CPU Newsletter

February 24, 2006

CPU EVENT: "ID: The Politics of Intelligent Design" (Monday, 02/27) -- RSVP NOW!

CPU EVENT:

1. "ID: The Politics of Intelligent Design" - A CPU Panel Discussion

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1. "ID: The Politics of Intelligent Design" - A CPU Panel Discussion

RSVP at http://www.cupolitics.org/rsvp. Seats are filling quickly! Press release and event poster are also available online.

Date: Monday, 02/27
Time: 7:45PM
Location: Roone Arledge Cinema

Featuring:

Rev. John C. Rankin is president of the Theological Education Institute (TEI) and Mars Hill Society of Hartford, CT. Raised an agnostic Unitarian and secular humanist before his conversion to a biblical worldview in 1967, he holds graduate degrees from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary ( M.Div.) and Harvard Divinity School (Th.M. Ethics and Public Policy). The author of the three volume series, First the Gospel, Then Politics., and host of the Mars Hill Forum series, John has been married since 1977, and he and his wife Nancy have four children. His website is: www.teinetwork.com .

Barbara Forrest is the co-author with Paul R. Gross of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press, 2004), which details the political and religious aims of the intelligent design creationist movement. She served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the first legal case involving intelligent design, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, which originated in Dover, PA, and was resolved with a judgment in favor of the plaintiffs in December 2005. She is a member of the board of directors of the National Center for Science Education and the National Advisory Council of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She has appeared on Larry King Live and ABC's Nightline. Her radio interviews include NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow, Americans United's Culture Shocks with Barry Lynn, and Infidel Guy with Reginald Finley. She is a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of History and Political Science at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Nick Matzke is a Public Information Project Director at NCSE. He has a double B.S. in Biology and Chemistry from Valparaiso University, and a Master's degree in Geography from U.C. Santa Barbara. He has a long-standing interest in evolution in a spatial context, particularly issues surrounding dispersal and convergence. Before coming to NCSE, he conducted extensive literature surveys on the origin of carnivorous plant traps and bacterial flagella. In the area of evolution and earth history education, Nick specializes in making the scientific literature accessible and understandable to the public, in order to rebut antievolutionist claims about the evolution of biological complexity. During the landmark "intelligent design" case Kitzmiller v. Dover, Nick spent a year working for the Plaintiffs' legal team, providing scientific advice and researching the creationist origins of the ID movement, work which eventually resulted in the discovery of the now-famous creationist drafts of the 1989 ID textbook Of Pandas and People (this episode was recently written up in Skeptic magazine). After his appointment at NCSE, he intends to enter a Ph.D. program, where he can work on the integration of bioinformatics, biogeography, and large-scale evolution.

Joel Cracraft is Lamont Curator of Birds and Curator-in-Charge of the Department of Ornithology, American Museum of Natural History. He received his B.S. (Zoology) from the University of Oklahoma, M.S. (zoology) from Louisiana State University, and his Ph.D. (biology) from Columbia University in 1969. He was on the staff of the University of Illinois, Chicago (Anatomy and Cell Biology) before coming to New York in 1992 as Curator of Ornithology. He also has professorial appointments in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University and in the Graduate Program in Biology at the City University of New York.

His research interests are in systematic biology, biological diversification, and biogeography. Much of his current research focuses on the higher level systematics of birds, and the radiation of the large Australian endemic avifauna, including birds-of-paradise, using both molecular sequence and morphological data. He has written or edited books on phylogenetic systematics (1979, 1980), phylogenetic analysis of molecular data (1991), the biodiversity crisis (2000), the Tree of Life (2004), and the teaching of evolution (2005), in addition to over 150 scientific papers. He is a recipient of the Elliott Coues Award from the American Ornithologists' Union, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is a member of 14 professional societies and has held office or served on the board of many of them, including being President of the Society of Systematic Biologists and President of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (2004). Over the past decade he has been active in "biopolitical" efforts to promote systematics and biodiversity science, including Systematics Agenda 2000/US (co-chair), Systematics Agenda 2000 International (Steering Committee), Biodiversity Panel, President Clinton's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, OSTP (member), and the international biodiversity science program Diversitas (Steering Committee). He also served as an advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union at the Arkansas creation trial in 1981.

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