About Darwinpalooza

Darwinpalooza
Schedule

Darwin Resources

MC 19th-Century Studies Program

MC Biology Department

Contact Us

Spring 2010
 (detailed abstracts and locations forthcoming)

 ▪ Judi Kessler, Steve Buban, and Ken Cramer, “Social Darwinism,” January 21, 7PM, Highlander Room

 ▪ Jonathan Smith, “Darwin, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Victorian Visual Culture,” February 11, 7PM, Highlander Room

 ▪ 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

 ▪ MC Education Department, “Seminar on Teaching Darwin in the Public Schools (National Science Literacy Month),” February 23, 7PM, Morgan Room

 ▪ Tobias Gibson, “Evolution and The Law,” March 25, 7PM, Highlander Room

	Professors Judi Kessler, Steve Buban, & Ken Cramer present “DARWIN’S UGLY COUSIN:  SOCIAL DARWINISM” Thursday, January 21, at 7:00 PM, Highlander Room From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, a number of social scientists and gentlemen-scholars adapted Darwin’s theory of evolution on to the human social world. These evolutionist social thinkers believed that the strongest and “fittest” humans should and would prevail over the less “fit,” and they frequently pushed ideology, policy, and legislation to make this happen. They were known as the social Darwinists. Kessler will speak about the origins of social Darwinism, and the implications of this controversial school of thought for social policy, including the eugenics movement, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Buban will comment on the links between 19th century social Darwinism and the development and application on the discipline of sociology.Cramer will briefly talk about whether there’s evidence for a new social Darwinism and eugenics movement emerging from 21st century genetic research. Judi Kessler is an Associate Professor of Sociology at MC.  She received her Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Barbara, and currently teaches courses in race & ethnicity, comparative development, work, and introductory sociology. Steve Buban has been a Professor of Sociology at MC since 1977.  He received his PhD from the University of Iowa and currently teaches courses in social problems, social movements, social interaction as well as general education courses. 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.

Professor of English Jonathan Smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn presents

“DARWIN, EVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS AND
VICTORIAN VISUAL CULTURE”

Thursday, February 11, at 7:00 PM, Highlander Room

In The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin used his theory of sexual selection to argue that the human aesthetic sense is an evolutionary inheritance from animals. Followers of Darwin, combining sexual selection with his botanical work on the role of color and ornament in flowers,  popularized a full-blown “evolutionary aesthetics” in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Aesthetics, they argued, was all about sex and reproduction. Beauty did not exist for beauty’s sake, nor was it a gift from a loving Creator. Those who regarded this evolutionary view of aesthetics as dangerous also tended to see the illustrations in Darwin’s books as aesthetically offensive. For Darwin tended to avoid, even when it would have been appropriate or expected, the use of fine art in his books. Instead, he embraced visual forms that were newer, less prestigious, or associated with lower levels of taste and sophistication. When his illustrations did invoke fine art categories, they did so in ways that seemed to cast these categories in an ironic or democratizing light. For defenders of more traditional theories of beauty and more traditional taste in art, in other words, the illustrations in Darwin’s books were nearly as problematic as his aesthetic theories themselves.
 

Jonathan Smith is Professor of English at University of Michigan-Dearborn where he teaches courses in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. He has published two books on science and literature, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1994) and Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (2006).

Simon Cordery, Rob Hale, &
Dick Johnston present
 

"Beyond Darwin in 1859? Mill’s ‘On Liberty,’ Smiles’ Self-Help and Eliot’s ‘Masterpiece of the Century’”
 

Thursday, February 18th, at 7 PM, Highlander Room

Sick of Darwin and On the Origin of Species? A number of other influential works were published in 1859, and this panel will discuss three of them.  Associate Professor of History Simon Cordery will examine Samuel Smiles’s Self Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct, a popular work that extolled the benefits of thrift, hard work, education, perseverance, and a sound moral character.  Professor of English Rob Hale will discuss George Eliot’s critically-acclaimed debut novel Adam Bede, a radical, realistic novel about sex, crime, and evangelical Christianity in rural England.  Dick Johnston, Associate Professor in the Political Economy and Commerce Department, will explain the significance of British philosopher John Stuart Mill’s radical but influential work On Liberty, which advocated moral and economic freedom for individuals.

Faculty in the Department of Educational Studies present

Teach Evolution in the Public Schools

Tuesday, February 23, 7 PM, Morgan Room

In observation of National Science Literacy Month, faculty and students from the MC Department of Educational Studies, along with area teachers and administrators, will discuss what steps might be taken to make the teaching of evolution in the public schools less of a contentious issue. The forum will examine how evolution has been taught in the past, why it continues to periodically generate controversy, and how the teaching of evolution might be reconceptualized for future generations. Topics will include the effects of the Scopes Trial, the influence of Fundamentalist belief and issues relating to the advocacy for Intelligent Design.

Tobias Gibson, Professor of Political Science, Westminster College presents

The Supreme Court Seen Through the Eyes of Evolution

Thursday, March 25, 7 PM, The Highlander Room

As an institution, much of what the Supreme Court does is shrouded in mystery.  It is the only branch of the national government that does not seem to seek out the limelight of the media, and much of its business is open to no one outside the justices who sit on the Bench.  Using the few evolution cases that have been heard by the Supreme Court, this talk will serve as a window to the inner workings of the Supreme Court.   

Tobias T. Gibson is an assistant professor of Political Science at Westminster College.  Prior to his appointment at Westminster, he was assistant professor of Political Science at Monmouth College from 2006-2009.  He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006.  He teaches courses on American politics, including the Supreme Court, Constitutional Law, and Judicial Process.  He is the author of several articles, books chapters, and encyclopedia entries on the institution of the Supreme Court, public law and democratic theory. 

Past Events

Fall 2009

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?

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 18^th and 19^th 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.

1. 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.