Friday, March 20, 2009

David Quammen, an award-winning author and science journalist, will speak on Charles Darwin at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, 2009, at the University of North Carolina Wilmington's Kenan Auditorium. His talk, titled "Charles Darwin Against Himself: Caution Versus Honesty in the Life of a Reluctant Revolutionary," will examine Darwin's life during the two decades after his epiphany that "natural selection" formed the basis of evolution, a time during which Darwin kept his explosive idea under wraps and pondered when and how to release it to the world.

Quammen is a contributing writer for National Geographic magazine and the Wallace Stegner Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University. In his book, "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin," he focuses careful attention on Darwin, the father of modern biology and the source of an idea so radical that its implications are still only imperfectly understood: evolution by natural selection.

A graduate of Yale University and a former Rhodes Scholar, Quammen travels on assignment throughout the world to jungles, deserts and swamps, writing about the fields of biology, ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation for numerous magazines. He is perhaps best known for his award-winning column, "Natural Acts," which was published in Outside magazine from 1981 to 1995. Quammen is the author of three fiction and seven non-fiction books including Wild Thoughts from Wild Places and The Song of the Dodo.

The UNCW Evolution Learning Community welcomes Quammen as part of its campus-wide initiative to encourage interdisciplinary study and discussion about Charles Darwin, evolution and related issues. The 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On The Origin of Species" and the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth fall in 2009, which is being celebrated worldwide as "The Year of Darwin."

Quammen's visit to UNCW is sponsored by the Department of Creative Writing and the Honors Program. A complete listing of UNCW Evolution Learning Community events can be found at www.library.uncw.edu/web/outreach/evolution.

Media contact:
Dana Fischetti, manager of news and media relations, 910.962.7259 or fischettid@uncw.edu