News

Conway Morris to deliver closing lecture for Darwin conference

Posted on November 02, 2009 by Ginna Anderson in Events

Conway Morris

British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris will deliver a lecture titled “Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation” at 8 p.m. Tuesday (Nov. 3) in the auditorium of the University of Notre Dame’s Jordan Hall of Science. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Conway Morris’ talk is the closing event of an international conference titled “Darwin in the 21st Century: Nature, Humanity and God” which was sponsored by the University’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, and the Pontifical Council for Culture’s Science, Theology, and the Ontological Quest (STOQ) Project in Rome.

Known as the foremost authority on the Cambrian Explosion, Conway Morris is a professor of evolutionary paleobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He is renowned for his many debates with the late Stephen Jay Gould on the topic of the predictability of evolutionary history.

Conway Morris was elected a fellow of the Royal Society at age 39 and is the author of a number of books on evolution, including “The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals” and “Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.” His research interests include the study of Burgess Shale-type faunas, the first appearance of skeletons and the Cambrian “explosion.” His interests extend to the science/religion debate and he is considered a highly effective communicator in the public understanding of science.

A reception sponsored by the University’s GLOBES (Global Linkages of Biology, the Environment, and Society) program will follow Conway Morris’ lecture in the galleria outside the Jordan Hall auditorium.

Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on November 02, 2009.

International Conference on Darwin

Posted on August 14, 2009 by Ginna Anderson in Events

November 1-3, 2009
Darwin in the 21st Century: Nature, Humanity, and God
An international conference hosted by the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame featuring distinguished experts from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The conference is devoted to evolutionary theory in its scientific, anthropological, philosophical, and theological dimensions as a contribution to the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species.The keynote address will be given by Francisco Ayala of the University of California at Irvine. Notre Dame students and faculty may register for the event free of charge at http://cce.nd.edu/. Go to the conference website

Forbes Research Published in Science

Posted on August 13, 2009 by Ginna Anderson in Headlines

Andrew Forbes, (PhD Biology, 2008) a former graduate student under Prof. Jeff Feder, recently published a paper in Science, one of the most respected scientific journals in the world. Now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Davis, Andrew was first author of the publication based on his dissertation research in sympatric speciation. In the Science article, Forbes and co-authors demonstrate that the introduction of apples to America almost 400 years ago may have ultimately changed the behavior of a fruit fly, leading to its modification and the subsequent modification of a parasitic wasp that feeds on it. The result is a chain reaction of biodiversity where the modification of one species triggers the sequential modification of a second, dependent species.
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