Richard Dawkins talks about his latest book “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence For Evolution” at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2009.
Read the excerpts from first chapter of the book here and the second chapter of the book here.
Or just buy the book:
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Jerry Coyne explains ‘Why Evolution Is True’ (also the title of his excellent new book) at the Atheist Alliance International 2009 conference, sponsored by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.
Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Why Evolution Is True”. His official blog is here.
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Off-topic. Got to know this from a friend. Apparently Singapore’s Science Center is giving free star gazing sessions held at its observatory at the Omni-Theater every Friday.
From their website, best days to catch the planets:
Viewing Period Planets in View
Jan – Feb 09 Venus
Feb – Jul 09 Saturn
21, 28 Aug & 18 Dec 09* Mercury
Jul – Dec 09 Jupiter
*Best dates
About the telescope:
“The main telescope is a 40-cm Cassegrain reflector of combined focal length 520-cm.
The sub-telescope is a 15-cm apochromatic Kepler refractor of focal length 180-cm.
The equatorial mount for the telescopes was designed with an accompanying English yoke to provide the necessary stability for the drive and tracking mechanisms. The 5.5-metre stainless steel dome can be made to swivel in any direction and its shutter can be made to slide open to focus the telescope on interesting objects in the sky.”
Incidentally, this year is the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) . Here’s the link to Singapore’s official site.
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Singapore: How humans evolved could one day be scientifically reconstucted through a project involving Singapore’s A*STAR scientists, who will help collect tissue and DNA samples from 10,000 species of animals.
Scientists from Singapore’s A*STAR’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) will team up with 70 leading scientists from major zoos, museums, research centres and universities in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia in the effort called the Genome 10K Project. Keep reading →
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Primate fossil ‘not an ancestor’
The exceptionally well-preserved fossil primate known as “Ida” is not a missing link as some have claimed, according to an analysis in the journal Nature.
The research is the first independent assessment of the claims made in a scientific paper and a television documentary earlier this year.
Dr Erik Seiffert says that Ida belonged to a group more closely linked to lemurs than to monkeys, apes or us. Keep reading →
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