Symposium: Darwin and the debate over human origins

To mark the 151st anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, MIT’s Science of the Eye program will hold a symposium on “Darwin and the Debate over Human Origins” a 7:30 p.m. tonight in the Broad Institute Auditorium.

Lecturers will include:

• Darwin scholar Janet Browne, professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University on “Apes in Our Family Tree”;
• David Reich, professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School on “Evidence for Gene Glow from Neanderthals into Modern Humans”;
• Professor David Housman, of MIT's David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, on “Inherited Disease and Human Evolution”;
• John Durant, director of the MIT Museum, on “The Continuing Controversy over Teaching Evolution”

The recent sequencing of human and primate genomes has deepened the evidence supporting Darwin’s view of human evolution, yet the teaching of evolution in our schools remains problematic.

Visit the event website or e-mail guisbond@mit.edu for more information.