Terrence W. Deacon

Terrence W. Deacon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research combines developmental evolutionary biology and comparative neuroanatomy to investigate the evolution of human cognition, and is particularly focused on the explanation of emergent processes in biology and cognition.

Deacon received a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Harvard university in 1984. He taught at Harvard from 1984-1992, at Boston University from 1992-2002, and was a research associate at McLean Hospital and the Harvard Medical School from 1992-2000, before joining the University of California, Berkeley. His honors include being a Harvard Lehman Fellow, a Harvard Medical School Psychiatric NeuroscienceFellow, a Western Washington University Centenary Alumni Fellow, and the 69^th James Arthur Lecturer for the American Museum of Natural History.

He has published over 100 research papers in collected volumes and scholarly journals, and his acclaimed book, /The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain/  (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997) was awarded the I. J. Staley Prize for the most influential book in Anthropology in 2005 by the School of American Research. He is presently completing work on two additional books, /Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter/ (W. W. Norton & Co., Spring 2011) and /Homo Sapiens: Evolutionary Biology and the Human Sciences/ (Thompson/Wadsworth, 2012).