As part of the Darwin Year celebration, the eminent scientist Edward O. Wilson will deliver the university's annual distinguished lecture on Tuesday, March 3, 2009, at Severance Hall.
A leading figure in the modern environmental movement, Wilson is Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, where he conducts entomological and environmental research at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. His many books, which span the fields of science, economics, arts and humanities, and ethics, include On Human Nature (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), The Diversity of Life, The Future of Life, and, most recently, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.
Wilson has received 75 awards in recognition of his contributions to science and humanity, including the U.S. National Medal of Science, Japan's International Prize for Biology, the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Germany's Terrestrial Ecology Prize. He is also the recipient of 27 honorary doctoral degrees from North America and Europe.
Appropriately enough, journalist Tom Wolfe has called Wilson "the new darwin." His public talk next spring will be the fifth in the distinguished lecture series.
"Charles Darwin holds a peculiar position in the history of science and society," biographer David Quammen has written. "His name is a household word but his ideas—with a single exception—aren't household ideas. He's central, he's iconic, but that's not to say he's widely and well understood."
In 2008-09, a series of guest lectures and related events will provide students, other members of the Case Western Reserve community, and the public with a chance to understand Darwin better. The series was organized by faculty members across the university to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. The goal, they say, is "to make apparent to all the full breadth and depth of the evidence for evolution and the profound importance and wide applicability of evolutionary ideas and approaches in varied spheres of intellectual and practical endeavor."
Six members of the organizing committee came from the College of Arts and Sciences: James Bader, Hillel Chiel, and Joseph Koonce (biology); Cynthia Beall (anthropology); Lawrence Krauss (physics); and Patricia Princehouse (philosophy). Princehouse has taught an undergraduate seminar, "Darwin's View of Life," for SAGES (the Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship). Drawing on a collection of Darwin's manuscript letters in the Dittrick Medical History Center, her students have researched the development and implications of his thought.
"The committee sees the Darwin year as an opportunity to explain what really occurs in evolutionary biology, what the field really is—and to affirm the importance of the university in that enterprise," Princehouse says. "The science of evolution gets almost no public audience—except for PBS. So this is a series of talks and other get-togethers to try to help people on campus and off campus understand what evolutionary biology is about, and why evolution is the basis for all of biology."
Princehouse adds that nonspecialists sometimes think of evolution as something that happened—if it happened— long ago, and assume that it has little significance now. But in fact, "Evolution is the basis for therapies in medicine and progress in agriculture. It is an important element in industry—especially evolutionary algorithms, which are used when you're trying to design a program or shape for an object." In other words, engineers simulate evolutionary processes to come up with new inventions.
"Evolution has been enormously fruitful at a practical level," Princehouse says. "But people have no idea. So, instead of having a series of talks about evolution's detractors, the Year of Darwin is an effort to bring scientific issues into the open."
Two of the speakers who will visit the university next year have written acclaimed books for a general audience about recent scientific advances in evolutionary biology:
Sean B. Carroll, a geneticist and molecular biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin, is the author, mostly recently, of The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Record of Evolution, winner of the 2007 Science Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. His lecture will be sponsored by the College Scholars Program and SAGES.
Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and provost of the Field Museum of Natural History, is the author of Your Inner Fish: A Journey Through the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. A specialist in the evolution of limbs, Shubin discovered, on an Arctic expedition, a fish fossil with some of the structural features (lungs, wrists, fingers) of a primitive land animal. His discovery filled a significant gap in the evolutionary record.
Other distinguished speakers during the Darwin year will include Sarah Tishkoff (University of Pennsylvania), who studies the relationship between genetic variation in human beings and differences in traits such as susceptibility to disease; Robert J. Richards (University of Chicago), who examines the history of evolutionary theory and its ethical implications; and Judge John E. Jones III, who ruled in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) that the Supreme Court's 1987 decision excluding creation science from public school curricula applied as well to Intelligent Design.
The series will be launched at Fall Convocation on Thursday, August 28, 2008, in Severance Hall, with a lecture by David Quammen, whose book The Reluctant Mr. Darwin will be the common reading selection for the freshman class. In this way, the organizers hope to motivate students to attend other events associated with the Year of Darwin.
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