Please join us for the UWT Environmental Seminar Monday, last one of the year! "Your Inner Frog: Larynx, Language, and the Emergence of Voice in Nature" Gordon Miller, Director, Environmental Studies, Seattle University Monday, December 8, 2014 SCI 309, 12:25-1:25pm Feel free to bring your lunch! The UWT Environmental Seminars are free and open to the public. SPEAKER BIO Dr. Gordon Miller is Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Seattle University, where he teaches courses in natural history, acoustic ecology, nature writing, and environmental history. His did his graduate work at Rutgers University and Cambridge University and his primary research interests are animal communication, acoustic ecology, and the history and philosophy of science, especially biology. His books include an anthology entitled Nature’s Fading Chorus: Classic and Contemporary Writings on Amphibians (Island Press, 2000), which was prompted by the amphibian declines of recent decades, and the illustrated edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s small but revolutionary botanical classic, The Metamorphosis of Plants (MIT Press, 2009), among other works. ABSTRACT In his bestselling book and popular PBS series called Your Inner Fish, paleontologist Neil Shubin traces the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body spelled out in the simpler body plans of ancient creatures. He gives particular attention to the long evolutionary transition from fish fins to human hands, emphasizing the significance of the hand in quintessentially human forms of achievement and expression. Expanding this exploration of human origins to the rise of amphibians—particularly frogs—I will focus on the fact that the formation of the larynx in frogs during the Lower Triassic made possible the first vocal sound ever uttered on planet earth. In our own much different and highly developed experience of speech and language, we all nevertheless still have, in a sense, a frog in our throats. But the phenomenon of voice presents a different interpretive challenge for our understanding of animals—and perhaps of nature as a whole—than the appearance of mere bodily parts and I will discuss how this challenge is addressed by some leading zoologists as well as by selected nature writers. And I will explore some implications of these approaches for our sense of relation to and responsibility for the wider natural world. Cheers, Jim James E. Gawel, Ph.D. Assoc. Prof. of Environmental Chemistry and Engineering Environmental Science and Studies School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences University of Washington Tacoma 1900 Commerce St Campus Box 358436 Tacoma, WA 98402 Phone: 253-692-5815 E-mail: jimgawel@uw.edu