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Carlos Bustamante
Carlos D. Bustamante is Professor of Biological Statistics and
Computational Biology at Cornell University. His research focuses
on analyzing genome wide patterns of variation within and between
species to address fundamental questions in evolutionary biology,
anthropology, and medical genetics. His group works on a variety
of organisms and model systems ranging from humans and other
primates to domesticated plant and animals to large scale simulations
of microevolution. Much of his research is at the interface
of computational biology, mathematical genetics, and genomics
and is funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health,
the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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Jerry Coyne
Jerry Coyne is an influential evolutionary biologist whose
primary research focus has been the mechanism of speciation,
that is, the processes that cause populations of organisms
to become separate species. He is the author or co-author
of over 110 scientific publications and one scholarly book,
primarily on the speciation of Drosophila, but also venturing
into the speciation of birds, molecular evolution, and ecological
genetics. He has weighed in on some of the thorniest and most
controversial issues in evolutionary biology, including punctuated
evolution and the genetic basis of morphological change. Dr.
Coyne has also written over 80 columns, articles and book
reviews for popular publications, including The New Republic,
The NY Times Literary Supplement, Wired, The Skeptical Inquirer,
Edge, and others, primarily in defense of the teaching of
evolution and as a critic of creationism in all forms. He
is the author of a recent book on this subject "Why Evolution
is True." He earned his B.S. degree from the College
of William and Mary and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He
is Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at
the University of Chicago.
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Jonathan Marks
Jonathan Marks is a Professor of Anthropology at the University
of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research focuses on understanding
human evolution and variation through critical, historical,
and social studies of human genetics. With graduate degrees
in both genetics and anthropology, Dr. Marks was uniquely situated
to participate in and critique the florescence of molecular
anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s leading up to the human
genome project. He was a powerful spokesman offering scientific
and ethical criticism of the Human Genome Diversity Project.
As a result of that work, he became Vice Chairman of the Indigenous
Peoples’ Council on Bio-Colonialism, although he may be
one of the least indigenous people you will ever meet. Dr. Marks
has authored many significant works, including his 1995 classic
"Human Biodiversity," in which he is as comfortable
critiquing 18th and 19th century science as interpreting the
meaning of DNA sequence data to explain the biological differences
within and among human groups. His 2002 book "What it Means
to be 98% Chimpanzee" won the 2003 W.W. Howells Book Award
from the Biological Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological
Association, and is the 2009 winner of the prestigious J. I.
Staley Prize from the School of Advanced Research. In that book
he attempts to disentangle the folk heredity that informs so
much of evolutionary genetics today from reliable modern knowledge,
that is to say, from science. Most recently he has published
"Why I Am Not a Scientist," a highly readable anthropology
of science that should be read by scientists and lay persons
alike. Dr. Marks has written and spoken extensively about the
inappropriate use of race in genetics and medicine. In his presentation,
“Darwin’s Ventriloquists”, he argues that
scientific racism is a more serious problem for evolutionary
biology than unscientific creationism is. Dr. Marks’s
visit is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology. |
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Daniel Povinelli
Daniel Povinelli became interested in studying the mental abilities
of chimpanzees when he was 15 years old, after reading a popular
article about their ability to recognize themselves in mirrors.
His interests led him to receive an undergraduate degree in
physical anthropology and zoology from the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst in 1986, and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1991.
In 1991, he established a set of behavioral/psychological laboratories
at the University of Louisiana to compare the intellectual abilities
of humans and chimpanzees. With the support of the James S.
McDonnell Foundation, in 1999 these laboratories became the
Cognitive Evolution Group. The Cognitive Evolution Group is
dedicated to using behavioral studies of chimpanzees and human
adults and children to identify the uniquely human aspects of
the human mind. Povinelli’s research has been recognized
by an American Psychological Association Award for an Early
Career Contribution to Psychology, an NSF Young Investigator
Award, and a $1 million Centennial Fellowship from the James
S. McDonnell Foundation. He has been accepted as a fellow at
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is
an elected fellow of the Association for Psychological Science,
and was recently named one of “20 Scientists to Watch
in the Next 20 Years” by Discover magazine. |
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Donald Prothero
Donald R. Prothero is Professor of Geology at Occidental College
in Los Angeles, and Lecturer in Geobiology at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He earned M.A., M.Phil.,
and Ph.D. degrees in geological sciences from Columbia University
in 1982, and a B.A. in geology and biology (highest honors,
Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of California, Riverside.
He is currently the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor
of 25 books and over 200 scientific papers, including five leading
geology textbooks and three trade books as well as edited symposium
volumes and other technical works. He is on the editorial board
of Skeptic magazine, and in the past has served as an associate
or technical editor for Geology, Paleobiology and Journal of
Paleontology. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America,
the Paleontological Society, and the Linnaean Society of London,
and has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation
and the National Science Foundation. He has served as the Vice
President of the Pacific Section of SEPM (Society of Sedimentary
Geology), and five years as the Program Chair for the Society
of Vertebrate Paleontology. In 1991, he received the Schuchert
Award of the Paleontological Society for the outstanding paleontologist
under the age of 40. He has also been featured on several television
documentaries, including episodes of Paleoworld (BBC), Prehistoric
Monsters Revealed (History Channel), Entelodon and Hyaenodon
(National Geographic Channel) and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts
(BBC). |
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Robert Richardson
Robert C. Richardson is the Charles Phelps Taft Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, and the Gervinus
Fellow at the Universität Osnabrück. He received his
B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Colorado in 1971;
he received his M.A. in 1972 and Ph.D., with Honors, in 1977,
both from the University of Chicago. He has been a visiting
professor within the Department of Molecular Cell Physiology
at the Free University of Amsterdam during 2003 and 2004, and
was the Mercator Guest Professor at the Universität Osnabrück
during 2005.
Dr. Richardson's research specialities are History and Philosophy
of Science, Philosophy of Biology, and Cognitive Science. He
has published broadly in journals including Philosophy of Science,
Mind, Biology and Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology, Erkenntnis,
and Synthese. With William Bechtel, he published Discovering
Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in
Scientific Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993); the second edition will be issued by MIT Press in 2010.
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