CANCELED: The Evolution Weekend Lecture Feb. 11 with Dr. Robert Richards

CANCELED DUE TO WEATHER: The Evolution Weekend Lecture scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 11, has been cancelled.

Clarke University will host the Evolution Weekend lecture on Sunday, Feb. 11, at 1 p.m. in Jansen Music Hall. The lecture will be given by Robert J. Richards from the University of Chicago and is titled “Darwin’s Biology of Intelligent Design.”

Richards will speak on the movement of Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design adherents argue that organisms give evidence of design, and this indicates the operations of a causal agent capable of producing intelligently designed creatures. This also suggests that human beings have a special place in the scheme of life. Charles Darwin also thought human beings had a special place in the hierarchy of organisms and argued for a biology of intelligent design. In the lecture, Richards will address the question, “What does Darwin’s accomplishment mean for our contemporary attitudes about morality and the role of God in a neo-Darwinian world?”

Richards is the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science at the University of Chicago. He is a professor in the Departments of History, Philosophy, Psychology, and in the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science; he also serves as Director of the Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine. His area of research is German Romanticism and the history of evolutionary theory.

Richards is the author of several books, including Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, Was Hitler a Darwinian? Disputed Question in the History of Evolutionary Theory, and most recently, Debating Darwin, co-authored with philosopher Michael Ruse.

This program is supported by Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views and opinions expressed by this program do not necessarily reflect those of Humanities Iowa or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Evolution Weekend lecture with Robert J. Richards is a free event and is open to the public.