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Public lectures: Nature versus Culture

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The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Young Academy organises Interscience: a series of public lectures in which scientists examine one topic from the point of view of their respective fields. UM will host a lecture on Wednesday, 17 October, to discuss the importance of the nature vs nurture debate in various disciplines in contemporary science. How do gender differences and biology affect economic decisions? Are brain scans admissible in court and do the humanities have anything interesting to say about the climate?

Programme

The speakers are:

Raf de Bont, university lecturer in the history of science at Maastricht University
Introduction

Marieke van den Brink, professor of gender and diversity at Radboud University Nijmegen
'Men are from Mars, Women from Venus?'
A nuanced picture of current scientific insights into congenital and acquired gender differences

Hanneke Hulst, assistant professor of neuroscience at the Amsterdam UMC
‘Brain scans – sense and nonsense’
How do we as a society use MRI to 'look' at diseases and behaviour?

Paul Smeets, associate professor of finance at Maastricht University
Do hormones determine the choices we make?
In his research, he found significant differences in risk behaviour and social behaviour between men and women.

Kristine Steenbergh associate professor of English literature at VU University Amsterdam,
How can the humanities approach the relationship between nature and nurture?
Humanities in the context of the Anthropocene (era of man) as defined by the anthropologist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen

 

(credits illustration: Maarten Baas)

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