 and Celebration
February 8, 2009
1:00 to 5:30 pm
Geology corner auditorium, Main Quad
Building 320, Room 105
The event is free!
Open to the public!
Come for part, come for all.
Spread the word.
And above all, keep evolving!
For information contact
Speakers will include:
Robert Siegel
Stanley Falkow
Richard Klein
Lynn Rothschild
Greg Priest
Bob Stephens
Laura Moorhead
Quayshawn Spenser
Tom Hayden
Josh Wong
Joseph Mallon
William Durham
Featuring:
The Darwin Readers' Forum
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.
 Interested in helping out???
Please contact us.
We are looking for speakers (faculty, student, community members, etc), planners, as well as help with logistics, publicity, resources, etc,
NB: Details regarding timing are preliminary and subject to change.
Please check back to revision, and additional program information.
Logistics
Map of auditorium:
Parking
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.
Registration
No need to register.
We would love to get an email if you intend to come.
This will help us gauge the size of the audience.
Facebook group
Organized by Robert Siegel
Co-Sponsored by the Program in Human Biology
With much thanks to Robbie Torney, Rebecca Tisdale, Thomas Lew, Lauren Smith, Karina Padilla
Wendy Max, Katherine Preston, Lynn Rothschild, Carol Boggs.
Human Biology and Borders Bookstore in Palo Alto
The wonderful cake was the brilliant work of Katherine Preston.
The wonderful program was designed by Rebecca Tisdale.
Evolving talk topics and schedule:
(The schedule below differs slightly from the program but reflects the actual sequence of symposium events.)
Session 1 (1:00)
Introductory comments - Robert Siegel
refreshments
book display
mingling
Darwin quotes
Session 2 (3:30)
Parting words (5:10) - Robert Siegel
Talk descriptions:
Darwin fever is in high gear. He is venerated. He is despised. Careers are made over Darwinian quibbles – scientific, historical, and moral. Why are we so obsessed with the man, the idea, the controversy, the gospel of Darwin? This presentation seeks to ask many questions and answer few. We will set the stage for the symposium and for yet another century of nitpicking Darwin.
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.
Science journalist and Stanford lecturer Thomas Hayden reads from his collection of outraged creationist response to entirely mild and perfectly reasonable writing about Mr. Darwin.
Discussions of Darwinian ethics tend to begin and end with social Darwinism. Books and articles abound that analyze whether, how and to what extent Darwin thought that "might makes right." Correspondence between Charles Darwin, a radical Unitarian minister who denied the divinity of Christ, and one of the founders of American pragmatism sheds light on what Darwin's moral philosophy actually was. That philosophy turns out to have very little to do with social Darwinism.
Discussions of Darwinian theory focus on competition among organisms. Darwin was guided from his Beagle days on by Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, a solid uniformitarian tract. Yet, the evolution of life on earth has been strongly shaped by the biggest catastrophe in the history of the earth: the formation of the moon. What the moon means to the evolution of life on earth will accompany the speculation, what if we had no moon?
Twenty-one years ago, a landmark exploration of mitochondrial DNA diversity popularized the idea of a recent African origin for all living humans. The ancestral African population was estimated to have existed 200 ka (thousands of years ago), plus or minus a few tens of thousands of years. A corollary was that at some later date, its fully modern African descendants expanded to swamp or replace the Neanderthals and other non-modern Eurasians. The basic concept soon became known as “Out of Africa,” after the Academy Award winning film (1985) that took its title in turn from Isak Dinesen’s classic autobiography (1937). Many subsequent genetic analyses have reaffirmed the fundamental Out-of-Africa model, and the fossil and archaeological records also support it strongly. The fossil record implies that anatomically modern or near-modern humans were present in Africa by 150 ka, and the fossil and archaeological records together indicate that modern Africans expanded to Eurasia beginning about 50 ka.
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.
Tabling:
Stanford Darwin Day:
Publicity 2009
More Darwin related sites
Other events (2009): Daniel Dennett
Stanford Presidential Lecture
January 12, 2009 7:00 Building 320, Room 105
January 13, 2009 4:00 Stanford Humanities Center
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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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