Quammen to speak at UNCW

UNCW's Department of Creative Writing and Honors Scholars Program presents:

"Charles Darwin Against Himself: Caution Versus Honesty in the Life of a Reluctant Revolutionary" by David Quammen (Montana State University)

Location: Kenan Auditorium, UNCW (Campus Map)
Date and Time: Monday, March 30, 2009 at 7:30 pm

David Quammen, an award-winning author and science journalist, will deliver the talk titled "Charles Darwin Against Himself: Caution Versus Honesty in the Life of a Reluctant Revolutionary." Quammen 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 is 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.