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Fall 2009
(click links for details)
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Hannah Schell, “Then and Now: The Varieties of Religious Responses
to Darwin,” September 3, 7PM
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Xavier Llora, Evolutionary Computing, September 17, 7pm
▪
Adam Gopnik, “Darwin And Lincoln, True and False,” October 7, 7PM
▪ Adam Gopnik, “Darwin in Time,” October 8, 11AM
▪
Michael Ruse “The Evolution-Creation Struggle,” November 2, 7PM
▪ Simon Cordery, Rob Hale, Dick Johnston “Beyond Darwin in 1859?
Mill’s ‘On Liberty,’ Smiles’s Self-Help, and Eliot’s “Masterpiece of
the Century,” November 5, 7PM
Spring 2010
(detailed
abstracts and locations forthcoming)
▪
Judi Kessler, Steve Buban, and Ken Cramer, “Social Darwinism,”
January 21, 7PM
▪
Jonathan Smith, “Darwin, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Victorian
Visual Culture,” February 11, 7PM
▪
MC Education Department, “Seminar on Teaching Darwin in the Public
Schools (National Science Literacy Month),” February 25, 7PM
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Tobias Gibson, “Evolution and The Law,” March 25, 7PM
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Heather Brady, “International Darwin,” April 15, 7PM
Fall
2009 Events
Professor Hannah Schell presents
"Then and Now:
The Varieties of Religious Responses to Darwin"
Thursday,
September 3, 2009, 7PM
The Morgan
Room of Poling Hall
When Darwin’s ideas began to appear in the 19th
century, the responses from religious persons were multiple and did
not constitute a wholesale rejection as we often imagine, looking
backward from the Scopes Trial. Professor Schell will consider the
larger theological and cultural context of the reception of Darwin’s
ideas by his religious contemporaries. She will also provide a brief
overview of some of the religious responses in the contemporary
discourse over Darwinism in order to highlight the continuities and
discontinuities between then and now.
Hannah Schell is
an associate professor of Religious Studies at Monmouth College. She
received her B.A. from Oberlin College in Philosophy and her M.A.
and Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University. She is interested in
virtue ethics and the problem of evil – how human beings make sense
of tragic events – and is finishing up a book on the history of
Christian thought in America.
Professor Xavier Llorà presents
"From
Galapagos to Twitter: Reaching Across Centuries Thanks to Darwin's
Artificial Evolutionary Modeling"
Thursday,
September 17, 2009, 7PM
The Highlander
Room
One hundred and fifty
years have passed since the publication of Darwin's world-changing
manuscript "The Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection".
Darwin's ideas have proven their power to reach beyond the biology
realm, and their ability to define a conceptual framework which
allows us to model and understand complex systems. In the mid 1950s
and 60s the efforts of a scattered group of engineers proved the
benefits of adopting an evolutionary paradigm to solve complex
real-world problems. In the 70s, the emerging presence of computers
brought us a new collection of artificial evolution paradigms, among
which genetic algorithms rapidly gained widespread adoption.
Currently, the Internet has propitiated an exponential growth of
information and computational resources that are clearly disrupting
our perception and forcing us to reevaluate the boundaries between
technology and social interaction. Darwin's ideas can, once again,
help us understand such disruptive change. In this talk, I will
review the origin of artificial evolution ideas and techniques. I
will also show how these techniques are, nowadays, helping to solve
a wide range of applications, from life science problems to twitter
puzzles, and how high performance computing can make Darwin ideas a
routinary tool to help us model and understand complex systems.
Professor Xavier Llorà is a member of
the
Illinois Genetic Algorithms Lab (IlliGAL). The lab is directed
by Professor
David E. Goldberg and hosted in the
Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering. He
is also a member of the
Data-Intensive Technologies and Applications at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Both are
located at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Adam
Gopnik Presents:
Darwin & Lincoln:
True and False
Wednesday, October 7, 7PM
The
Highlander Room
Gopnik’s latest work,
Angels & Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
looks at the birth of the modern era through the lives of two
extraordinary people born within hours of each other exactly 200
years ago this year. Searching for the men
behind the icons of emancipation and evolution, Gopnik reveals them
as both ordinary family men with ambitions, faults and loves and as
great thinkers who helped shape the modern world—a world
increasingly governed by reason, argument and observation, by the
verdicts of time and history.
Raised in Montreal where he studied art history at
McGill University, Adam Gopnik began his long professional
association with The New Yorker in 1986 with a piece that
would show his future range, a consideration of connections between
baseball, childhood, and Renaissance art. His work for the magazine
has won both the National Magazine Award for Essay and the George
Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. He is the author of two previous
bestsellers,
Paris to the Moon and
Through the Children’s Gate.
Michael Ruse
Professor of the
History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University
presents
"The
Evolution-Creation Struggle"
Monday, November
2nd, at 7:00 PM
Dahl Chapel/Auditorium
More than a mere argument over science,
the war of evolution vs. Creationism is really a battle between two
competing worldviews. In this talk, Michael Ruse traces this battle
back to the Enlightenment -- to the loss of faith in the Western
world -- and reveals how these two diametrically opposed (yet, in
many ways, similar) ideologies have fought for the privilege of
defining human origins, moral values, and the nature of reality.
Though siding with the evolutionists, Ruse is unafraid to liken some
of the more extreme proponents, such as Dawkins, to intemperate
religious figures of the worst kind. With an ability to clearly
explain scientific and philosophical concepts, Ruse engages the
audiences in a necessary conversation, situated at the crossroads of
science and religion. If Intelligent Design is a scientific
dead-end, why do so many people believe in it? Why does the battle
of evolution vs. Creationism loom largest in America? Ruse offers
nothing less than a new and productive way of understanding this
often heated discussion.
Now approaching his
fifth decade of teaching, Michael Ruse is a popular professor at
Florida State University, where he helped build their History and
Philosophy of Science programs. He started the journal Biology
and Philosophy, has edited Evolution: The First Four Billion
Years, and has been profiled in many publications. His books
include The Evolution-Creation Struggle (a New York
Magazine Academic Book of the Year), and Can a Darwinian Be a
Christian?
Past Events
Spring 2009
Featured February Events
 Dr.
Ken Cramer presents
Evolution:
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know?
A 3-Part Lecture Series
All All lectures begin at 7 p.m. in
the Whiteman-McM illan Highlander Room, Stockdale Center
Thursday,
Feburary 12: Part I – The Evolution Revolution: a Brief History of
Evolutionary Thought through Darwin:
A brief survey of pre-Darwinian
ideas that alternatively resisted and set the stage for the concept
of evolution, illustrating its truly revolutionary nature. The
influence of Darwin’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors of
the 18th and 19th centuries such as Lamarck,
Paley, and Wallace are discussed. Concludes with a summary of
important events in Darwin’s life, the evolution of his thinking,
both biological and theological, and the eventual publication of
The Origin of Species, including his famous “delay.”
Special Musical Event
Overman (Chicago Indie Band)
Featuring their song "Evolution Rocks"
8:30 p.m., Main Dining Room, Stockdale Center
Thursday,
Feburary 19: Part II – Evolution: the Evidence and Significance:
A careful explanation of
the process of evolution, the evidence Darwin proffered, and the
current state of evidence for evolutionary change. The primary
mechanism of evolution, natural selection, is also detailed.
In response to the question, “Why should I care?” the talk concludes
with a discussion of the importance of evolution to a variety of
fields from medicine to agriculture to psychology, with some
specific examples.
Thursday,
Feburary 26: Part III – What’s So Scary about Evolution? An
Evaluation of the Controversy:
Begins by considering the differing
methods of science and religion, setting the stage for a balanced
and respectful approach to evaluating creationism and intelligent
design as scientific hypotheses. Explains why these ideas are
not accepted as valid explanations in the scientific community, and
are therefore not legally taught in a science classroom.
Explores some explanations of the phenomenon of intense opposition
to evolution in the U.S. Concludes with options for
reconciling scientific and religious views on human origins.
Ken Cramer has been a Professor of Biology at MC since 1993.
He received his Ph.D. from Utah State University in Wildlife Ecology
and teaches courses in ecology, environmental science and
introductory biology. As coordinator of Integrated Studies he
also teaches several general education classes on science and
religion, environmentalism, and evolution. Dr. Cramer is a fan
of all things biological but is especially interested in animal
ecology and behavior. He conducts research on the brown
recluse spider and maintains a web site dedicated to educating the
public about them. Cramer spent a year in Chile where he
learned to speak Spanish and he has traveled in various parts of
Latin America.
 Dr.
Joseph Carrol presents
The Donald B. McMullen Memorial
Lecture:
“The Historical Position of Literary
Darwinism”
THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 7PM, Highlander Room,
Stockdale Center.
Literary Darwinism is a
theoretical school that aims to integrate literary study with
evolutionary social science—with behavioral ecology, evolutionary
psychology, and related fields. Literary Darwinists believe that
literature is produced and consumed to satisfy the evolved and
adapted needs of human nature. We argue that literature takes human
nature as its primary subject and derives much of its affective
power from tapping into basic emotions rooted in conserved features
of our species-typical neurophysiology. In this talk, I situate
literary Darwinism within a series of scientific developments
extending over the past two centuries. Lyell’s Principles of
Geology established the necessary context for Darwin’s theory of
natural selection; Darwinian biology established the necessary
context for evolutionary social science; and evolutionary social
science provides the necessary context for literary Darwinism. Over
the past decade or so, three main adjustments have been taking place
in the paradigm for evolutionary social science: (1) recognizing
that “group selection” in humans has produced adaptations
specifically for social life; (2) integrating the idea of
domain-specific cognitive modules with the idea of a flexible
general intelligence; and (3) recognizing the significance of
gene-culture co-evolution in human nature. These adjustments have
provide a much improved framework for explaining how literature and
the other arts fit into human cognitive evolution. A theory of
adaptive function gives literary scholars a new level of explanatory
power and opens up new avenues for research.
Dr. Carroll is the Curators’ Professor
of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Recipient of
both the Chancellor’s and President’s Award for Research and
Creativity, he teaches Nineteenth-Century British Literature,
Literary Theory, Short Stories, and interdisciplinary honors
seminars. He is one of the leading authorities on Darwinian literary
theory. Professor Carroll is the author of The
Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold; Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction:
A New Romanticism; Evolution and Literary Theory; and most
recently
Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature.
He is currently working on a new book, Graphing Jane Austen:
Human Nature in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century.
 Dr. David Depew’s presents,
“Why
Darwinism Is Too Easy to Understand and Other Oddball Questions
About Evolution,”
Wednesday, April 1, 7PM, Highlander Room.
The main message of my presentation is that to
get public and technical-scientific understanding of evolution on
the same page you need more than good science communication and
certainly more than the agonistic public debates between
creationists and evolutionists that we have witnessed in the last
quarter of a century. You need to air the history of these
issues. My guess is that if you get the history right,
seeing it as a long series of controversies between science and
politics, you will achieve that equilibrium. My implication is
that you will not achieve it if you think the problem is just
communicating value-free discoveries to the public better. To
this end, I will make some remarks on six questions, moving from the
early history of Darwinian controversies to the present. These
topics might be among a wider array of questions that could be used
to organize a class in evolution-as-controversy. This would
not be a biology class. I wonder what kind of class it might
be?
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Why Darwinism of the future will be very different from Darwinisms
of the past.
David J. Depew is Professor of
Communication Studies and Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of
Iowa. He works in the history, philosophy, and rhetoric of
evolutionary biology. He is the co-author, with Marjorie
Grene, of
Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004) and, with Bruce H. Weber, of
Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of
Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT
Press, 1995). With Weber, he has co-edited a number of
collections, most recently
Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered
(Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 2003). His
recent work has been on the rhetorical aspects of Darwin’s Origin
of Species
and its reception in Britain and America. With John P.
Jackson, University of Colorado, he is working on a book about how
Darwinians have intervened on the Progressive side in American
social and political controversies.
Dr.
Kevin Baldwin presents
“1859:
Darwin's Origin, Drake's Oil, and Mill's ‘On Liberty’
Reconsidered”
Thursday,
April 16, at 7, in the Highlander Room.
The publishing
of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and Mill's "On Liberty"
along with Drake's discovery of oil in 1859 have defined the way we
relate to ourselves and to the rest of life on earth for the last
150 years. A reconsideration of the full meaning of these events may
determine how we celebrate their bicentennial.
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