The Evolution of "Why" as the Key to Free Will

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Presidential Lecturer

We human beings are the only living things that can represent, transmit, and criticize reasons for doing things and making things. This creates a perspective for us that we can then use to interpret all the rest of the life on the planet, cautiously. Mother Nature’s reasons are not just like our reasons. It is our evolved capacity to ask, and answer, “Why” questions that gives us, in the end, the kinds of free will worth wanting, the kinds that no other animal has.