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The Fifth Annual
Stanford Darwin Day Symposium

and Celebration

Break

***BIrthday Cake - Help Chuckie D blow out the candles***

    Parting words - organizing committee

We hope you can join us.

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• 3:40 Greg Priest - “Charles Darwin's Tree of Life as Image, Metaphor and Model”
• 4:00 Becca Tisdale, Josh Wong (and Anne Stake in absentia) - “The Darwin Safari:  Revisited”
• 4:20 Biorappers Tom McFadden, Derrick Davis, and Sam Coggeshall - "3.5 til infinity", "Regulatin' Genes" 
• 4:40  Devaki Bhaya - "Viruses and bacterial immunity via CRISPRs"
• 5:00 John van Wyhe - “Charles Darwin - the true story”
• 5:30 David Fizgerald - “The irReverend Eustace Paluxy Tells It All"

    Parting words - organizing committee

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NB: Details regarding timing are preliminary and subject to change.   

• Jason Lewis, Michael Needle & Janet Monge: "A Darwinian approach to the origins of human bipedality."  - When discussing the origins of human bipedality, Darwin stated “man could not have attained his present dominant position in the world without the use of his hands” and that with bipedal posture, early hominids “would thus have been better able to have defended themselves with stones or clubs, or to have attacked their prey, or to have otherwise obtained food.”   The Darwianian approach to this issue would be to test theories on the origins of human bipedality as part of larger evolutionary trends, namely the when, where, how and why of an adaptive radiation of the Gorilla/Chimp/Human clade, based on either predation or subsistence pressures.  This talk will introduce some initial thoughts on analyzing the totality of ecological, comparative morphological, and fossil data to further test the predation vs. subsistence hypotheses of hominid origins.

• Andrew Schein: “How 1 became 14: Adaptive radiation of Darwin's finches.”  Darwin theorized that one species could become two, even without the aid of geographic separation, as long as different individuals in the population acquired different niche preferences. Evolutionary experts now reject this model of divergence, called sympatric speciation, for most species. We will look into whether the very finches on Galapagos that originally helped inspire Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection might also vindicate his theory of sympatric speciation.

• Jenny Rempel:  “Flightlessness in Insects: What Darwin Didn't Know.”  Although fascinated by beetles and inspired by the Galapagos Archipelago, Darwin's hypotheses on the evolution of island insect flightlessness have been largely discredited by the scientific community. An examination of the theories surrounding insect flightlessness using the Galapagos Islands as a case study yields interesting insights into what has been called 'backwards' evolution. Come share in the discussion of insects, evolution, Darwin, and Galapagos.

• Samuel Cohen-Tanugi:  “Eradicating introduced feral mammals in the Galapagos.” - I discuss the application of key evolutionnary concepts to conservation, hoping to promote understanding of large scale efforts such as the eradication of goats in Galapagos. This topic allows for a rich discussion of fundamental concepts of evolution and their ethical applications, as well as a detailed and technical presentation of the efforts in Galapagos.

• Greg Priest:  “Charles Darwin's Tree of Life as Image, Metaphor and Model.”   A diagram of the "tree of life" played a central role in the development of Darwin's thought: it was the first drawing in his personal notebooks on the transmutation of species and became the only illustration in the Origin.  The paper explores how Darwin developed the tree and how he deployed it as an illustration or image, as a metaphor to serve his polemical objectives and as a scientific model of the evolutionary process. Darwin's three uses of the tree of life were not disconnected, but rather represented for him a single coherent whole, an understanding of which helps reveal Darwin's conceptions of the nature of the scientific enterprise.

• Devaki Bhaya: "Viruses and bacterial immunity via CRISPRs - why would Darwin care" - A novel microbial defense system or "host immunity" system against viral attack, with some analogies to gene silencing via RNAi in eukaryotes, has recently been uncovered (Barrangou, 2007). Although many details remain elusive, fundamental components of this prokaryotic “immune system” are Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats (CRISPRs) CRISPR arrays consist of small tandemly repeated genomic segments (21-47bp) separated by non-repetitive spacers (20-50bp).New spacers are integrated in a sequential manner, can range from 2 to 728 repeats, and are suggested to serve as a “memory” of previous viral insult. However, basic questions of CRISPR distribution and diversity have yet to be addressed in naturally occurring populations and to the best of our knowledge, no model system has yet been developed to explore these fundamental aspects. We are examining these questions in the context of viruses in the mats of Yellowstone National Park with an emphasis on their cyanobacterial hosts. This is a fascinating new system in which to probe question of selection and evolution of host and virus.

• John van Wyhe:  “Charles Darwin - the true story”

* Defending the separation of government & religion, and the civil rights of atheists

* Promoting critical thinking, with science as our basis for knowledge

* Understanding our love and compassion

* Promoting respect toward all freethinkers

* Educating the public about atheists & atheism

* Meeting other atheists for mutual learning and enjoyment

The Bay Area Russell Set

The Bay Area Russell Set (BARS) is a local chapter of the Bertrand Russell Society, based in Silicon Valley. Our organization is named after the philosopher, mathematician, humanist, and peace activist Bertrand Russell. It is dedicated to exploring his ideas and advancing his ideals.

D.A.M.N.

(Doubters, Agnostics, Mythbusters & Nontheists)

The Humanist Community in Silicon Valley

Our community is a chapter of the American Humanist Association. Our goal is to meet the social, intellectual, and emotional needs of humanists of all ages. We have weekly events and activities, including our children's program on Sundays.

Humanist Roots Group of UUCPA

We are a growing community of friendly and intelligent people dedicated to the spiritual, intellectual and social needs of south San Francisco Bay area humanists. Everyone is welcome to join our monthly potluck dinner/discussion parties usually held on the first Saturday of each month, at 6:00 pm, in the UUCPA (Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto) Fireside room. Discussion topics vary from the philosophical/religious, such as personal beliefs and ethics, to scientific topics of our day that range from evolution vs. creationism, to global warming, genetic engineering, cloning, Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins. 

Humanists of San Mateo County

We are a small but dedicated group of freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, and humanists. We meet in Foster City the 3rd Wednesday of each month from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM. We choose articles, books and topics related to humanism and secular humanism.

We are affiliated with the Humanist Community in Silicon Valley and believe that Humanism is a philosophy of life based on science and reason rather than supernaturalism. The responsibility for our lives is ours and ours alone.

email: humanistsofsanmateo@googlegroups.com

 

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Darwin Day 2009 - in honor of Chuckie D's 200th

 

Stanford Darwin Day Symposium

 

 

 

 

 

Speakers will include:

 

 Featuring:

Attendees are encouraged to bring their favorite Darwin quotes to read.

(To avoid duplicates - please submit your quotes ahead of time to email address above.)

 

Borders Bookstore in Palo Alto

will be hosting a table at the break with a selection of Darwin related books.

 

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 http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=01-320

 

Most campus parking is free on weekends.

Your best bet may be to park in "the oval" on Palm Drive and walk across to the opposite side of the quadrangle.

 

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 With much thanks to Robbie Torney, Rebecca Tisdale, Thomas Lew, Lauren Smith, Karina Padilla

 

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        book display

        mingling

 

 

Parting words (5:10) - Robert Siegel

 

• Laura Moorhead - Meet Mr. Vestiges: Robert Chambers, The Man Who Readied the World for Darwin’s Evolutionary Thinking

    Charles Darwin, we know, was not alone in his evolutionary thinking. But few realize how influential Scottish journalist Robert Chambers was in readying the world for Darwin’s work. Fourteen years before Darwin presented his theory of evolution in a joint paper with Alfred Russel Wallace to the Linnean Society of London, Chambers published his 396-page science-based treatise on evolution, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chambers got many of his facts wrong, but his big idea—that “a gradual evolution of high from low” was completely “natural”—was right. More importantly, the book did not go unnoticed: Vestiges outsold Origin until the twentieth century, and the book surfaced in Darwin’s own writing, both personal and professional. It was also hugely controversial, particularly with the scientific community. As historian Milton Millhauser put it, Chambers “absorbed a number of the roughest blows that might otherwise have fallen on Darwin’s shoulders.” Darwin wrote Joseph Hooker, “birds of a feather flock together’, & therefore I sympathise with [Chambers].” (In another letter, Darwin actually complained about being publicly accused of plagiarizing Vestiges.) Chambers forced a coterie of educated men out of their ivory towers and pastorial retreats and into very public debates that played out across countries and in the most popular newspapers and journals of the Victorian age. This presentation considers Chambers as “the essayist of the middle class,” an associate of Darwin, and a champion of the evolutionary cause.

• Josh Wong - Controversies in Annie Darwin's Death: Scapegoat or Flashpoint?

 The death of Darwin's daughter Annie is often cited as spiritual motivation for his dismissal of orthodox religion.  Controversies in Annie Darwin's Death examines how this milestone in Darwin's life fits into the much more complex puzzle of Darwin's views on religion.

 

 

 

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More Darwin related sites

 

 

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Other events (2009):

January 5, 2009 at 5 pm in Cubberly Auditorium (Stanford University) -- an hour-long World Premier reading of ORIGIN, the new screenplay about Charles & Emma Darwin written by Stanford alum John Zussman and Patti Zussman.

Professional actors from Stanford Drama and beyond are doing the reading, with music, projected images, and THE WORKS! 

 

 

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