NYT bestselling author Jerry Coyne in Halifax: Faith vs Fact
Details
This is a free talk by author Jerry Coyne. Seating is first come, first seated, but if you're coming it would be great if you could RSVP here to give us an idea of numbers.
Many people claim that science and religion are not only compatible, but can actually help each other via fruitful dialogue. In this talk Jerry will show that this claim is false: science and faith are obdurately incompatible, and on several levels. After demonstrating the incompatibility, he will show how attempts to reconcile science and religion have been failures, and how religious people strike back at science when they realize this. At the end he'll describe the harm that is done to society, and to rationality, by regarding religious faith as a virtue rather than as a vice.
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About the Speaker
Jerry A. Coyne is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He received a B.S. in Biology from the College of William and Mary and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at Harvard University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at The University of California at Davis, he took his first academic position as assistant professor in the Department of Zoology at The University of Maryland. In 1996 he joined the faculty of The University of Chicago and has been there ever since. Coyne’s work has been largely concerned with the genetics of species differences, aimed at understanding the evolutionary processes that produce new species. He has written 115 scientific papers and more than 140 popular articles, book reviews, and columns, as well as a scholarly book about his research area—Speciation, co-authored with H. Allen Orr—and a trade book about the evidence for evolution—Why Evolution is True, which was a New York Times bestseller. His second trade book, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (Viking/Penguin Random House) was published in May, 2015. Coyne is a contributor for The New York Times, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slate, The Nation, USA Today, and other popular periodicals.
Sponsored by CFI Canada and Dalhousie's Centre for Comparative Genomics and Evolutionary Bioinformatics.
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