Florida Citizens for Science secretary Mary Bahr provided the following report on the recent Café Scientifique, Gainesville.
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We had about 85 people show up for our tours of the Museum fossil hall and the following discussion that Kevin Folta, Joe Meert, and Johnathan Bloch started with their fascinating presentations. Joe is a Geologist and he talked about deep time, Jonathan was part of the team that uncovered many of the steps of whale evolution and Kevin is a plant geneticist who talked about “real time” evolution and DNA as a mechanism for change. So we had several of the lines of evidence that support evolutionary theory.
If you have never been to a Cafe Scientifique the first half hour is a presentation by the panel followed by an hour of questions and discussion. The crowd included out-of-towners like FCS president Joe Wolf and the star of the New York Times article David Campbell and his wife (many people were excited to meet David and Joe). It also included a group of University students and a middle school teacher and seven of her students who were getting extra credit for attending. A great time was had by all! Even the Cafe staff asked about attending more Cafe Scientifiques. We plan to do it again next year – this time probably addressing Biodiversity using the museum collections (the butterfly collection numbers in the millions) as a starting point. Please let us know if any other folks need help getting started on Cafes in other parts of Florida.
Mary Bahr
I left out the Fossil hall tours which required three rounds to accommodate all the attendees. I went on Dr MacFadden’s last tour and he focused on Horse evolution which is well documented in the fossil hall and which is also his specialty. It is an amazing tale of the genus equus evolving originally in the Americas, crossing the land bridge to Europe and Asia and then going extinct in the New world only to be domesticated and returned here by the Spanish and then playing a role in defeating the Native American populations who were initially awed by men riding horses. What a story! 😉
Well done to all involved.
Cheers, and of course….RAmen 🙂
Long way from Florida, but the UK has recently been experiencing another rash of anti-evolution activism. A friend there just emailed me this info:
“Charles Darwin to receive apology from the Church of England for rejecting evolution”
“The Church of England is to apologise to Charles Darwin for its initial rejection of his theories, nearly 150 years after he published his most famous work.”
“The Church of England will concede in a statement that it was over-defensive and over-emotional in dismissing Darwin’s ideas. It will call “anti-evolutionary fervour” an “indictment” on the Church”.
“The statement will read: Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practise the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends.”
That’s from the UK Telegraph…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/2910447/Charles-Darwin-to-receive-apology-from-the-Church-of-England-for-rejecting-evolution.html
The CoE website has also dedicated a section of the site, [quote] “to mark the approaching bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.”
Better late than never!