published by
Prometheus Books on May 22. You can read the publisher’s description of the book
here.
Communication drives human evolution. But this principle, which Eduardo Neiva and I explain in
The Language of Life, applies to all living things. Precious little is understood about how evolution works. Public and especially private schools fail to give evolutionary theory and history sufficient attention, religious ideology negates the truth of evolution in favor of fanciful creationist tales, American politicians demonstrate their conservative credentials by denying evolution, and mainstream media pay little attention to evolutionary science (which is fascinating and can be quite easily explained).
One tremendous source of information about evolution, including the crucial role of communication in survival and reproduction, however, are zoos. I visit zoos whenever I travel to major cities. I visited the Bronx Zoo for the first time on a beautiful day in late December. The photos that appear here were taken there. Because of our closely-shared genetic and cultural heritage, I tend to lean toward the monkeys and primates. As Charles Darwin quickly realized visiting the London Zoo, gorillas give us tremendous insight into our own behavior. This spectacular specimen assumes the position of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker.” What do you imagine he is contemplating?
One
featured display at the Bronx Zoo shows how monkeys use their colors to advertise their presence to each other (for sexual selection) but also to blend in with the forest to hide from eagles, leopards, and humans (survival by means of natural selection). This is a delicate balancing act in nature—showing off sufficiently to attract mates while avoiding predators. Among guenon species of monkey, individuals communicate with each other by means of their distinctive markings and colors. Guenon families compete for resources by using facial expressions to intimidate their rivals.
The Bronx Zoo has a particularly good collection of giraffes who roam freely over many acres. Visitors learn how giraffes communicate emotions in three ways—visual, vocal, and tactile. Visually, the position of their neck expresses emotion including fear, panic, anger, and submission. Vocally, giraffes grunt when alarmed or annoyed. In terms of touch, giraffes frequently nose and lick one another’s body, neck, and head. Males spar with each other to establish sexual dominance by wrapping their necks around their opponent then shoving, pushing, and swinging their necks to strike with blunt, backwardslanting horns.
One
of the featured animals at the Bronx Zoo is the African Wild Dog. The zoo has mounted an impressive program to protect this endangered species. The display in New York explains how African Wild Dogs communicate through sounds, scents, and body language. African Wild Dogs squeak, lick each other, and run around together in a group to create a pre-hunting ceremony. They hoot when lost to locate their pack. The dogs bark to signal alarm, growl to express aggression, and whine to get attention. Their eyes, ears, and tails signal dominance and submission. We recognize many of these behaviors, of course, in our own pets.
The enhanced second edition of
Public Speaking: The Evolving Art–-a textbook I co-authored with Stephanie Coopman, is now available. An interactive book and website that offer a fresh approach for teaching public speaking, the first edition drew hundreds of classroom adoptions throughout the United States.
Public Speaking: The Evolving Art is the first volume to combine the latest trends in popular culture and media with information technology as cornerstones for an instructional approach to public speaking and features the "Speech Buddies"—student mentors that guide learners through the entire process of effectively developing and presenting a speech. Learn more about this project at:
Coopman and Lull.
Flew into Quito, Ecuador—a city so beautiful it literally takes your breath away (altitude is nearly 10,000 feet)—to spend a busy week before heading over to the Galápagos Islands in June. I was hosted in Quito by CIESPAL (
El Centro Internacional de Estudios Superiores de Comunicación para América Latina) and SEICOM (
Sociedad Ecuatoriana de Estudios e Investigaciones de la Comunicación).
Gave a talk titled, “El Poder de la Comunicación Evolutiva” (The Power of Evolutionary Communication) to a large gathering at the CIESPAL auditorium that was carried in real time online and now can be found in six parts on
YouTube. Was interviewed for an hour on the program
Palabra Suelta (best translation, “loose talk”) on Ecuador Television, the national public TV channel, by Xavier Lasso. We discussed global trends in media and my new book,
The Language of Life: How Communication Drives Human Evolution. Todo en español, por supuesto!
Be sure to check out the photos and commentaries about the
Galápagos Archipelago and the
Charles Darwin Research Station under Images.
The fully revised and updated second edition of Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach continues to attract readers from around the world. The cover features the outstanding artwork of the Canadian artist, René Milot (below). This work first appeared in National Geographic magazine. It nicely captures the cultural fusion of mass media and information technology, which is a main theme of the book.
The artwork is part of a "A Look at Life Through the Ages," and denotes the world's most important cities at the beginning of the three millennia. New York City was selected to be featured for the year 2000. National Geographic's description of Milot's painting is the following:
"A young woman sits in her basement apartment, window barred against urban threats. When not out with friends, she is connected to the world via computer, cell phone, television, and radio - living life remotely, in a barrage of information. A caged iguana, dusty telescope, and potted plant hint at the natural world she has little time to enjoy. Cultural trinkets litter her room, as disposable as a pizza box. Craving stimulation, she wouldn't dream of living anywhere else."
