TELEVISION
The Human Spark
PBS, January 6, 13 and 20, 2010, at 10 p.m. EST*
www.pbs.org/humanspark
Watching Alan Alda host The Human Spark, you get the sense that he could teach basket weaving and make it entertaining and relevant. This program, however, aims for a much headier topic—the question of what makes human beings so unique. What is it about our brain that allowed us to take over the world? The three-part series investigates how our ancestors differed from Neandertals and from our closest relatives today, the chimpanzees.
We follow Alda as he meets with archaeologists unearthing stonework from caves in the Dordogne region in southern France and as he participates in behavioral studies on both chimps and children with primatologists at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta. In Boston, neuroscientists scan and analyze Alda’s brain.
The whirlwind trip includes many brief lessons on big ideas. Some of these themes deserve an entire miniseries of their own—especially the light treatment of our ancient history, glossed over in the first episode. It’s worth sticking by Alda’s side to laugh with him, however, as he throws a primitive spear at a plastic deer and to share his glee when, in an experiment, a toddler learns to free a block from a container in one go by mimicking an adult.
This passion for teaching and learning may be one of the most unique and important qualities we humans have developed, according to the central theme of The Human Spark. As Alda points out, “we look into our students’ eyes as if to say, ‘Are you getting this? Are you following me?’ Not quite like our nearest cousins whose behavior seems to be implying, ‘Hey, you’re on your own, bub.’ "
*Editor's note: The air dates have been updated to reflect new scheduled times.
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2 Comments
Add CommentOur brain put us in a position to 'take over the world' only as a happenstance of adaptation within a system. There exists today organisms that are prepared to 'take over the world' as the system moves beyond our relevance. We are an arrogant life form. I wonder if the dinosaurs were?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut hosted by Alan Alda makes it more interesting and entertaining. I'll be watching the program!
It is all to easy to forget the huge time-span of over 200,000 years mankind spent just surviving by gathering food as the tribes moved slowly on. Thought and speech then must mainly have consisted of people discussing the interactions of the environment as a whole, necessary to adapt rare ressources to our needs. In this sense, mankind is getting back to its roots, in that it is now again discussing the vast ammounts of information showing how to interact with the environment in order to adapt to climate change and just survive. To this extent, we must reconsider all the technology we have developed and with which we are destroying the planet we depend on.
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