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Darwin Day 2013

in Sydney will be a members and friends meeting to be held:
at the February HuVAT meeting Humanist House 10 Shepherd St Chippendale 10 February 4 pm.
If you consider yourself a friend and wish to attend but don't know any member send an email from the link below.
Refreshments will be served after the talks.

Richard Dawkin honorary president of Darwin Day.

www.darwinday.org
Darwin Day's international home page

- see other programs around the world


Darwin Day 2013

Presented by John August and Victor Bien

This will be our 2013 celebration of Charles Darwin`s theory of evolution (now more accurately thought of as the law of evolution) .

This year Victor Bien will will be screening about a 10 - 15 minute clip from David Attenboroughs series the Kingdom of plants shown on ABC TV in October to November last year. This is to initiate and stimulate discussion to increase appreciation and understanding of biological evolution; specifically to see the modern answer to a puzzlement Charles Darwin expressed about the sudden rise of flowering plants in the evolutionary time-scale. A meta-object lesson to pick-up is to appreciate a very significant human limitations: specifically our perceptions of time-frame.
John August's talk will be on The Price Equation:
Evolution has long struggled with the idea of "group selection". Evolution is normally "selfish", in that only the survival of the individual matters. An important insight was that you might be willing to sacrifice yourself for relatives, because that means that your own genes would persist, its just that they would not be your own copies - but being identical, they would count much the same. But still the idea of "group selection" persisted. Could there be selection of a more or less unrelated group ? Could there be selection for cooperation ? The Price Equation was the mathematical formulation of a remarkable insight be George R. Price. In summary, The Price Equation tells us that when cooperation has survival benefits, then genes corresponding to cooperation will survive. On the one hand this observation seems almost too obvious, but there is a power in the formulation that tells us so much. The Price Equation can be applied whenever there is a tension between how a gene benefits the individual or benefits others. That can be in terms of abstract notions like cooperation - or biological effects like the prevalence of sickle cell anaemia - something that can provide both a resistance to malaria but also the illness of anaemia. His talk will cover some aspects of this remarkable formula.

These talks are intended to stimulate questions and discussion.


Charles Darwin (b. 12 Feb 1809) whose promulgation of the Theory of Evolution, or descent with modification through natural selection, has had as profound an effect on how we view and understand the natural world as any other scientific theory ever proposed.


Darwin's influence on Modern Thought. Click here for paper by Ernst Mayer

Some key points from the article: Darwin introduced historicity into science (chemistry and physics do not have this character); he rejected all supernatural explanations; he refuted typology or essentialism -which says living things are invariant and stable, they are not; variation characterises living things, refutation of typology amounts to refutation of racism amongst other things...




Access this page on the internet at www.darwinday.hsnsw.asn.au or from our home page and click on the Darwin Day link at the left.


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