By Neece
Brent sent me a brochure from last year about Darwin-fest, for his 200th anniversary. This was when Morgantown Atheists was just forming and a lot of the members of that time went to a lot of these events. So this is a cyber-souvenir from 2009.
West Virginia University is celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin with DarwinFest, a series of talks and presentations examining the naturalist’s work – from his travels to his influential theory on evolution.
“Darwin: Evolutionary Science and Its Impacts on Society”; an interdisciplinary celebration involving colleges and schools across the University – will be held from February through early April. The events, which are free and open to the public, will feature leading scholars and scientists from around the world.
Darwin, who was born Feb. 12, 1809, is known as the father of evolution for his theory that all life develops through a process he
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By Neece
Happy Darwin Day everyone! Today is Darwin’s birthday and in honor of him, I thought I’d post this article about Liquid Glass, which could possibly be the coolest nanotech material I’ve seen in some time. I think it’s so cool mainly because of its versatility and the fact that it’s already in use in Germany, the UK and Turkey.
Why am I talking about nanotech on Darwin’s birthday? If you think about it, without evolution, we wouldn’t be able to manipulate our world so deftly and with such finesse. About 195,000 years ago homo sapiens first appeared in the fossil record. We started leaving Africa about 70,000 years ago, and migrated as far as the Americas 14,500 years ago.
A mere 10,000 years ago, we were mostly hunter-gatherers in nomadic groups. The first proto-states were developed only 6,000 years ago. Think of that! Look how far we’ve come in such…
By Neece
Yesterday the Freethinkers Morgantown Book Club was in the Dominion Post. Here’s the article:
Sharing Stories: Clubs allow friends to bond over books
By Kaitlin Bushinski for the Dominion Post, Life and Leisure section, 1-E, Sunday November 8, 2009
For those seeking more active engagement with literature, starting a book club can be a fun and rewarding way to do just that, while meeting new people and challenging oneself intellectually, say lit lovers.
According to club veterans, book clubs are also low-cost and easy to organize. All it takes is one person, a plan and a little advertising to get it off the ground.
Amber Johns, the director of community relations for the Morgantown Library System, is starting a Jane Austen-themed book club that will have its first meeting in February.
“We were trying to figure out a new approach to book clubs, and Jane Austen
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By blally
Here is a 3 page article about evolution and livestock and the overuse of antibiotics. It’s originally dated September 2005, but is very interesting for getting an idea of evolution in action, and there is an August 2009 update to the article on page 2.
By blally
Here’s an interesting article entitled Smart Biology to the Rescue from H+ magazine about applying evolution to the enhancement of lifespans. It’s 2 pages long.
By Neece
Written by Katrina Vanden Heuvel for The Nation:
This Fourth of July, those who identify themselves as non-believers, or humanists, or atheists — or a whole host of other names which signify a nontheistic worldview — have much cause for celebration. After eight years in the Bush wilderness — and an even longer period of ostracism by the Washington political establishment — a rising demographic of like-minded Americans and a new president are guiding us back to our roots as a secular nation.
“We have generally been a pariah group in America,” says Woody Kaplan, Advisory Board Chair of the Secular Coalition for America. “Pretty much unrecognized by the political establishment. Yet there’s almost no religious group in America as large as us…. We were that third rail that politicians failed to touch.”
Indeed when the Obama Administration invited the Coalition to the White House for
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