University of New England

Harvard scholar David Haig to speak on "The Divided Self: Brain, Brawn and Superego" April 28th

Harvard biologist David Haig is scheduled to deliver the fifth annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture on "The Divided Self: Brain, Brawn and the Superego" April 28, 2006 at 7 p.m. in the CHP Lecture Hall on the University of New England's Westbrook College Campus, 716 Stevens, Ave., Portland.

The lecture, sponsored by the University of New England's New England Institute, is free and open to the public.

Lecture Background
Biologists have traditionally viewed animals as machines and their brains as fitness-maximizing computers, and have emphasized the competitive struggle between organisms. By contrast, psychologists and novelists have often portrayed minds as subject to internal division and have often highlighted the conflicts that occur within individuals. Now biologists have begun to recognize conflicts between genes within a single individual, an organism at odds with itself.  David Haigh will illustrate this with the example of conflicts between maternally and paternally imprinted genes: genes that are expressed only when inherited from one's mother and those expressed only when inherited from one's father.

Until 20 years ago we had no idea which of our genes came from our father and which came from our mother. We took it for granted that our genes expressed themselves identically and that there was a 50/50 chance that they came from either parent. We also assumed that they worked in cooperation with each other.

The biggest breakthrough in genetics in the past two decades has been the discovery of genomic imprinting, which allows us to trace genes to the parent of origin.

David Haig has been at the forefront of theorizing these developments. He argues that these "paternally and maternally active genes" comprise less than 1 percent of our total gene count and are far from being cooperative. In fact, they have been shown to be in competition with one another. If Haig's theory holds true, imprinted genes exemplify an extraordinary within-individual conflict, while shaking up our fundamental ideas of what it means to be an individual.

David Haig
David Haig, Ph.D. is professor of biology in Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.   He is an evolutionary geneticist with a particular interest in genomic imprinting and relations between parents and offspring. 

He was born in Canberra, Australia, and did graduate research the evolution of plant cycles at Macquarie University in Sydney. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Haig went to Oxford where he further developed his ideas on genomic imprinting and developed an interest in the conflicts between mother and fetus during human pregnancy. He then moved to Harvard, where he was nominated for the Harvard Society of Fellows, and where he continues his interest in conflicts within the genome. He is the author of Genomic Imprinting and Kinship ( Rutgers, 2002) as well as numerous scientific papers.

To see a video of David Haig speaking on his work visit http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haig/haig_index.html

(Press release issued Dec. 13, 2005)