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Colin Allen
Colin Allen is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science
at Indiana University, where also serves as a core faculty member
of the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.
He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California
- Los Angeles, where he wrote a dissertation on philosophical
issues in cognitive ethology, particularly the attribution of
mental states to nonhuman animals. This topic has continued
to be a central concern of Prof. Allen's research. His most
recent work concerns behavioral evolution, consciousness and
cognition in non-human animals, and methodological issues in
the study of animal behavior. He is the author (with Mark Bekoff)
of Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive
Ethology, and he has coedited four anthologies of original
essays in the philosophy of biology. He will serve as president
in 2008-2009 of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
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Dean Falk
Dr. Dean Falk is the Hale G. Smith Professor and Chair of the
Department of Anthropology at the Florida State University.
Her research focuses on the evolution of the brain and cognition
in higher primates, including humans. She and her colleagues
recently undertook a comparative study of endocasts from the
skulls of microcephalic and normal humans. Her interest in microcephalics
was sparked initially by research on the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis,
a tiny hominin from the Indonesian island of Flores whose remains
were described at the end of 2004). Dr. Falk visited Liang Bua,
the cave on Flores where the Hobbit was discovered in July,
2007. She has become well known as a result of her association
with the Hobbit, but before that she was probably best known
for her book, Braindance (2004, University Press of
Florida), originally published in 1992 and thoroughly updated
and revised in 2004. In Braindance she weaves evolution,
physiology, and social behavior together to tell the tale of
human brain evolution, including future projections of cognitive
potential. She is currently finishing up Finding Our Tongues:
The Role of Mothers and Infants in the Evolution of Language,
Music and Art (Basic Books) based on her 'putting the baby
down' hypothesis, which associates the evolution of infant-directed
speech with selection for bipedalism. Dr. Falk’s talk
about the lessons to be learned from Homo floresiensis
is being sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.
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Mark Farmer
Mark Farmer, Professor of Cellular Biology at the University
of Georgia, specializes in the cell biology and evolutionary
history of protists (protozoa and algae). Protists are typically
single celled organisms that do not form tissues with specialized
functions. Most are free living but a few are notorious parasites
of humans and animals. The evolutionary chain of events that
gave rise to protists from much simpler bacteria remains one
of the great unsolved mysteries in biology. As Past-President
of the International Society for Evolutionary Protistology Dr.
Farmer has studied those organisms that are thought to represent
some of the earliest ancestors from which animals, plants, and
fungi are descended. While serving as a program officer for
the National Science Foundation he became interested in the
growing politicization of science policy in the U.S. and in
the growth of the Intelligent Design movement. Many examples
of so-called “Irreducible Complexity” are readily
explained using examples from protistan biology and Dr. Farmer
draws on these to explain basic cellular processes that are
often not well understood, even by many fellow scientists. A
self described “Scientist of Faith” he also feels
that there should be no inherent conflict between an acceptance
of basic evolutionary theory and one’s personal beliefs.
Dr. Farmer is an active spokesman for scientific integrity in
America’s public schools and regularly engages in public
debates with those who advocate the introduction of religious
concepts into the science curriculum.
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Edward Larson
Edward J. Larson is the Russell Professor of History and Talmadge
Professor of Law at the University of Georgia and recipient
of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Before accepting a teaching
position at Georgia in 1987, he served as Associate Counsel
for the U.S. House of
Representatives Committee on Education and Labor (1983-89) and
as an attorney with a major Seattle law firm (1979-83). The
author of five books and over eighty published articles, Larson
writes mostly about issues of science, medicine and law from
an historical perspective. His
books include: Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific
Theory (2004); Evolution's Workshop: God and Science
in the Galapagos Islands (2001), Sex, Race, and Science:
Eugenics in the Deep South (1995), Trial and Error:
The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution (1985,
1989, and 2002 updated editions) and the Pulitzer Prize winning
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing
Debate Over Science and Religion (1997). His articles have
appeared in such varied journals as Nature, Atlantic Monthly,
Science, Scientific American, The Nation, Oxford American, Wall
Street Journal, Virginia Law Review, and British Journal for
the History of Science. He is interviewed frequently for broadcast
and print media, including multiple appearances on PBS, the
History Channel, Court TV, C-SPAN and CNN.
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Neil Shubin
Dr. Neil Shubin, Ph.D., is provost of The Field Museum of Natural
History in Chicago as well as a professor of anatomy at the
University of Chicago, where he also serves as associate dean.
Dr. Shubin’s research sits at the interface of expeditionary
paleontology, developmental genetics and genomics; the goal
of which is to gain insight into the evolutionary origin of
anatomical features of animals. In 2004, Shubin and his colleagues
Ted Daeschler and Farish A. Jenkins Jr. lead the team that discovered
Tiktaalik roseae. Better known as the “the fish
with hands”, Tiktaalik is a 375 million year
old fossil fish that sheds light on a pivotal point in the history
of life on Earth; when the very first fish ventured out onto
land. This groundbreaking discovery made front-page news in
several media outlets including the New York Times and the Chicago
Tribune, and was published in the journal Nature. Shubin was
named ABC News’ “Person of the Week” in April
2006 and continues to gain national recognition for revealing
the missing link between ancient sea creatures and the first
creatures to walk on land.
In January, Random House Publishing released Your Inner
Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Years of the Human Body.
In Your Inner Fish Shubin recounts this discovery and
explores evolutionary history, tracing the origins of the human
body back millions of years, long before the first creatures
walked the earth.
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Jill Sundie
Dr. Sundie is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the C.
T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. She
received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Arizona State University
and an M.A. in Economics from the University of Southern California.
She studies motivations for consumer behavior and decision-making
from an evolutionary psychological perspective, with particular
focus in the areas of social influence, conspicuous consumption
and negative consumption emotions such as envy and schadenfreude.
Her work has been published in the Journal of Personality &
Social Psychology and other outlets. Prior to completing her
doctorate, she worked for several years at an investment management
firm, The Vanguard Group.
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