Let's talk about some of the details of this year's festival and Ian let's start with you
and talk a little bit about as we look at the poster for this year's event I am sure
most folks would agree when they see this poster that there is definitely a message
here for a young audience, it's for them but at the same time some of these lectures and
discussions are going involve some heavy intellectual lifting but not anything that should be leaving
people like me who are geeky but not necessarily science-y feeling left out. There is a lot of
relevant current broad appeal content in some of these lectures would you say.
Yes, I think the idea with the lecture series was have people especially faculty on campus
who are able to communicate their work their research to the lay audience as a way
to get them more engaged, you see that I am doing one of the talks and that was the idea
behind my talk was to make sure they would actually be engaged with my work and what
we are doing here. Among these distinguished lecturers there's
one man who is coming from New York or where is he from?
Connecticut Yeah, Connecticut close enough. Carl Zimmer,
let's talk a little bit about Carl Zimmer for those that may not be familiar with him
but probably many people have heard the name in what context and what is he going to talk
about when he is here? I think Jim can talk more of this he is a
science writer and read some of his work with evolution education.
Really he's foremost writer on modern Biology. He's written something like ten books all for popular
audiences, they can get you looking at proteins on the shelves of viruses even though you
might not know what a virus is until you get done reading that book you know all about
it and it is really cool stuff. Modern biology is the intellectual adventure of our time,
With genomics, it's just exploded finding out things that would totally shock people. If you could
go back 15 years and tell them such and such is common knowledge, they go what! You know
there is all kinds of really cool things, the guy really out there all over the place
explicating that he writes books he writes a weekly column for the New York Times in
the science section, he's written for Atlantic, Slate, Discover, National Geographic, he was one
of the national big bloggers for National Geographic which does more science blogging
than anybody right now. He's really, really neat he's good at explaining all kinds of
things that seem totally mysterious to people and let them see how totally cool they are.
He's recently done stuff about human evolution, in the New York Times said most people in
anthropology would find totally startling they thought Neanderthals were a totally different
species from us. We didn't even know that there was a third species living about the
same time this was about 50-60 thousand years ago in Eurasia but he's looked at what the
genes in those bones are and how they show how we're related. You and I have some Neanderthal
genes in parts of our body and why do we have those. This is all totally new knowledge about
us as people and he's the guy who told that story.
I think he's a master at making this something that those of us who are not scientists can
understand. Ian, if you had to pin a good starting age to come and hear him what would
be your recommendation in terms of folks who might be hearing this and want to learn more
about Carl Zimmer, you might want to bring younger members of their family, what's a
good age? I think high school students could definitely
understand this, it may be a little difficult for them but I think it would be important
to kind of see what he does and brings things to the table. As Jim was saying he is very
good at science communication so I think it would be good for them to see how someone
of his intelligence is able to relate to anyone so I think that this would be important.
Even middle school students, I think he talks to the level where people like that there
will be things that are challenging and confusing but on the other hand it's fascinating the
stories he tells about this stuff is really, really interesting.