Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
As is always the case, at least in my experience, the Freedom from Religion Foundations meetings are at once serious, moving, sociable (lots of chances to mingle with members and speakers), and uplifting. The entire meeting is a bit more than a day long, so I’ll give a brief report halfway through.
Last night Dan Barker began the meeting with his piano music, in this case a rewritten version of a Christian song, and Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-President, formally opened the meeting, giving several awards to people who had given their city council meetings secular invocations rather than prayer.
Linda LaScola, who runs the Clergy Project with Dan Dennett–a project that helps nonbelieving clergy either find their way or come out of the closet–talked a bit about this very worthy endeavor. Then came one of the high spots of the meeting so far: a fundamentalist Christian from Eastern Tennessee, who had gone for years on the Clergy Project boards (open only to nonbelieving clergy) as “Adam Mann,” stood up, told his story, and, for the very first time, gave his real name: Carter Warden.
It’s always moving and sad to hear these stories, and his was especially poignant, as it began with him investigating evolution, since he felt he had to know the enemy that his Church rejected. Well, that led him to read for years–all sorts of science, secular philosophy, books by atheists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Four Horsemen, and so on (he even read my book!). He finally came out as an uncompromising atheist, but his family didn’t know until just recently, and many of them still don’t know, as he announced it only here, and last night.
A musician, like Dan Barker, Warden then played guitar and sang a song he wrote about the freedom that comes with giving up God; it was really very good. He then did a duet with Dan sitting at the piano, riffing on an old Christian song, but changing the words so that it was Jesus, not science, that was built on “sinking sand” and that science, not Jesus, was a “rock.” Needless to say, Warden got a standing ovation. Then there was a short panel: Warden, Barker, Dennett, and LaScola took questions from the audience about the clergy project.
Lawrence Krauss then got “The Emperor’s New Clothes” award, and gave one of his characteristically animated and fascinating lectures on cosmology, “Turning metaphysics into physics,” about the origins of the universe and the new work detecting gravity waves.
This morning there was the famous “non-prayer breakfast” in which Dan Barker presided over a “moment of bedlam” instead of grace, and we all shouted, clapped, and clinked our glasses. The morning and early afternoon featured more awards, including one to Laurie Lebo, a local reporter who wrote The Devil in Doverbook about the ID trial. Lebo, a runner and only 52 years old, described the heart attack she had this summer, which gave her a near-death-experience that she refused to impute to God.
Lebo was followed by Rafida Bonya Ahmed, who received the new “Forward” award from the FFRF. Ahmed is the widow of Dr. Avijit Roy, the secular Bangladeshi blogger who, along with his wife, was attacked in Bangladesh by machete-wielding Islamic terrorists. Roy died, and Ahmed was severely wounded, sustaining head injuries and losing the thumb of her left hand (an absence clearly visible on the big screen as the mark of terrorism). Ahmed continues the pair’s work of secularism, but now from Austin. When introducing Ahmed and telling about her tragedy, Annie Laurie’s voice broke in sorrow, as did Ahmed’s when she described the incident in detail. It was so sad. But Ahmed’s message was ultimately uplifting: we are all citizens of the world and must help our brothers and sisters who are repressed by Islam, or by the rapacious capitalism that awards Bangladeshi garment workers a full 70 cents a day for their labors. Ahmed had no use for what she called the “PC mentality” that excuses extremist Islam.
I’ll be speaking at 4 pm after Dan Barker and Susan Jacoby, and Dan Dennett will be talking after dinner. It’s been a fine meeting so far. You can see the schedule here.
After Jerry noted that the world’s most expensive BBQ is dry-aged and in New York City, and that “true Texans wouldn’t have anything to do with” it, I thought it might be a good time to feature Texas BBQ, which I enjoyed at Iron Works BBQ in Austin while at the Evolution 2016 meetings earlier this summer.
Iron Works is in an old iron works at the corner of Red River and Cesar Chavez Streets, conveniently located just down the block from the convention center where the meetings were held. It was recommended by locals, and so I went with a couple of colleagues. You order and pick up your main course at a counter window, grabbing drinks out of an open ice chest and heading to the check out, and then get to sit down.
One of my colleagues had the pulled pork, with which she had a Shiner IPA (Shiner being a brewery to the southeast of Austin).
My other colleague had the sampler plate– brisket, ribs, sausage, and maybe you can spot some other sort of BBQ in there. (New category of WEIT post: Spot the meat!)
I had the sausage, with an added large pickle. For sides I had creamed corn– delicious, and you don’t often see it these days– and beans– also delicious. But they didn’t have my two favorite Southern sides: okra and fried pickles. There may well be regional variations in side preference and availability, which as a northerner, I am not accustomed to.
Like all good BBQ joints, there was a roll of paper towels at the table.
I went back another time with another colleague, this time enjoying the brisket, with potato salad and mac and cheese as my sides. I washed it down with a Big Red, a Texas-made soda of the cream soda/Dr. Pepper class.
For a more upper crust brunch, a colleague and I went to a classier joint, with bloody marys
Austin is famed for its musical nightlife, and there were two areas I got to see.
Dead robot soldiers.
The first was the Rainey Street District, which is an older residential neighborhood, now with condos, with the remaining low frame houses (and their lawns) converted into bars. It attracted mostly the young urban professional crowd. These two signs were in the neighborhood (the pictures obviously taken in daylight). I don’t know what the second one means, but it has a cat, so I liked it.
The other nightlife area was 6th Street, which seemed the more traditional honky-tonks-with-live-bands kind of a place I was expecting. This is Darwin’s Pub, which of course was a must see for visiting evolutionary biologists. My vision was not as blurry as the photo– it’s hard to get a decent picture in a darkened pub.
And one night at the street corner bar at the aptly named Corner, we discovered it was a colleague’s birthday, and the waitress managed to rustle up a filled red velvet cupcake for her, which was on the house. After singing Happy Birthday, we devoured it.
I spent June 17-22 in Austin, Texas, for Evolution 2016, the annual joint meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biology, which is the premier annual gathering of evolutionary biologists from around the world. I hope to make a few posts about the goings on, and we’ll start with some natural history.
On the day I arrived I met up with my friend and colleague Steve Orzack, and we headed out to Pedernales Falls State Park, about an hour west of Austin, to do some birding and herping prior to the official kickoff of the meeting that evening. Also keeping an eye out for mammals, I noticed a sign mentioning “rock squirrels”, showing a black headed squirrel, and recalling how variable fox squirrels are, I wondered if this might be the local variety of fox squirrels. We soon came across a squirrel, which, however, was a rather interesting Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis).
Eastern gray squirrel at Pedernales Falls State Park, Johnson City, Texas, 17 June 2016
In the northern United States, gray squirrels are typically gray above and white below, while fox squirrels are a slightly different shade of gray above and fulvous below. Very rarely a gray squirrel may be fulvous below, in which case the definitive character to look for is that gray squirrels have a white frosting or “halo” on their tails (the tips of the outer tail hairs being white). The squirrel above caught our attention because while gray above, it’s clearly ochraceous buff below, so I thought it might be a fox squirrel. We kept it under observation, and it soon showed its true colors.
Eastern gray squirrel at Pedernales Falls State Park, Johnson City, Texas, 17 June 2016.
Obligingly raising its tail while stopping to drink out of small puddles and pools in the spring-fed muddy track along which we walked, it revealed its gray squirrel-defining frosting on its tail, while also clearly showing it was reddish below.
I’ve never seen gray squirrels in the north drink like this, and it may reflect the scarcity of water sources in the dry scrublands of Texas. This squirrel was also of interest because the park is in Blanco County, and according to Texas Tech, Blanco County is just outside the range of the gray squirrel, so this would be a new county record. (The rock squirrel of Pedernales Falls turns out to be a rather bushy-tailed, black-headed ground squirrel, Spermophilus variegatus, but we did not see any).
The reddish ventral coloration was not a peculiarity of this individual, for the urban squirrels of Austin were also gray squirrels with ochraceous buff venters. This guy was hanging out at one of the bars on Rainey Street.
Eastern gray squirrel on Rainey Street, Austin, Texas, 19 June 2016.
This one was in the parkland strip along Lady Bird Lake (actually an impounded strip of the Colorado River) just west of Rainey Street. The ochraceous buff venter is clearly visible.
Eastern gray squirrel, Austin, Texas, 21 June 2016.
This particular squirrel was first spotted with a mixed flock of great-tailed grackles, white-winged doves, and rock doves. Try spotting all four species in the picture below
Mixed feeding flock of rock doves, white-winged doves, great-tailed grackles, and an eastern gray squirrel, Austin, Texas, 21 June 2016. Can you spot all the species?
Austin’s most famous mammals are the Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) that roost under the Congress Avenue Bridge, and emerge by the millions (or so I am told) each evening. I went out twice to see them, once from below the bridge, and once from the sidewalk above; they came out about 9 PM. Both times large crowds gathered both above and below, and many vessels, including tour boats, gathered on the lake below the bridge. Attempts to photograph them were unsuccessful with my limited camera, but you can see them briefly in the video; listen for the murmur of the bats in the background behind the voices. The red light is a search light used by one of the tour boats, and I tried to follow this light to catch the bats on the video.
On the last day of the meetings, I walked under the bridge to get to the concluding Super Social, and found this dead bat below the bridge. You can clearly see its ‘free tail’ (i.e. the tail is not completely contained within the membrane of the uropatagium).
Mexican free-tailed bat, Austin, Texas, 21 June 2016.
The deposits of bat-feces rich sediments (bat guano) below bat roosts (especially if in caves) are often important sources of fossils of bats and associated creatures; there’s a ‘rain’ of dead bats into this sediment. But with a lake and sidewalk below, this cute fellow is unlikely to be fossilized.
Mexican free-tailed bat, Austin, Texas, 21 June 2016.
The pièce de résistance of the mammals of Austin for me was a new species and family of mammals for my life list: I spotted a coypu (Myocastor coypus) swimming down Waller Creek in the heart of downtown Austin, right behind Iron Works BBQ. The coypu (or nutria) is an invasive species, originally brought to the U.S. from South America. They look like large muskrats, but do not have a laterally compressed tail. I was looking for the tail, which I could not see clearly, but once I looked at my pictures and video I could easily see the distinctive, diagnostic whitish snout of the coypu.
I went to one panel yesterday: “Humanism and Humor: Funny Ladies Discuss”, with Margaret Downey as moderator and featuring comedian and author Julia Sweeney and comedian and activist Leighann Lord (she also co-hosted Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson). I thought it might be a rather serious discussion of comedy and its implications for nonbelievers, but it turned out to be hilarious: both comedians cracked us up many times with spontaneous quips. I suppose I should have realized that, but what I realized only during the panel was that comedians have brains different from the rest of us. I, for one, couldn’t emit bon mot after bon mot, and on the spot. It’s a great talent. Julia told some stories about her SNL days, and added that she can’t watch Al Franken as a politician, because she knows what he’s really thinking when he’s speaking as a senator from Minnesota, and she cracks up when thinking of what’s going through Franken’s mind. He was, she said, the funniest person she ever met.
She was also asked what kind of sketch her most famous character, the androgynous Pat, would do in these days of the transgender bathroom fracas: she responded that it would probably be along the lines of people hanging around outside the bathrooms to see which one Pat entered. She also told some stories about SNL regular Victoria Jackson (a believer): one involved Jackson saying offstage that we really shouldn’t help poor people, because they’re going to heaven anyway and their miserable lives shouldn’t be prolonged, for that just delays their receiving their ultimate reward. According to Julia, she and Al Franken said, “You’re kidding, aren’t you, Victoria?”, and Jackson said, “No, I really mean it!”
Left to right: Margaret Downey, Leighann Lord, Julia Sweeney
Star Trek fans may know John De Lancie, an actor and director who is best known for playing the role of Q in the Star Trek series (I never saw it, but Q was apparently an omnipotent and nasty character—much like Donald Trump). De Lancie has done a lot of other work, including Shakespearian acting and playing the role of Clarence Darrow in a traveling play that (unlike Inherit the Wind), was based on the real Scopes Trial.
Accepting the Isaac Asimov award for Humanist Arts, De Lancie gave a really lovely talk (well emoted, since he’s an actor!) on how he became an atheist when only about 8 years old, how he was thought to be stupid because he couldn’t read till he was about ten, and how he found himself (and his ability to read) by being cast in a school production of Shakespeare. His speech will be on YouTube in about a month, as will all the others, so I won’t recount some of his anecdotes, including his meeting with another atheist (and previous Isaac Asimov awardee), Gene Rodenberry. He did say that his favorite Shakespeare plays were Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.
John DeLancie
Elizabeth Loftus got the Isaac Asimov award for Science, and gave a nice talk on her work on faulty memory and the fallacy of recovered memories. She also discussed the persecution she faced from social workers and psychologists opposed to her assertion that there is little evidence for long-term repression of traumatic memories, including those involving sexual abuse. She was, in fact, sued by a “recovered memory” patient for investigating her case and finding that the evidence for a recovered memory of abuse was bogus. At one point in the five-year lawsuit, which went to the California Supreme Court (she won, although the lawyers were the real winner!), Elizabeth said she spent hours trying to feel better by watching Lifetime T.V., which often has shows about beleaguered women who triumph over adversity. She said she was embarrassed to be a professional psychologist who found solace in such dreck, but that it worked. In the Q&A session afterwards, a guy got up and confessed that, he too, watched Lifetime T.V. and it was even worse, for he skipped the NFL playoffs to watch it.
I had my picture taken with Dr. Loftus afterwards; she’s a lovely person, and a very tough woman:
The banquet food continued to be good, with a nice piece of salmon over lentils for dinner:
. . . followed by a chocolate tart with whipped cream. (There was a salad an a nice bread basket beforehand.)
And, in my room, “hydrate” yourself: only $3.50 for a 16-ounce bottle of water. How dare they? Needless to say, I drank tap water.
I give my talk in about an hour, so it’s time to shower and put on the nice clothes.
Yesterday was actually the second day of the annual AHA meetings in Chicago, but the first day in which the conference was in full swing. I arrived in the late afternoon and so was able to make only one panel discussion: “Examining Honor Culture in Islam”, with Muhammad Syed and Sarah Haider (co-founders of the Ex-Muslims of North America) as well as Mya Saleem, a former hijabi who works with that organization.
The discussion was pretty good, with Saleem questioning the notion of what “choice” means when it comes to religious covering like the hijab. Her own story belies the notion that a Western Muslim always wears the hijab by choice: she was forced to wear it in a religious school starting in her teens, and then was shamed by other girls when she tried to take it off after school: they said the “good girls” wore their hijabs all the time. Mya continued to wear it for over a decade after school. Haider said that she thinks there should be no laws in the West forbidding wearing religious clothing, but that even discussing such legal strictures is premature: first we must have a conversation about what wearing such clothing really means. And that conversation is only beginning.
The question I would like to ask those who celebrate the hijab as their “choice” is this:
“What criteria, exactly, would lead you to agree that wearing the headscarf is not someone’s choice?”
As a determinist, in this discussion I take “choice” to mean “an action that was taken without any social pressure to perform it.” (n.b.: This does not mean that I accept a compatibilist version of free will.) Using that criterion, I think there’s much less choice than people maintain. If your parents or schoolmates tell you or pressure you to wear it, it’s not a choice. And in the vast majority of cases, I suspect, there’s parental and social pressure, eroding the narrative that it’s a “choice” in the sense above. How many Muslims living in the West don the hijab if they didn’t come from a family that urged them to wear it (many Muslim schools in the U.S. put the scarf on girls as young as 5), or didn’t belong to a group of hijab-wearing friends and coreligionists?
If you want to see the Authoritarian Leftist celebration of the putative choice, just check out the PuffHo Religion Page. For the past few months PuffHo has been celebrating the hijab: here are a few recent articles.
Beautiful reasons?
PuffHo’s motivations are good: to help dispel bigotry against Muslims; but their incessant pro-hijab campaign rings hollow, as they never discuss the difficult issue of whether wearing the garment is really a “choice”. Nor do they mention that in countries like Iran and Afghanistan, it’s not a choice, nor is it in places like Egypt or Turkey where, although wearing it isn’t mandatory, there’s intense social pressure to do so.
The evening’s banquet featured two notables getting awards: Bishop John Shelby Spong and Jared Diamond. (The noms were pretty good, too: a nice salad, chicken breast stuffed with greens, good bread basket and a lovely cheesecake for dessert. Sadly, there was no free booze, and the prices at the convention bar were outrageous: $10 for a glass of wine and $9 for a beer. Fortunately, Elizabeth Loftus offered me a “you fly and I’ll buy” deal, giving me $20 for drinks if I’d go and get them.)
I knew about Spong, of course, as he’s famous for being the Nonreligious Bishop: a man who, while Episcopalian Bishop of the Diocese of Newark for many years, wrote several dozen book about the silliness of conventional Christianity, all while preaching a doctrine of tolerance and nontheism. You can read about him at the link above, and about some of his beliefs here, but his religion is basically secular humanism. Spong doesn’t believe in a personal or anthropomorphic God, and sees the manifestation of God as our living of a good life and “wastefully” dispending love (he also mentioned the “Ground of Being”). He sees the Bible as a completely manmade document, and argues that in no sense should it be taken literally. (I’m not sure how he feels about Jesus.)
Spong’s speech, which he he gave after receiving the Religious Liberty Award, was magnificent: the perfect after-dinner combination of humor (we were in stitches much of the time) and seriousness (a commitment to equal rights for all)—all delivered in a wonderful, fluid style and an appealing North Carolina accent. I suspect the talk, which was filmed, will be on YouTube, as the AHA posts its award videos. I’ll thus put it up eventually, and leave you with one thing Spong said. During his life, he noted that he’d received sixteen serious death threats, and none of them were from atheists. They all came from his fellow Christians. Not much of a surprise there!
Along with Martin Luther King, Jr., Spong may be the preacher I most admire. Spong has fought tirelessly for women’s rights and gay rights, ordaining the first openly gay priest in his Church in 1989. He got in big trouble with his Church for that: they passed a resolution “disassociating” themselves from Spong’s diocese. But in the end he won, and there are now many gays and women who are Episcopal priests.
During the Q&A, I wanted to ask Spong (but didn’t) why he considered himself a Christian, for he rejects most of its tenets and doctrines. Someone did ask him why, if he valued Judaism so highly (he had a great spiel on the demonization of Jews by Christians), he wasn’t a Jew. He didn’t really answer, but gave his idea that the New Testament was really made up to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament, and that any ancient Jew would have immediately recognized the New Testament as a completely confected, nonliteral document.
Bishop John Shelby Spong
Would that all the world’s preachers were like Spong! Were that the case, with their flock believing likewise, I’d have no problem with religion.
The AHA’s Humanist of the Year Award for 2016 went to Jared Diamond, whom all biologists know as a man who has successful (and simultaneous) careers as a physiologist, avian ecologist, and anthropologist. (He’s still going strong at 78, and still making expeditions to New Guinea.) Many of you will also know him as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, an analysis of why some human societies flourished and others didn’t.
Jared Diamond, also famed for his colorful jackets
Diamond’s 20-minute talk, which he said he wouldn’t have given nearly so passionately before a “regular” audience, was about the incompatibility of science and religion—a topic dear to my heart. He mentioned several scientific issues that, he said, didn’t necessarily show that two areas were wholly incompatible, but that theologians had yet to face.
One was the issue of other planets in the Universe harboring intelligent life. Diamond noted that of the nearly 3000 planets that we know of outside our Solar System, about 0.3%—nine—were in the “life zone,” with temperatures amenable to the evolution of carbon-based life. He is certain that there are many planets in the Universe that do harbor intelligent life, but said theologians haven’t settled on a doctrine of how God would deal with them. (Well, Michael Ruse has: he wrote about an “Intergalactic Jesus” who could fly from planet to planet, bringing salvation to all!) Diamond also wondered how theologians would deal with the salvation of hominins who didn’t leave descendants, like Homo erectus or the Neandertals, or how they’d deal with those early hybrids between “modern” humans and Neandertals.
Finally, Diamond discussed why he thought we’d never even learn about intelligent life elsewhere. The reasons were varied, including the notion that intelligent civilizations have only a limited window of time to send out “flying saucers”. For example, Diamond sees our society collapsing to the point that by 2050 we will no longer have the ability to send out space vehicles, so that over all of human history there was only a hundred-year window for interplanetary communication. Even the closest star is several light years away, making interplanetary travel nearly impossible. Further, the chances that a vehicle sent out by an intelligent civilization would find intelligent life on another planet would be low: such planets are rare.
In response to a question about why alien vehicles couldn’t home in on our electromagnetic signals—whether the signals come from SETI project or just regular t.v. and radio transmissions—Diamond said that endeavors like SETI angered him, because the meeting of two intelligent species would undoubtedly lead to Big Trouble. He used the examples of what humans have done to chimps and gorillas, and how different human cultures historically dealt with each other when they met.
All in all it was one of the best evenings I’ve had at a secular/humanist/atheist meeting, with great talks and good food.
Oh, and here’s the panorama from my room at the Hyatt. On the left is the Chicago skyline, and in the center looms one of my favorite buildings: the R. R. Donnelley Printing Plant (built 1912-1929), a great specimen of brick Art Deco architecture. I’ve heard that most of the telephone books in the U.S., as well as the Sears Catalogue, were made in this printing plant. It closed in 1991, 5 years after I moved to Chicago. You can see a bit of Lake Michigan to the right:
Noms: I forgot to photograph the individual cheesecakes last night, each bearing a chocolate AHA symbol; but here’s a picture from the AHA Facebook page. It was scrumptious!
I was in the suburbs a fair amount of time during the AAA convention, being a “handler” for Jeff Tayler and Inna Shevchenko, so I didn’t take a ton of pictures of the meeting itself. Fortunately, Mark Gura did, and posted a lot of them on his Facebook page’s AAA album). I’ll put his photos first, and mine toward the bottom.
Our master of ceremonies for the two days was none other than our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, played by Harry Shaughnessy. He had some kind of mechanized skateboard and glided around like a divine being.
These were all speakers at the meeting. First, Dale McGowan:
Dave Silverman, president of the American Atheists:
Herb Silverman, who debated Dave Silverman in a “Silverman vs. Silverman Smackdown”, the topic being “Can you call yourself a Jewish atheist?” Herb said yes, Dave no. Although people seemed to think that Dave got the upper hand, I’m not going to stop calling myself a secular atheistic Jew.
Left to right: JT Eberhard, Richard Hayes,Hugh Mann and Tim Branin.
And my photos. The hotel is very near the Atlanta airport, and since I got up early I could see the planes stacked up to land before dawn. Here they make their final approach as the sun comes up:
Jeff and Inna doing a joint Q&A after their separate talks at the Southern Crescent Freethinkers meeting. I can’t find a YouTube video of Jeff talking about religion, but there’s a recent one of Inna giving a TED talk, “I will not stop speaking out loud.”
This was only Inna’s second visit to the U.S. (she’s originally from Ukraine, and is now a political refugee in Paris), and Jeff’s first visit to the American Deep South (he’s lived most of his life overseas, the last 23 years in Moscow). I had great pleasure in introducing them an echt Southern barbecue meal at The Barbecue Kitchen, which I highlighted the other day. We all had chopped BBQ pork, with three vegetable “sides”. Inna also essayed sweet tea, the “table wine of the south.” And they both cleaned their plates. (The place is good!)
The night before that, we exposed our visitors to another Southern food experience at Mary Mac’s Tearoom, a famous place to eat down-home Southern food in a fancier atmosphere. It’s an Atlanta institution. Here we all are about to chow down (the waiter took the photo). I had chicken and dumplings with tomato pie (a fantastic side) and squash souffle. And sweet tea, of course. At the right is Melissa Dawn, the brand-new president of the Atheist Alliance of America.
The bread basket at Mary Mac’s includes corn muffins, cinnamon rolls, and yeasty dinner rolls. Uncharacteristically, I forgot to take pictures of our main courses!
I’m just back from speaking in Torun, which was great fun, including a slap-up traditional Polish lunch in the dean’s office, which is the fanciest office I’ve ever seen (some of the furniture dates from the sixteenth century). I also saw Copernicus’s house, but I’m getting ahead of myself; there will photos of all this tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m announcing a secular meeting whose organizers seem to have been rather dilatory about publicizing it. Here goes:
The Atheist Alliance of America (AAA) has finally put up the program for its annual meeting, held this year in Atlanta, Georgia between October 15 and 18. I’ll speak briefly (less than 10 minutes) as recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, but there is a big slate of other speakers—including Jeff Tayler (his strident secular Sunday sermons summarized here), and Inna Shevchenko, head of FEMEN—who will be giving full-length talks. I’m also scheduled to talk to the kids of Camp Quest about the wonders of evolution—another a longish talk.
I’ll look forward to meeting any readers there, and although I don’t think the conference will be selling my books, I’ll be glad to sign any that you bring (if you want a cat drawn in, you must say the magic phrase, which in this case is the Latin binomial for the tiger).
