Well, it's been a week since the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday, so I imagine everyone has recovered from their celebrations. Locally, the University of Utah and the Utah Museum of Natural History each had a number of events to mark the occasion. The local PBS station broadcast a two hour NOVA documentary called, "Intelligent Design on Trial." Earlier in the year, the BBC radio 4 program In Our Time had a four part series on the life and work of Darwin. The cool thing about all these things is that they all stimulated thought about evolution and the place of science in society. The down side is that most of this stuff is preaching to the converted. If anybody out there has any good ideas on how to get the commercial media to give more time and attention to science matters, shout them from the roof tops.
To avoid ending on a down note, I'll draw everybody's attention to an article in Tuesday's New York Times that grabbed my attention. It seems that the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology has decided to not hold it's 2011 meeting in New Orleans due to a Louisiana law that opens science classroom to creationism. The amusing thing about the story is the city they decided to move the meeting to . . . Salt Lake City. Take that Mardi Gras town. Salt Lake City, more friendly to science than New Orleans, could be a new city motto.
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