September 1999 Dinner:

Eugenie Scott on Kansas Board of Education v. Evolution

WHO: Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education.

WHEN: 6:30 p.m. September 28

WHERE: Appetizers from caterer Jimmy Bean's and beverage (wine is included in the price of the evening) under the life-size T. rex skeleton in the atrium of the Valley Life Sciences Building on the UC Berkeley campus. After schmoozing in the Wallace atrium we'll repair to room 2063 for the talk.

Cost is $20 a person. Deadline for receipt of your checks is September 22. Please make your checks payable to NCSWA and send them to:

Robert Sanders
1512 Holly Street
Berkeley, CA 94703

HOW TO GET THERE: Take the I-80 freeway to University Avenue exit, Berkeley, and drive east until you reach the campus. Continue straight ahead onto the crescent drive and turn left at the apex. Don't stop at the traffic kiosk. Several hundred feet ahead is a circular drive encircling a couple of tall trees. The Valley Life Sciences Building (VLSB) is the huge structure ahead on the right. To reach the atrium, enter the doors at the top of the stairs -- it's straight ahead. After-hours parking now costs $5 on campus (follow the instructions on the signs), but you may be able to find free places on Oxford St., which is only a long block from VLSB.

Alternatively, take BART to the Downtown Berkeley station and walk uphill along Center St. to the campus. Continue along the crescent drive, turn right at the traffic kiosk, head uphill to the traffic circle, then a few hundred feet to VLSB.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER: The Kansas Board of Education's recent decision not to require the teaching of evolution in its state science curriculum marks the latest skirmish in a long battle between supporters of evolution and proponents of creationism. But, as Stephen Jay Gould wrote in a recent Time magazine op-ed column, the Kansas decision marks a new creationist strategy of quietly deleting evolution rather than formally banning it or lobbying for creation science to be taught in tandem. Our speaker, Eugenie Scott, has spent nearly twenty years on the frontlines of this battle. As executive director of the National Center for Science Education, she has mounted challenges to the creationist agenda in every state.

Scott's organization and its efforts were featured in an August 29 New York Times story. She'll tell us how this stunning decision in Kansas came about, how her organization works to keep evolution in the classroom, how to refute creationist arguments, and what role journalists play in informing the near majority of the public who she says do not accept evolutionary theory. At stake, says the American Institute of Biological Sciences, is whether a new generation will enter adulthood "burdened with a profound lack of knowledge about a subject that underlies all of biology."

For more about our speaker, see the August 29 New York Times article. Also, see the National Center for Science Education website.