This Saturday, February 7, is Darwin Day at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The official site is online, including the full schedule of the day's activities.
I will be giving a short presentation in the afternoon session, around 1:30 or so, covering my work on the evolution of hearing and language in humans. With the participation of my great graduate students, we're also planning to have some hominid casts for the exploration stations in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, there are other very interesting events. The morning presentations by evo-devo expert Sean Carroll, zoologist Patricia McConnell, and Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography should be really good. And there's a panel in the afternoon covering science in the media, featuring James Crow, Steve Paulson of Wisconsin Public Radio, Jeremy Jackson and Molly Jahn.
The Wisconsin State Journal has published a nice article about the events:
To Tony Goldberg, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine, the concept of evolution is far from a dusty theory. It’s a real process that informs just about everything he does in his laboratory.
Goldberg studies the ecology and evolution of disease and disease-causing organisms and he sees evolution every time he studies a virus or a bacteria that has changed to resist our latest efforts to control it.
"People would be surprised," Goldberg said, "at how deeply evolutionary biology affects our everyday lives."
This is the start of a busy week for me, as I will be giving a lecture in Chicago next Wednesday and at UW-Whitewater next Thursday evening. I'm looking forward to both those events as well, and will post later with some more information if you're in either area.
