LEWIS DARTNELL - Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us & Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

How have our psychology and cognitive biases altered the course of human history? What would you do if you had to rebuild our world from scratch?

Lewis Dartnell is an author, researcher, and holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He researches astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He also works as a scientific consultant for the media and has appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. Dr. Dartnell has won several awards for his science writing and outreach work. He has published five books, including The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch; Origins: How the Earth Made Us; and Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History.

"It seems that a lot of education is a little bit obsessed with training students to remember facts and figures. In the modern world, when every one of us has got the total of human knowledge in our pockets, it's much less important what you can hold in your head and what you can remember because you can just look it up whenever it becomes important, and it's now how you interpret or analyze or synthesize that information and developing skills and techniques in rapidly understanding and interpreting and analyzing information and making decisions based on information. The internet has changed a huge amount about what is important to our lives and simplified many things that would have been examined on otherwise.

It's in finding things out for yourself that is that deep spark of human creativity, which gives us the innovation and all the sort of creativity and designs that we can come up with. So, I think that is something that you would absolutely want to try to continue nurturing yourself."

http://www.lewisdartnell.com
http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb/2013/11/the-knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratch
www.penguin.co.uk/books/433955/origins-by-lewis-dartnell/9781784705435
www.penguin.co.uk/books/442759/being-human-by-dartnell-lewis/9781847926708

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