Monday, 24 August 2009

OU professor talks at International Congress of the History of Science

Jim Moore, Professor of the History of Science, gave the opening plenary address `Darwin's Sacred Cause', to the 23rd International Congress of the History of Science (triennial of the world's leading professional body), meeting in Budapest - 26-31 July, 2009.

Darwin’s Sacred Cause, authored by Jim Moore and Adrian Desmond, gives a completely new explanation of why Darwin came to his shattering theories about human origins. More than a thousand people enjoyed Jim’s presentation, to the point where two historians of mathematics (one being the UK leader in the field) said despite initial misgivings, they were “quite convinced by the argument”, which they credited as revealing a potentially radically new Darwin.

As a result of the presentation, the Director-General of the Hungarian (national) Museum of Natural History gave Jim a private two-hour tour, where he was shown astonishing 18th-century natural mummies and Neanderthals. Jim said: “It was amazing to hold the mandible of a 25-35 year-old woman, dead 60,000 years."

Jim has now been invited by The Foreign Secretary of the Cuban Academy of Sciences to address the Academy and to lecture at the University of Havana in early October.

Related links:
Talking to Open2, Jim Moore explains how Charles Darwin changed our whole way of thinking - and makes a surprising revelation concerning one of the motivations for Darwin's work. http://www.open2.net/historyandthearts/arts/jimmooreinterview.html

Hatred of slavery drove Darwin towards evolutionary theory: http://www.open.ac.uk/platform/news/arts-and-culture/hatred-slavery-drove-darwin-towards-evolutionary-theory

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