Darwin Day Speaker and Hub Anniversary Party

13 Years of The Hub & The Fight for Science! Celebrate two milestones in one night!

• The Talk: Nick Schweitzer explores the fascinating (and often controversial) history of evolution in our legal and education systems.
• The Milestone: It’s our 13th Birthday! We’re celebrating over a decade of skeptical inquiry and community.
• The Fun: After the Q&A, we’re throwing an anniversary bash you won’t want to miss.

Come for the science, stay for the celebration. Doors Open at 5:30, talk at 6:00 with Q & A to follow and anniversary celebration after that wraps up

Speaker

Nick Schweitzer John Nicholas (“Nick”) Schweitzer is a retired attorney living in Madison, Wisconsin. His legal field was professional ethics, serving as an administrative law judge for the state agency that issued and regulated licenses for scores of professions. He also taught legal ethics as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and conducted attorney discipline hearings for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Utterly unrelated to that professional focus, he fancies himself an “amateur scientist”, promoting science and reason in various ways:

1. He has inveigled the Madison Parks Commission into letting him install various scientific exhibits in city parks over the past 20 years. These include – the solar system at an appropriate scale for objects and distances; – a geological and evolutionary timeline using distance as an analog for time; – an anthropological timeline from Australopithecus to modern humans; – the electromagnetic spectrum from sound to gamma rays; – the size of the constituents of the classical model of an atom; and – the layers of the earth.

2. In response to a creationist booth he encountered at the Dane County Fair, for 3 years he countered it on the other side of the exhibit hall with a “science and reason” booth using exhibits borrowed from many departments at the local university.

3. This past year (April – November), with the help of the local Humanist and Skeptics groups, he set up and staffed an atheist/agnostic/humanist/skeptic/freethinker table at the weekly farmers’ market in Madison.

4. He leads a monthly discussion group at his freethought congregation titled “What I Believe Now”.

5. He has presented this “Evolution in the Courts” lecture at least half a dozen times to students in the local university’s genetics program.

6. He was at one time the co-chair of the Wisconsin chapter of the Secular Coalition before the national organization disbanded its state chapters.