The Proceedings of the 44th Carnival of Evolution are up on Atavism. The Proceedings include
Session 1. Symposium on the evolution of novelty
Session 2. Evolutionary ecology and life history evolution
Session 3. Philosophy and evolution
Session 4a. Experimental Evolution
Session 4b. Timing and tempo of evolution
Session 5. Outreach and anti-creationism
and a Poster session.
Another in an annual series of discussions of science and religion at Ohio State is scheduled for October 5. The announcement:
*The Evolution of Religion*
Wednesday, October 5, 7-9pm
[Enable javascript to see this email address.] Studios, 333 West Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215Where do our religious beliefs come from? Have religious beliefs served an evolutionary purpose? Join us in the [Enable javascript to see this email address.] Studios for a spirited panel discussion on the intersection of science and religion, followed by a question-and-answer session. Scheduled speakers include:
- Moderator Neal Conan, host of NPR’s *Talk of the Nation *
- Nicolas Wade, New York Times science writer and author of *Before the Dawn* and *The Faith Instinct*
- Lionel Tiger, Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at Rutgers University, and author of *God’s Brain*The event is free but reservations are required. To register, visit this site or call 614.228.2674 for details. Supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
The series is sponsored by public TV station WOSU, by the Center for Science and Industry in Columbus, and by the Department of Entomology at the Ohio State University. I wrote about one such on the Thumb four years ago. They have had a distinctly “accommodationist” flavor, and given the Templeton Foundation’s funding of the series (via Susan Fisher of the Department of Entomology at Ohio State), I suspect this one will carry on that theme. I know little of Tiger’s or Wade’s views on that, so I may be wrong. The entire series of webcasts is archived at this site.
Tom Baillieul, a member of Ohio Citizens for Science, has a background essay on the evolution of religion available here (PDF).
(I can’t resist noting that the Department of Entomology is also home to one of the creationist “scientists,” Glen Needham, who played a significant role in the Bryan Leonard affair at Ohio State.)
Fellow Oregonians – this looks like a great series! I’ve seen Bustamante talk before, he does amazing research. So it should be great, if you can stand hanging out with the Ducks, that is…
(And, by the way, evolutionary theory is literally the warp and woof of genomics. If you took genomics and somehow deleted all of the methods and analyses derived from evolutionary theory, the whole field and industry would crumple into a quivering pile of meaningless digital goo. There are areas where ID people are wrong and can at least state arguments of some sort – but then there are vast areas like population genomics where ID people don’t even know enough to realize that there is a vast, hugely successful enterprise that is entirely built upon principles they would disagree with.)
OK, end of rant.
Subject: Upcoming Seminar Series at University of Oregon Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:10:30 -0700 From: Roo Vandegrift
Hello,
I’m a graduate student at the Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (CEEB) at the University of Oregon. Our graduate student group within CEEB has put together a public seminar series for the spring that you and some of your readers might find interesting. It’s titled The Individual in the Genomics Era. Here’s some information on the dates and topics:
*What genomics means for our past, present, and future * April 5 Dr William Cresko University of Oregon
*The Personal Genome Revolution * May 3 Dr Lee Silver Princeton University Supported by the Oregon Humanities Center Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities
*Reconstructing the great human diasporas from genome variation data* May 23 Dr Carlos Bustamante Stanford University
Further information can be found on the website, including the exact location on the University of Oregon campus the talks will be held, the press release, etc. http://www.uoregon.edu/~grebes/seminar Additionally, I’ve attached a copy of the flier for the series.
I hope some of you in the Pacific Northwest might consider attending! And if not, if you know of anyone who might benefit from this series, please let them know.
Peace, Roo
Roo Vandegrift CEEB - University of Oregon
Einstein rings, a spectacular prediction of relativity, taken from Hubble (Image credit Hubble/NASA)
You may remember a little while back I wrote about a conference of modern Geocentrism (Galileo was Wrong). Geocentrism is the belief that Earth is the centre of the Solar system, nay the entire Universe and everything revolves around it.
Todd Wood attended the conference, and you can read the about his growing sense of incredulity in his posts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5).
It turns out that these folks are relativity deniers.
My colleague Gary Hurd has spent much of the last 3 days virtually attending a virtual workshop on the origin of life. The workshop will conclude at 5 p.m. eastern standard time today. Here is Mr. Hurd’s report, which he filed at about noon eastern time:
Ingrid Laas and I, members of Wisconsin Citizens for Science and Madison Science Pub, will be blogging from the Darwin / Chicago 2009 event from October 29 - 31 in Chicago. You can find the posts at Madison Science Pub. Follow us and intrepid advisor Flightless Frank as we cover the talks, sample the food, and go behind the scenes of the vast, worldwide Darwinian conspiracy and report on its seedy underbelly… and Frank’s.
Now that my grades have been submitted on time, I can admit to you that I spent all day Saturday, May 9, attending the annual Skepticamp in Denver. Skepticamp is the brainchild of Reed Esau, and the 2009 Skepticamp is the third so far. Since their inception, there have been a half-dozen other Skepticamps in the US and at least one abroad. The 2009 Skepticamp lasted from 9 in the morning till 7 at night and was the shortest 10-hour conference I have ever attended.
Steve Steve is having the time of his life at the Nature Network conference. Right now, he’s slumped over on the podium, recovering from yesterday’s festivities. A picture is found below.
The question for you is this: Who is Steve Steve explaining evolution to?
We learn at the Discovery Institute Blog about a recent lecture tour in Spain by ID creationists
Over an eight day period last January, Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (aka DoctorsDoubtingDarwin.com, a rapidly growing, 277-member, physician group from 17 countries) sponsored a lecture tour in Barcelona, Malaga, Madrid, Leon and Vigo. It was titled “Lo Que Darwin No Sabia,” or “What Darwin Didn’t Know.” Tom Woodward, Ph.D. (author of Doubts About Darwin and Darwin Strikes Back) and myself (author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links) lectured on eight occasions to exceptionally large audiences. Santiago Escuain was our translator extraordinaire. Rich Akin, the CEO of PSSI, put in enormous hours into making this trip a huge success.
El Pais reports on the ‘successful’ Spain Tour of ‘Lo que Darwin no sabía’. Of course, the DI does admit later on that the success was limited.
Laurence Moran at Sandwalk comments on a video excerpt with Bill Dembski, recently touted by the Discovery Institute’s Robert Crowther. What is fascinating that despite more than a decade of Intelligent Design ‘research’ this is the best ID has to offer.
Ironically, Dembski starts of by stating that “what darwinists have done is hidden behind complexities of living systems”. How ironic can this be… While science, as I have shown in several examples, deals in explanations, pathways and hypotheses, Intelligent Design has contributed exactly zero to our scientific understanding of these systems. Worse, while Dembski mentions some complex systems, he also avoids some examples of complex systems science understands quite well how they may have evolved.
My thanks to Robert Crowther for presenting the “best’ response ID has to offer. You be the judge.
The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, William Dembski’s current employer, has something rather curious on its website. If you look at their page of upcoming conferences, here is what they have listed in the left-hand sidebar:
- The Practice of Biblical Counseling
- Certification in Biblical Counseling
- The Family: Reclaiming a Biblical View
- Intelligent Design in Business Practice
Can you spot the one that appears out of place? Me neither.
But anyway, yes, they really are having a conference called, Intelligent Design in Business Practice. The flier for the conference comes complete with an obligatory ape-typing-at-keyboard graphic. Unfortunately, it does not say which of the speakers this is intended to represent.
If you’re wondering what the heck ID could have to do with business practice, when it doesn’t even have anything to do with science, then you’re thinking what I’m thinking. All the pretense about ID being some dispassionate scientific theory – not exactly believable to begin with – is rather hard to maintain with them holding conferences that try to apply ID to things that have little or nothing to do with science. (Not to mention that even their supposedly “scientific” conferences tend to resemble tent revivals.) As the Wedge Document has promised us, ID is supposed to have “cultural implications” for “sex, gender issues, medicine, law, and religion”. Business isn’t listed there, but once you’ve declared that your theory makes sweeping dictates over all facets of human society, it’s hardly a stretch to add business practices to the list.
Nevertheless, one has to wonder, given the history of the ID movement, exactly what useful advice the ID movement could possibly have to offer business. As luck would have it, I’ve gotten my hands on a preliminary schedule – the only copy in existence as a matter of fact – which I will post below the fold.
by Bora Zivkovic
As the 2007 Science Blogging Conference was such a great success, we are already in full swing in organizing the 2008 conference and hoping to make it even bigger and better than the first one.
Our beta-version wiki is up—check out the homepage and the first, rough outlines of the program (feel free to edit the page and add your idea at the bottom or in the comments). At this point we are trying to get more sponsors so if you and your organization/company/magazine is interested, let us know soon.
Check out out blog for updates.
Last time, almost in time for the conference, we edited and published the first-ever science blogging anthology, the Open Laboratory 2006, which was an instant hit. Thus, we are already collecting nominations for the next years’ edition. Send us your best posts (or best posts written by others) of the year by using this submission form and help us spread the news by adding this code to your blog or website.
Just a reminder that there will be a symposium this weekend discussing evolution and intelligent design at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa (and featuring PT-er Wes Elsberry). The event is geared toward those interested in matters of faith or science; teachers; principals; college students majoring in education, science and religion/philosophy; clergy; and parish educators. Scholarships are available for the first 200 K-12 educators, board of education members, school administrators, etc. who apply–still plenty of those left, so if you know anyone who’d be interested, point them in our direction. I’m including the text of one press release below the jump; all the information (including registration and hotel) can be found at the symposium website.
The Cincinnati Post has a story about the possibility that AiG’s creation science museum will encourage religious groups to hold conventions in the Cincinnati area. No word yet on whether it will discourage the realty base community from coming to Cincinnati as well.
But I guess that, with Kent Hovind in jail, AiG is going to have to pick up the slack in the mis-education of America.
Prof. Steve Steve and his trusty sidekick Nick Matzke plan to be at the NCSE booth at the AAAS Annual Meeting at the Hilton in downtown San Francisco from 10-5, Saturday, February 17. I know many PT people and ScienceBloggers are at the meeting, so stop by and see us! (transport info)
Prof. Steve Steve, and perhaps Nick, will also be in attendance on Sunday and Monday. It looks like Saturday and Sunday have free Exhibit Hall admission on account of 2007 Family Science Days.
As with every AAAS meeting, the true goal is to get invited to the Science Journalists’ Party, which I hope is Saturday night. They always throw quite a bash, although it will be hard to trump the molten chocolate fountain from the DC meeting a few years back.
It’s a new year, and it will be a busy one here in Iowa when it comes to evolutionary biology. I want to highlight two upcoming events: Iowa City’s first annual Darwin Day celebration featuring a lecture by Massimo Pigliucci, and an upcoming symposium on evolution and intelligent design, featuring John Haught and Wesley Elsberry. These events will be held in February and March, respectively; more information on both of them can be found over at Aetiology. Hope to see some readers there!
My day was spent in the Twin Cities attending the inaugural public meeting of the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education (MnCSE), and I can safely say now that Science Education Saturday was a phenomenal success: a good turnout, two top-notch talks, a stimulating panel discussion, and an involved audience that asked lots of good questions. You should have been there! I expect that, with the good response we got today, that there will be future opportunities to attend MnCSE events.
I'll just give a brief summary of the main points from the two talks today. I understand that outlines or perhaps even the powerpoint files will be available on the MnCSE page at some future date, but give the organizers a little time to recover from all the effort they put into this meeting.
Continue reading "A summary of the MnCSE Science Education Saturday" (on Pharyngula)
Many readers of this blog will be familiar with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. CSHL is the Long Island educational and research institution that hosts some of the most important professional meetings in several biological disciplines. It has for decades been the “home campus” of phage, bacterial and yeast genetics, as well as of computational neuroscience, developmental biology and various branches of genomics, bioinformatics and systems biology.
As a frequent attendee of meetings and symposia at CSHL, I am on their regular mailing list. I recently got an announcement of a meeting to be inaugurated this December that should be of great interest to followers of Intelligent Design. The meeting, “Engineering Principles in Biological Systems” ought to be exactly the kind of forum at which “Intelligent Design” researchers present their conclusions.
Greetings and salutations! I just returned from the AAAS meeting in St. Louis, and what a trip it was! I finally got to meet Wesley Elsberry and Nick Matzke of NCSE fame, and it was great to see Eugenie again. The occasion for these festivities? The newly formed Alliance for Science ran a three hour symposium entitled Antievolutionism in America: What’s Ahead? We had one hell of a speaker line-up. Dr. Scott kicked it off with her usual eloquence, and was followed by a slew of people to talk about everything from threats to fields outside biology, particularly geology and neuroscience, to the successes of Dover C.A.R.E.S. This symposium was unique because we recognize the plight of those on the front line and gave plenty of podium time to them. For example, Gerald Wheeler from the National Science Teachers Association, a certain pastor from this little town called Dover, and Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project all got a chance to air their concerns and suggestions.
Not surprisingly the room was packed for most of the event, with standing room only in the back. The press even ate it up by publishing a story that included the Alliance for Science and a legislative initiative with which we are involved. The article did get one little piece of information wrong though: it suggests that the AAAS itself was involved in the creation of the Alliance for Science. This is not the case.
UPDATE: I just found out this event has been cancelled at the last minute. So don’t come. I will, however, still be around all week and attending other Darwin Day events until the 11th.
I just wanted to let PT readers across the pond in England know that I am zipping over there for a Darwin Day talk this coming Sunday, February 5th, in Shrewsbury. The details are here, and used to be here but have been dropped for some reason. Actually, I am speaking a week before Darwin Day, and they appear to have a whole series of events planned.
Naturally, I will be talking about the Kitzmiller case and in particular how we discovered the “smoking gun” tying ID to creation science. Following my talk will be a, um, unique musical event (see description).
