Earlier this month, Harvard students made their way to the Sanders Theatre for the 2012 edition of Harvard Thinks Big. It’s a TED-style event which gets pitched like this: “8 all-star professors. 8 big ideas. All ten minutes each.” You get the gist.
This year’s version had as much substance, though perhaps not quite the same sizzle, as the 2011 version, which featured talks by Steven Pinker, Lawrence Lessig, Daniel Gilbert and Elaine Scarry. Above, we have one talk from the latest Harvard Thinks Big. It features Daniel Lieberman, the renowned biologist (perhaps you know his work on barefoot running?) talking about how evolutionary biology explains why obesity is on the rise in the United States.
Other speakers at the event included Doug Melton, Eleanor Duckworth, Nicholas Christakis, Kaia Stern, Donhee Ham, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jill Lepore. The lectures can be watched via YouTube (follow the previous links) or via iTunes. Regrettably the talks by Greenblatt, Ham and Lepore haven’t made it to the web, at least not yet. When they do, we’ll mention it on our Twitter stream, where we post lots of other cultural goodies.
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It amazes me that otherwise intelligent people like Harvard profs breezily equate parenting with state coercion.
And to suggest that we need coercion to overcome the apparently inevitable forces of evolution.
One of the reasons we have obesity is due to the disastrous state-supported dietary advice that is so lovingly forced upon us. The last thing in the world we need is more such coercion.