Life, death, and the anti-vaccination cult
Speaker: Dr (Ian) Pete Griffith
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre, Innovations Building, Eggleston Rd, ANU
The what, where, when, and how of the anti-vaccination movement is quite easily established: the why is a different matter. This talk will explore the background to this movement, and attempt to explain why it exists. The author is of the view that hard-wiring of the brain to maintain the gene-pool (and avoid disease and death) is the basis - at least in the ill-informed - for delusional fears about vaccination. Sadly these fears have been exploited by certain individuals, perhaps for financial gain: otherwise, if educated, these people are in denial. All involved in this movement do not accept (or choose to ignore) that they are safe only if other members of society actually are vaccinated. The lack of understanding of the risks involved in - and/or refusal to acknowledge the importance of - universal vaccination (or the lack thereof) in public health programmes is a feature of this movement. How governments react to this challenge will be discussed.
Pete graduated with a BA in Biochemistry from Oxford and has a PhD in Microbiology from the ANU. He worked on vaccines in the pharmaceutical industry for a while before joining the Victorian College of Pharmacy as lecturer in microbiology and immunology in 1975. He resigned as Senior Lecturer in Pharmaceutical Microbiology in 1999, moving to a position in the Commonwealth Department of Health in Canberra where for a while he edited a journal, Communicable Diseases Intelligence, and was then Secretary to the Pandemic Influenza Planning Committee before retiring in 2001. He is actively involved in adult education in Canberra, and from 2002 - 2005 was President of Canberra Skeptics Incorporated.
Annual General Meeting
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Fellows Bar, University House, ANU
Why Australia should introduce an emissions trading scheme
Speaker: Professor Stephen Howes
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre, Innovations Building, Eggleston Rd, ANU
The cross-party consensus that Australia should introduce an emissions trading scheme which existed in 2007 has broken down. Many divergent views exist on whether, when, and how Australia should act to reduce its emissions. But too much of the debate in Australia ignores or misunderstands the international dimensions of the response to climate change. Once these are taken into account, Professor Stephen Howes argues that there is a compelling case for Australia to introduce an emissions trading scheme (ETS) now.
Stephen Howes is Professor of Economics at the Crawford School of Economics and Government of the Australian National University. Prior to joining the ANU, he was Chief Economist at AusAID, and before that was with the World Bank. He has a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. He worked on the Garnaut Climate Change Review in 2008.
Why science is failing to communicate
Speaker: Dr Rod Lamberts
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre, Innovations Building, Eggleston Rd, ANU
Rod Lamberts is the deputy director of the Centre for Public Awareness of Science (CPAS) at the ANU and has been delivering science communication courses there for the past nine years. He is also a consultant for UNESCO in the Pacific Islands. Before moving into the science communication realm, he enjoyed wandering through the worlds of psychology, medical anthropology, and corporate communication consultancy and facilitation.
This talk will reflect Rod’s wide range of research topics which include art and the environment, perceptions of expertise in science, public awareness of mental illness, understanding of risk and crisis, and cross-cultural communication of science.
World poverty: explanations and proposed solutions
Speaker: Professor Thomas Pogge
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre, Innovations Building, Eggleston Rd, ANU
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has recently reported a sad new world record: the number of chronically undernourished people now exceeds the one billion mark for the first time in human history. How is this possible? There are many reasons for thinking that the number of poor people ought to be in rapid decline, among them: (1) the OECD countries are giving a lot of development assistance to poor countries every year: about US$120 billion in 2006; (2) many NGOs and international organisations are also making great efforts to combat poverty and disease among the world's poor; (3) rapid technological progress and gains from globalisation have led to impressive gains in the global average income; (4) food prices have consistently fallen in the 26 years leading up to 2006 (though they rose sharply from 2006 through 2008); (5) the ranks of the poor are continuously thinned by some 50,000 deaths daily (18 million annually) from poverty-related causes.
Professor Thomas Pogge will try to show that the astonishing persistence and expansion of poverty is not the result of "intractable" local factors such as geography or the habits of inferior cultures but is rather due to fundamental structural features of our emergent global institutional order that produce a strong headwind against poverty reduction - a headwind that the five factors mentioned are too weak fully to neutralise. He will also try to show that we should promote the cause of poverty eradication - far more effectively than through development assistance - through modest reforms in global institutional arrangements that make these more protective of the human rights of the poor.
Having received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, Thomas Pogge writes and teaches on moral and political philosophy and Kant. He is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, Professorial Fellow at the ANU Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Policy (CAPPE), and Research Director at the Oslo University Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN). His work has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, All Souls College (Oxford), and the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda). He is editor for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science. With support from the Australian Research Council, the UK-based BUPA Foundation, and the European Commission (7th Framework), he currently heads a team effort toward developing the Health Impact Fund, a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for poor people worldwide.
The Powerpoint presentation (2 MB) from the talk is available here.
Weird animal genomes: sex, intelligence, and dumb design
Speaker: Professor Jennifer Graves
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre, Innovations Building, Eggleston Rd, ANU
Whether a baby develops as a boy or a girl depends on a single gene on the Y chromosome. In humans and other mammals, females have two X chromosomes, but males have a single X, and a Y that bears the testis-determining gene (SRY) that induces testis differentiation and switches on hormones that masculinise the embryo. The X and Y are both weird chromosomes; far from having been "intelligently designed", they are both the products of unique evolutionary forces. To understand these, we compare the chromosomes, genes, and DNA in distantly related mammals and even birds and reptiles with completely different sex determining systems. The genomes of Australia's unique fauna are a goldmine of new information.
The human X is a middle-sized, ordinary-looking chromosome, but is full of "brains-and-balls" genes involved in reproduction and intelligence (and often both). The unusual make-up of the X is the result of its singular representation in males, and I suggest that these genes evolved in response to direct selection for male advantage traits, and sexual selection by females for smarter males. Since reproduction and intelligence are vital in the evolution of our species, the X has been called "the engine of evolution". The tiny Y is a genetic wasteland - full of genetic junk and bearing only 45 genes, most active only in testis.
Kangaroo sex chromosomes reveal the original mammal sex chromosomes, while the bizarre platypus sex chromosomes (more related to those of birds) tell us that our sex chromosomes are relatively young. The Y is predicted to disappear in just 5 million years; if we don't become extinct, new sex determining genes and chromosomes will evolve, maybe leading to the evolution of new hominid species.
Professor Jenny Graves works on the genetics and genomics of Australian animals - kangaroos and platypuses are a specialty, but snakes and emus, devils (Tasmanian) and dragons (lizards) are becoming important. Her group uses the distant relationship of Australian mammals from humans to understand how genes and chromosomes evolved and how they work in all mammals including humans. Her laboratory is famous for using this unique perspective to explore the origin, function, and (dismal) fate of human sex chromosomes, and even to discover novel human genes.
Jenny heads the Comparative Genomics Research group in the Research School of Biological Sciences at ANU, and directs the ARC Centre of Excellence in Kangaroo Genomics. Jenny has produced three books and 350 research articles and has received a number of honours and awards, including the Macfarlane Burnet medal in 2006. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and Foreign Secretary of the Academy, and is a L'Oreal-UNESCO Laureate.
Screening of Flock of Dodos
Time: 7:15 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre, Innovations Building, Eggleston Rd, ANU
Flock of Dodos (running time 84 minutes) is the work of American marine biologist turned film-maker Randy Olson. It focuses on the intelligent design debate in the United States, especially the great Dover High School shemozzle. Stylistically it clearly owes much to Michael Moore - but is also strikingly even-handed. After neatly dispatching the case for ID, Olson turns to pondering the effectiveness of the strategies of the scientific camp, with his own mother as willing test subject. This may be a sop to the American mass market, but he ends up giving fellow sceptics something to think about. Stephen Jay Gould died well before this film was made, but exerts a ghostly presence.
Clear thinking about national security: why is it so hard?
Speaker: Professor Hugh White
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre 2, Manning Clarke Centre, Union Court, ANU
We often behave as if national security is too important to think clearly about. Some risks are ignored, while others are exaggerated. Policies are adopted to meet threats without any clear idea of what exactly the threat is, how serious it might be, and how it could most cost-effectively be addressed. Major decisions are made on the slenderest of bases: invading Iraq, rebuilding Afghanistan, toughening terrorism laws, and buying battleships have all been undertaken without due diligence by governments, and the public seems hardly to expect any better. And yet it should be possible to think clearly about national security and defence questions, applying to them the same standards of evidence, argument and diligence that we would expect in other areas of public policy.
In this lecture Professor Hugh White will explore some recent examples of unclear thinking about national security in Australia, attempt to explain why such lapses from common standards of rationality are so common, and suggest some ways we could do better. Along the way Professor White will talk about terrorism, bird flu, global warming, and the rise of China.
Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. His work focuses primarily on Australian strategic and defence policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, and global strategic affairs especially as they influence Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. He has served as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments; as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald; as a senior adviser on the staffs of defence minister Kim Beazley and prime minister Bob Hawke; as a senior official in the Department of Defence, where from 1995 to 2000 he was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence; and as the first director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford universities.
A podcast of the talk is available here.
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin:
Darwin, Wallace, and the Ascent of Man
Speaker: Emeritus Professor Ian Cowan
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre, Innovations Building, Eggleston Rd, ANU
"There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course the wind blows." So said Darwin. But Wallace thought, "a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a specific purpose ...". Professor Cowan will address some of the arguments and circumstances that lead to such divergent opinions.
Ian Cowan was formerly Head of the Environmental Biology Group, Research School of Biological Sciences, ANU and in his active retirement continues to sustain a fulfilling career as scientist, student of philosophy, and bon vivant!
For events and activities of previous years, click here.