The Authors

William H. Calvin

I majored in physics at Northwestern University (B.A., 1961), spent a year at M.I.T. and Harvard Medical School absorbing the atmosphere of what eventually became known as neuroscience, then went to the University of Washington to do a degree in physiology and biophysics (Ph.D., 1966) working under Charles F. Stevens. I subsequently stayed in Seattle, on the faculty of the Department of Neurological Surgery, a wonderful postdoctoral education as well as a home for my experimental work on neuron repetitive firing mechanisms, from lobster neurons in vitro to human cortical neurons in situ. After a 1978–79 sabbatical as Visiting Professor of Neurobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, my interests began to shift toward theoretical issues in the ensemble properties of neural circuits – what eventually became Darwin Machines – and to the big brain problem of hominid evolution. Friends in psychology, zoology, archaeology, and physical anthropology tried hard to educate me as I stumbled into their fields during the 1980s. While I am now an Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington, I am no more a psychiatrist now than I was a neurosurgeon before. Pressed for a specialization, I usually say that I’m a theoretical neurophysiologist trying to work out the neural circuitry for higher intellectual function – and that periodically leads me astray into linguistics and into the interrelationship between abrupt climate change and human origins.

Although I graduated from the University of Cambridge, England in 1949, it wasn’t until the 1960s that I entered academic life, first as a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and then, after a year’s postgraduate work in linguistics at the University of Leeds, as Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Guyana (1967-71) – the "Senior" was perhaps due to my being the only linguist in the entire country! It was there that I developed a long-lasting interest in creole languages, and this, after a year at the University of Lancaster in England, brought me to Hawaii, where what is locally called "pidgin" is in fact a creole. For twenty-four years I was a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii, having meanwhile received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Cambridge (1976). My work in Hawaii, and in particular my discovery that creole languages were produced by children from unstructured input in a single generation, led me to wonder where language had originally come from, and how it had developed to its present complexity. This led to an apprenticeship similar to Bill’s – a learning experience that involved struggling with a variety of unfamiliar disciplines. But I’m a card-carrying autodidact, and I’ve always found boundaries oppressive, whether of countries, institutions, or academic disciplines. Crossing them has given me some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.