Warren Douglas Allmon
Hunter R Rawlings III Professor of Paleontology
Cornell University
Creationism in 2013: Not in the Headlines but Never Far Away
November 18, 2013
Academic Building A G008, 5:00 PM
Co-sponsored with the Graduate School of Education
Abstract
Mainstream media in the U.S. usually focus on creationism and anti-evolutionism only when there is a major court case. The rest of the time, many people assume that these movements “disappear” or “die down”. This is not only incorrect, but it can lull scientists, scientific educators, and concerned citizens into a false sense of security. Creationism and anti-evolutionism are very much alive and well in the United States. Indeed they are now part of a larger “anti-scientific” socio-political movement that is in many ways fulfills the predictions of decades ago that, in the absence of sufficient vigilance on the part of mainstream society, creationism would spread to infect much more than evolution.
Biography
Warren D. Allmon is the Director of the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) in Ithaca, NY and the Hunter R. Rawlings III Professor of Paleontology in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University. He earned his A.B. in Earth Sciences from Dartmouth College in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University in 1988. For four years he was Assistant Professor of Geology at the University of South Florida, Tampa, and became PRI’s fourth Director in 1992. Since 1992, he has been instrumental in rejuvenating PRI’s internationally-known fossil collections; starting its local, regional, and national programs in Earth science education; and in planning and fundraising for the Museum of the Earth, PRI’s $11 million education and exhibit facility which opened in September 2003. In November 2004, Allmon helped secure a formal agreement of affiliation between PRI and Cornell, ending more than 70 years of official separation.
Allmon’s major research interest is macroevolution and paleoecology, especially the ecology of the origin and maintenance of biological diversity and the application of the geological record to the study of these problems, particularly using Cenozoic marine gastropods (snails of the last 65 million years).
Allmon is the author of more than 200 technical and popular publications. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the recipient of the 2004 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Public Understanding of Geoscience from the American Geological Institute.
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