Greater Boston Humanists invites you to join us we celebrate Darwin Day together right on February 12 with a talk by Dr. Andrew Berry of Harvard. This live lecture event is co-sponsored by GBHumanists and the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and MIT. Darwin Day is a major Humanist and secular community holiday “celebrating the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin.”
Andrew Berry’s lecture is fully titled: “Coincidence? Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and What Their Discovery of The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection Can Tell Us about How Science Works.”
Natural selection is a simple idea, and a long sought one, but it wasn’t until 1858 that it was first unveiled. Curiously, it was discovered not once, but twice — by Charles Darwin and by Alfred Russel Wallace — suggesting that the milieu in which Darwin and Wallace were working made the idea particularly accessible.
This talk will first, explore that milieu to identify its key components; 2nd, examine the events that brought the trajectories of Wallace and Darwin together in 1858; and 3rd, track their agreements and disagreements as the new science of evolution unfolded. The Darwin-Wallace story illustrates how science profits when critique and respect go together.
Dr. Andrew Berry is Assistant Head Tutor, Integrative Biology, and Lecturer on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. His research combined the techniques of field biology with those of molecular biology to seek evidence at the DNA level of Darwinian natural selection. He has given lectures on evolutionary topics to popular audiences all over the world – from Ankara to the Antarctic – occasionally drawing the ire of creationists. As an educator and popularizer, Dr Berry seeks to demystify the most important and most misinterpreted of all biological ideas: evolution.
Join us for a lecture and snacks as we celebrate together in community of secular humanism!