Shulman Lectures in Science and the Humanities

Janet Browne is a leading specialist on Charles Darwin and his life’s work. An associate editor of the early volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, she is also the author of a definitive two-volume biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). Hailed for its innovative examination of how scientific knowledge was gathered and disseminated in the nineteenth century, her study was awarded the James Tait Black Award for Nonfiction, the W. H.

Prof. Taede Smedes explores cosmology, theology and atheology in his talk as first lecturer for the Shulman Lectures at the Whitney Humanities Center. In “A Universe of One’s Own”, Prof. Smedes weighs the many different views of the big bang theory, from the perspective of the evolutionists, scientists, creationists and the church.

Joseph Prabhu, a Professor at California State University, Los Angeles, speaks on cross-cultural reflections on religion and science at the third Shulman Lecture of 2008 at the Whitney Humanities Center. He reflects philosophically on the concept of cosmology, and asks about ideas about the beginning and end of the universe.

In this lecture, Michael Ryan discusses the relationship between animal aesthetic preferences, sexual selection, and evolutionary biology. Dr. Ryan is the Clark Hubbs Professor of Zoology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research involves animal behavior, focusing on mechanisms of communication involved in mate attraction and corollary evolutionary consequences.

Prof. Golinski discusses the links between public science and aesthetics at the turn of the 19th century by focusing on inventor Adam Walker’s device for projecting astronomical effects on a screen. Called the Eidouranion, this early pre-cinema, with its mix of music and visual effects, made Walker one of the most successful scientific lecturers of his day, in part because of his explicit invocation of the sublime.