CLIENTS

          As part of the 2006 Darwin Day celebrations taking place all over the world, Red Bank Humanists will present a special Darwin Day presentation at its monthly Forum, Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 10:30 a.m., at the Red Bank Charter School, 58 Oakland Street. The guest speaker, from the Darwin exhibition at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, will be Norman Rothwell, retired Professor of Biology from Long Island University, whose specialty is Cell Biology and Genetics. The event is free and open to the public. The Museum’s Darwin exhibition is the most in-depth exhibition ever mounted on Charles Darwin, the highly original thinker, botanist, geologist, naturalist, and creator of the theory of evolution through natural selection.

            Darwin's 200th Birthday will occur on February 12, 2009; it will also be the 150th Anniversary of the publication of his famous book On The Origin of Species. Organizers will have time to evolve a truly International Celebration to show appreciation for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity. More information is available at www.darwinday.org.

            Red Bank Humanists seek to understand the universe through science and critical thinking and represent an overall objective of developing a more humane society. A complete schedule of Red Bank Humanists events is available at www.redbankhumanists.org. RBH is an affiliate of the American Humanist Association, the Council for Secular Humanism, Institute of Humanist Studies, and the New Jersey Humanist Network.

            “We’re delighted the American Museum of Natural History agreed to preview the Darwin exhibit for us in Red Bank,” said RBH Vice President, Bruce Fowler.  “But more importantly, we plan to take a group from Red Bank in a few weeks, and have a complete tour of the Museum’s exhibit in New York City.”

            On display at the Museum are live Galápagos tortoises and horned frogs from South America, along with actual fossil specimens collected by Darwin.

            Norman Rothwell, the guest speaker in Red Bank on February 12th (Darwin’s actual birthday), was a Fulbright Scholar in Sri Lanka, has taught graduate classes in evolution, and has been a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History since 1997. The Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History will run through August 20, 2006. The curator for Darwin is Niles Eldredge of the Division of Paleontology at the AMNH. For more information go to:  www.amnh.org.

 

            (The following is from the “AMNH” website:)

           

    What did Darwin do, and why does he still matter so much?

            Happiest at home with his notebooks and his microscope, he shunned the public eye. Controversy made him ill. This brilliant observer of nature kept his most original and revolutionary idea under wraps for decades. Yet today, two centuries after Charles Darwin's birth, nearly everyone knows his name.

            Keenly observing nature in all its forms—from fossil sloths to mockingbirds, primroses to children—Darwin saw that we all are related. Every living thing shares an ancestry, he concluded, and the vast diversity of life on Earth results from processes at work over millions of years and still at work today. Darwin's explanation for this great unfolding of life through time—the theory of evolution by natural selection—transformed our understanding of the living world, much as the ideas of Galileo, Newton and Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the physical universe.

            Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection underlies all modern biology. It enables us to decipher our genes and fight viruses, and to understand Earth's fossil record and rich biodiversity. Simple yet at times controversial, misunderstood and misused for social goals, the theory remains unchallenged as the central concept of biology. Charles Darwin, reluctant revolutionary, profoundly altered our view of the natural world and our place in it.

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