To register for this year's Skeptics Society conference at Caltech, a Festschrift in honor of Stephen Jay Gould upon completion of his 300th consecutive monthly column in Natural History magazine (upon which he is retiring), go now to:
www.skeptic.com and click on the "Festschrift" button.
We have done a huge mailing for this event so it will sell out. Register now to reserve your seat!
Called "America's Evolution Laureate," Dr. Gould is one of the best known and most highly decorated scientists of our age. After an A.B. from Antioch College and a Ph.D. from Columbia, Gould began his teaching career at Harvard, won the prestigious Schuchert Award for excellence in paleontological research by a scientist under 40, won the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship, was named "Scientist of the Year" by Discover magazine for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, was named Humanist Laureate by the Academy of Humanism, was awarded 41 honorary degrees, was voted a member of the National Academy of Science, and most recently served a term as President of the AAAS. He has written 20 books (for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award) and over 600 scientific papers. Given Gould's admiration for Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, perhaps Gould's most significant accomplishment is writing 300 consecutive monthly essays in Natural History magazine.
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." --Charles Darwin, final paragraph from the First Edition of The Origin of Species, 1859
With tributes & commentary on science in the 21st century from:
David Baltimore
Distinguished biologist Dr. Baltimore won the 1975 Nobel Prize for his work in virology. He is the 6th president of the California Institute of Technology. He was founding director of MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and president of Rockefeller University. He co-chaired the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine's committee on a National Strategy for AIDS. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, and recently received the Presidential Medal of Science.
Louis Friedman
Dr. Friedman is the founding director, along with Carl Sagan, of the 100,000-strong Planetary Society. His doctorate M.I.T. is in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has worked on civilian and military space programs, on JPL's deep space missions including Mariner-Venus-Mercury, and for the Grand Tour, and on mission design studies for the Venus Orbital Imaging Radar, Halley Comet Rendezvous-Solar Sail, and on the Mars Program. He is the author of Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Travel. He has also worked on the proposal for human exploration of Mars.
Donald Prothero
Dr. Prothero is Associate Professor of Geology at Occidental College. He has been a Guggenheim and NSF Fellow, a Fellow of the Linnean Society, and in 1991 received the Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society. He has authored or co-edited seven books, including Bringing Fossels to life: An Introduction To Palentology, Paradise Lost: The Eocene-Oligocene Transition, and The Terrestrial Eocene-Oligocene Transition in North America.
Frank J. Sulloway
Dr. Sulloway is the Miller Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches a course on evolutionary psychology and socio-biology. Sulloway currently conducts research on family dynamics and personality development. He is one of the world's leading Darwin scholars and the author of the classic book Freud, Biologist of the Mind, and of the highly acclaimed Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives.
Paul MacCready
Dr. MacCready is the Founding President of AeroVironment, one of the world's leading companies researching and producing science and technologies for a cleaner environment. A graduate of Caltech, he is perhaps best known for his success in designing, building, and achieving human-powered flight in the 1970s, solar-powered flight and solar-powered automobiles in the 1980s, and electric automobile technologies in the 1990s.
James Powell
Dr. Powell is the President and Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. His research interests are in geochemistry and he is the author of Night Comes to the Creta-ceous: Dinosaur Extinction and the Transformation of Modern Geology. He is known for his efforts as a science educator and has written extensively on the role of science museums, the crisis in science education, and wrote Pathways to Leadership: A Guide for Nonprofit Executives.
James Randi
Conjurer, and author of critical thinking classics Flim Flam! and The Faith Healers, "The Amazing" Randi is arguably the foremost spokesman against pseudoscience and the paranormal in the world. Through tens of thousands of media appearances, lectures, articles, essays, and books he nearly single-handedly generated the skeptical movement. He is the winner of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship, and offers a million dollar prize for proof of paranormal powers.
Carol Tavris
Dr. Tavris is a social psychologist and author of The Mismeasure of Woman. She is renowned among skeptics for her untiring efforts at battling pseudoscience in psychology, and among feminists for such works as The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective, and Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion. With Carole Wade she has co-authored such psychology textbooks as Psychology, Invitation to Psychology, and Psychology in Perspective. She regularly writes editorials and book reviews for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Michael Shermer
Dr. Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, director of the Skeptics Society, the host of the Skeptics Lecture Series at Caltech, and the host/producer of the Fox Family television series, Exploring the Unknown. His latest book is How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science that presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, and the soon to be released Denying History.
A special musical tribute by:
Richard Milner
A childhood friend of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Milner is Senior Editor of Natural History magazine where he also edits Gould's essays and researches photos and illustrations for these and other articles. He is the author of the oft-cited The Encyclopedia of Evolution, and is famed for his Operatic tributes to Darwin the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. He has written a wonderfully creative tribute to Gould.
With tributes & commentary on science in the 21st century from:
8:30-9:30: Registration, coffee and pastries
9:30-10:00: David Baltimore
Nobel Laureate, President of Caltech
10:00-10:30: Michael Shermer
Director of the Skeptics Society
10:30-11:00: Donald Prothero
Paleontologist, Professor of Geology, Occidental College
11:00-11:30: Carol Tavris
Social psychologist, author: The Mismeasure of Woman
Lunch Break 11:30-1:00: (Catered: $7.00 per person)
1:00-1:30: James "The Amazing" Randi
Conjurer, author of Flim Flam! & The Faith Healers
1:30-2:00: Frank Sulloway
Research Professor, U.C. Berkeley, author of Born to Rebel
2:00-2:30: Paul MacCready
Founder, President, Aerovironment, inventor of human- and solar-powered flight
2:30-3:00: Break
3:00-3:30: Louis Friedman
Executive Director, Planetary Society
3:30-4:00: James Powell
Director, Los Angeles Museum of Natural History
4:00-4:30: (To be announced)
Dinner Break 4:30-6:00: (Catered: $7.00 per person)
6:00-6:30: Richard Milner
A Musical Tribute to Stephen Jay Gould
6:30-8:00: Stephen Jay Gould
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: This View Of Life
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