Four upcoming meetings with sessions on Intelligent Design Creationism
MEETING 1:

The American Physical Society's meeting in March in Baltimore, MD will include a session and a news conference on Intelligent Design creationism. The meeting is slated for Monday-Friday, March 13-17 at the Marriot Waterfront Hotel. Register for the meeting at http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR06/reg.cfm

Session M50: Intelligent Design: Its Impact and Responses to It
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR06/sessionindex2/?SessionEventID=46557
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
7:30-9:45 - Grand Salon V
Chair: Robert Eisenstein
SPEAKER LIST:
Jeremy Gunn, ACLU, 7:30PM - 8:06PM
Legal Perspectives on Religion in Public School Science Classes
Marshall Berman, physicist formerly of Sandia who ran for school board in New Mexico to fight ID policies, 8:06PM - 8:42PM
Science and Society Under Attack: The Need for Political As Well As Scientific Responses
Francis Slakey, public affairs at APS, 8:42PM - 9:18PM
APS Activities with Other Professional Societies
Invited Speaker: Cornelia Dean, New York Times, 9:18PM - 9:54PM
Media Coverage of Evolution and Intelligent Design

News Conference, Wednesday, March 15, 10 AM
FOUNDATIONS OF EVOLUTION
Physicists are developing new tools for testing biological evolution at a much deeper level than was possible 20 years ago. Robert Austin of Princeton (austin@princeton.edu) will provide an introduction to an entire APS session (R7) dealing with this topic. Daniel Fisher of Harvard (fisher@physics.harvard.edu) will discuss efforts to explore evolutionary dynamics in a quantitative fashion through the combination of microbial experiments and theory. The University of Chicago's Jim Shapiro (jsha@uchicago.edu) will explain that an information-science approach is bound to offer many new details about evolution. As he points out, the results of 50 years of molecular biology research have demonstrated that the genome is not a passive blueprint, but rather a complex information-processing unit, and that cells have "natural genetic engineering tools" for restructuring DNA molecules. Using nano- and micro-fabrication technology to create habitable landscapes for E. Coli bacteria populations, speaker Juan Keymer and his colleagues at Princeton University (keymer@Princeton.edu), are exploring how spatial factors such as the destruction of habitat (induced by ultraviolet light) shape the organisms' evolution.


MEETING 2:
NSTA will bring together key individuals from the Dover trial at the NSTA National Conference in Anaheim on April 6, 2005. During the panel "Kitzmiller v. Dover: The Trial of Intelligent Design," science teachers, scientists, attorneys, and other experts involved in the case will recount the challenges, stakes, strategy, and outcome of this important trial. Look for more information about this session in a future issue of NSTA Express.
>Son of ocean pioneer Jacques Cousteau, Jean-Michel Cousteau will be the general session speaker at NSTA's 54th National Conference on Science Education in Anaheim, CA, April 6-9. To register, visit http://www.nsta.org/anaheimconference.


MEETING 3:
The Council of Engineering and Scientific Society Executives meeting July 25-28 in Salt Lake City will have a session with the latest updates on pending court cases, new bills introduced into state legislatures, and actions taken scientists and science societies to help show the public the science community's consensus on strong, peer-reviewed science. There will be other sessions on legislative and media issues http://www.cesse2006.org/program.cfm . Sign up to attend the meeting at: http://www.cesse2006.org/registration.cfm


MEETING 4: ASBMB Centennial meeting hosts session on Teaching Evolution Under Threat from Opposing Views:
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology's public affairs symposium on "Teaching Evolution Under Threat from Opposing Views," to be held from 12:30 - 2:00 pm on April 4, 2006, in San Francisco, CA during the Society's centennial meeting. We are featuring four speakers: Don Johanson, AZ State University (he is the discoverer of the Lucy fossil); Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education; Ken Miller, Brown University and a prominent evolution advocate; and the Rev. Ted Peters, editor of the Journal of Science and Theology and a faculty member at Pacific Lutheran Seminary.
You can register to attend the meeting by going to our webpage, www.asbmb.org and clicking on the meetings page.