"After Darwin: evolution and human dignity."
The YRT Team announces the next Faculty Roundtable at Yale to be held on Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2018. The topic will be presented by Ken Miller and Gunter Wagner. They will provide context for the faculty participants to consider some of the ways that our view of the evolution of the human speicies impact our understanding of human dignity and purpose.
Ken Miller is Professor of Biology at Brown University. He did his undergraduate work at Brown, and earned a PhD in 1974 at the University of Colorado. He spent six years as Assistant Professor at Harvard University before returning to Brown University in 1980. His research work on cell membrane structure and function has produced more than 60 scientific papers and reviews in leading journals, including CELL, Nature, and Scientific American. Miller is coauthor of four different high school and college biology textbooks which are used by millions of students nationwide. He is the author of the popular books Finding Darwin's God (A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution), Only a Theory (Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul) and The Human Instinct (How we Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will).
Günter P. Wagner is the Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He is an evolutionary geneticist with training in biochemical engineering, zoology and mathematics from the University of Vienna, Austria. In 1991 he received a call to assume a full professorship at the Biology Department at Yale. From 1996 to 2001 he was Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. His research focuses on the evolution of gene regulation, mammalian pregnancy, and the evolutionary origin of cell types. Wagner published >200 peer reviewed papers, some in leading journals like Nature, Nature Genetics, PNAS and Cell Reports. His 2014 book Homology Genes and Evolutionary Innovation was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences with the Daniel Girard Elliot Medal in 2018.
The Faculty Roundtable is sponsored by the Rivendell Institute at Yale University.
