This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

This episode is the second in our series of live talks.

It was recorded in San Francisco as part of the Leaky Foundation's Being

Human event series. Our speaker was Alison Gopnik. Dr. Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the

University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on how babies and young children learn

about the world. She's the author of over 100 journal articles and several books, including

the scientist in the crib and the philosophical baby. Her new book, The Gardner and the Carpenter,

about what the science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and

children, is coming out in August of 2016. Here's Alison Gopnik, live on stage at

Public Works in San Francisco. What I'm going to do is talk a little bit about work that I and

other developmental psychologists have been doing over many years, looking at how babies think,

what's going on in children's minds. And even more importantly,

how can understanding what babies and children are like tell us something about what we're like

as human beings? And in particular, how we evolve to be the kind of creatures that we are.

I started out my career as a philosopher, and my book is called The called the philosophical baby, the book that's already out.

And for many, many years, philosophers kind of ignored babies and children.

The 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy had three references to children, babies, mothers, fathers. You could read that

2,000 pages of deep Western philosophical thought and think that human beings

reproduced by asexual cloning. There was no sign of babies or children in there at all.

But there are actually a lot of deep, interesting questions

that we could ask about children. And here's one of the very, this is actually something that I'm

...