This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
His talk is Lafayette’s Lives of Liberty Lecture for 2008-09
Author David Quammen will present a lecture entitled “Darwin Against Himself: Caution Versus Honesty in the Life of a Reluctant Revolutionary” at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009, in Colton Chapel.
Free and open to the public, the talk will be Lafayette’s Lives of Liberty Lecture for 2008-09. It will be followed by a public reception.
Quammen also will speak with students in several classes during a two-day residency marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.
Qummen is the author of the 2006 biography The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution and general editor of On the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition, a decorative reprise of Darwin’s magnum opus. His lecture will explore the scientific and personal hurdles that Darwin vaulted in his progress toward what Quammen calls “history’s most radical act of biological insight.”
“Charles Darwin returned from his round-the-world-voyage on The Beagle in 1836, and during the following two years conceived a theory of evolution that was radically percipient, difficult, and scary – difficult and scary even to him. The next 21 years of his life were spent in sorting his way through certain personal and cultural disincentives to publishing that theory. Finally, in 1859, he did – in his epochal book, The Origin of Species,” Quammen says. “The moral of this story is that science involves, always, humanity as well as intellection.”
Quammen is the Wallace Stegner Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University. In addition to his Darwin biography, his nonfiction works include Monster of God and The Song of the Dodo, which was awarded the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award and John Burroughs Medal. Quammen received an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. He has also published three novels and four essay collections.
A three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award, Quammen is the first person given the title of contributing writer at National Geographic in the magazine’s history. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Yale University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, earned a bachelor of letters degree at Oxford University.
The Lives of Liberty Lecture Series was inaugurated in 2007-08 during the College’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Marquis de Lafayette.