Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences

UWA hosted two public lectures by Dr Michael Shermer during National Science Week 2008.

Access Dr Shermer's highly popular presentations online:

• 20 August, 6pm - Why Darwin Matters: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and the Battle for Science and Religion 
  Evolution happened, and the theory describing it is one of the most well-founded in all of science. Then why do half of all Americans reject it? There are religious and political reasons, and in Why Darwin Matters, historian of science and best-selling author Dr. Michael Shermer attempted to diffuse these fears by examining what evolution really is, how we know it happened, and how to test it. Dr. Shermer builds a powerful case for evolution as the theory that most closely parallels the Christian model of human nature and the conservative model of free market economics. Dr. Shermer was once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, and is now one of the best-known public intellectuals defending evolutionary theory, so Why Darwin Matters provided an insiders guide to the evolution-creation debate, in which he showed why creationism and Intelligent Design are not only bad science, they are bad theology, and why science should be embraced by people of all beliefs.
  
  
• 21 August 21, 1pm - Why People Believe in Weird Things: Science, Pseudoscience, and the Paranormal 
  Ever wonder why people believe in UFOs and alien abductions, mind-reading and psychics who talk to the dead, reincarnation and life after death, out-of-body and near-death experiences, urban legends and satanic panics, not to mention Intelligent Design creationism and the pernicious myth that the Holocaust never happened? Dr. Michael Shermer, the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American, is a genuine ghost-buster, a relentless crusader against junk science, bad science, voodoo science, pathological science, pseudoscience, and plain old nonsense. Based on his best-selling book, Why People Believe Weird Things, Dr. Shermer's lecture was filled with humour, insight, magic, illusions, and personal anecdotes.