Eugenie Scott at ASU

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, will be giving the Robert S. Dietz memorial lecture at 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 2, 2006, at ASU's main campus (Physical Sciences building, room F 166).

Genie will be speaking on "Creationism and Evolution: Historical, Scientific, Political, Legal and Educational Perspectives." I plan to be there.

Bob Dietz was an early advocate of plate tectonics and one of the primary developers of the concept of seafloor spreading, a major factor in its scientific acceptance. He was the faculty advisor for the Phoenix Skeptics, which I originally started as an ASU student group with Mike Norton and Jamie Busch. Dietz was also on the board of the Phoenix Skeptics after it became a non-campus group, and gave a few talks to the group. He had a great sense of humor, which showed in his book, co-authored with illustrator John C. Holden, Creation/Evolution Satiricon: Creationism Bashed (1987), which included some quotations from a pamphlet I wrote a year earlier, Fundamentalism is Nonsense. He died in 1995.

UPDATE: I described Genie Scott's ASU talk here.