when you go to a conference on evolution, it’s hard to miss the one guy in the room who actually looks like darwin. a philosopher amongst an auditorium full of scientists, he joked that his uncanny resemblance to ol’ charles might have been the reason he was invited in the first place. dan dennett, co-director of the center for cognitive studies at tufts university, might be more accurately described as an evolutionary philosopher. his work and writings focus on the philosophy of biology and the mind. why we are the way we are, why we think the way we think, how we got that way, and why people keep insisting on believing in fairy tales to explain complex things.

(according to wikipedia, when recovering from aortic replacement surgery and after having been told that his friends were praying for him, he very nearly asked them “did you also sacrifice a goat?”)

not originally on my lineup of people to photograph for this conference, i was really pleased that dennett agreed to sit for a few minutes. aside from my longstanding beard-envy, his was one of the few presentations i was actually able to see (on darwin and memes). funny, sharp and insightful, the presentation was way too short. luckily, there is quite a lot of dan dennett on youtube.

steven pinker is a psychologist at harvard who specializes in the evolution of language. in an appearance on the colbert report he was asked to explain how the mind works in five words or less. his answer: brain cells fire in patterns.

he is a charter member of the luxuriant and flowing hair club for scientists. and yes, that’s a real thing, if not entirely serious.

you can see steven’s brain here.

you can see steve’s genome here.

buy steve’s books here.

i was raised in an atheist jewish household in two of the biggest (and most liberal) cities in the country. my brother and i never even went to hebrew school. i like to say that we’re more jew-ish than jewish. we love matzo ball soup. we’re expert complainers. but no bar mitzvahs. i have no idea when passover is, no idea if yom kippur happens before rosh hashonah, or which days you get to take off of school. we never went to temple, though there was a temple across the street from our house. my brother, genius that he was, discovered that there was a day camp in the temple where they had arcade games that didn’t require quarters. we snuck in one day, barely making it through one game of pac man before the rabbis discovered us and kicked us out. that was pretty much the extent of our exposure to religion. we tried hannukah one year, but the family collectively decided that doing anything for eight days straight was way too much of a pain in the ass. worrier that i was, i felt that candles were a fire hazard. we mostly celebrated christmas as it was over in one day and everything else was closed, anyway.

as someone who was raised in an environment where nobody at all was religious, where reason and responsibility were valued, it was very shocking to me to encounter religious america as i got older.

ken miller is a professor at brown university, and gained some amount of fame as a key witness in the dover school  board intelligent design trial. he was an especially damning witness against the creationists as he actually wrote the evolution textbook that they were trying to ban. on top of that he is a roman catholic.

ken lectures often to conferences and has been very involved with the promotion of science in education. he’s a great speaker, very funny and very smart. he’s all over youtube, one example of which is embedded below. i’m a total geek for these kinds of videos. i find them fascinating and can watch them all day.

find out more about the dover school board trial here.

see books by ken miller here.

FAQs about evolution here at the national center for science education.