I’ve blogged about the Australian Broadcast Corporation Radio National program All In the Mind before. That time I was talking about a show they did on and during brain surgery, specifically to remove an AVM (arterial venous malformation) similar to the one Democratic Senator Tim Johnson had removed.

Not only is the show fascinating but the show’s host, Natasha Mitchell is brilliant and hot. (It is an Australian show and that accent just does things to me. )

The episode I’m pushing today explores a different facet of the mind.

Transhumanists are hell-bent on extending their lives beyond the current limits of the flesh, by exploiting cutting-edge genomics, stem-cell research, robotics and nanotechnology. Engineering evolution is their goal. But can they re-engineer our Darwinian mind? Leda Cosmides, renowned pioneer of the controversial field evolutionary psychology, asks, ‘Are We Already Transhuman?’

It is a podcast but for you people who read really fast there’s a transcript, too.

Leda Cosmides doesn’t have an Australian accent, but she’s well worth listening to. She is co-director and founder of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What is Evolutionary Psychology? From the CEP website:

Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems–programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature.

Like most things “evolutionary” this discipline takes a lot of guff from the anti-Darwin crowd but it just makes sense.

(I just tried the transcript and my eyes glazed over. As an audible speech, this is very accessible but as a transcript, it looks much drier and inaccessible than it sounds. Part of it is there are appropriate pauses and emphasis as she is speaking that are not in the transcript. Reccomend the audio.)

I turned on the radio and came in on an interview with, I think Paul Kantner. He was talking about Jefferson Airplane (of course) and in particular about “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” and he talked about how Grace Slick could sing aggressively–that she could really get in your face but still not feel strident. He said that there was a little gentleness about her. I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s hard to associate the word ‘gentle’ with Grace Slick. But it got me to thinking and yeah, that quality seems pretty rare to me. Janis Joplin was aggressive and for me, she could be strident.

I was thinking about the kind of breathy style that a lot of women use when they sing, and I was trying to think if there were many singers that combined that powerful but still immediate and aggressive style today. I couldn’t think of any. So I came here to ask you guys.

Click on Grace to hear the song.

“I warned him about sending more troops to Iraq, but would he listen? Noooooooooooo.”