{"id":79982,"date":"2023-01-21T09:33:24","date_gmt":"2023-01-21T14:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/?post_type=tribe_events&p=79982"},"modified":"2023-03-16T10:15:42","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T14:15:42","slug":"science-cafe-radical-by-nature-the-revolutionary-life-of-alfred-russel-wallace","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/event\/science-cafe-radical-by-nature-the-revolutionary-life-of-alfred-russel-wallace\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Cafe: Radical By Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

Grab a bite from the Daily Planet Cafe and join host Chris Smith and special guests for the Science Cafe! This month’s guest is Dr. Jim Costa, the Executive Director of the Highlands Biological Station. We’ll get a sneak peek of his latest book coming out March 21: “Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace<\/a>,” and have plenty of time for discussion with the audience. <\/span><\/p>\n

Copies of the book will be available from So & So Books for purchase and signing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Join us in-person or watch online on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman declared in Song of Myself <\/em>that he “contained multitudes,” a largeness of spirit, perspectives, beliefs, and interests so expansive that there was room within even for contradictions. He may well have been singing of his contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace. Perhaps the most famed naturalist of the Victorian age by the end of his long life in 1913, Wallace’s expeditions to remote Amazonia and southeast Asia became the stuff of legend: a collector of thousands of species new to science, he shared in the discovery of natural selection with Darwin and founded the field of evolutionary biogeography.<\/p>\n

Yet Wallace also courted controversy with nonscientific pursuits from spiritualism to socialism, becoming the archetypal socially engaged scientist tirelessly campaigning for land and labor reform, women\u2019s rights and more. Jim Costa celebrates the complex and “multitudinous” Wallace in “Radical by Nature,” his new biography to mark the Wallace bicentennial. At 200, Alfred Russel Wallace continues to inspire and instruct.<\/p>\n

Our Speaker<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr. James (Jim) Costa<\/span><\/strong> is Executive Director of the Highlands Biological Station and Professor of Biology at Western Carolina University, where he teaches biogeography, Darwin’s<\/span> “On the Origin of Species<\/span>,” and a temperate-tropical ecology field course.<\/span>\u00a0 A naturalist<\/span><\/span>, evolutionary biologist, and Wallace and Darwin scholar, Jim is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, Trustee of the Charles Darwin Trust, and has held fellowships at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute <\/span>for Advanced Study<\/span>, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, and the DFG Centre for Advanced Study in Hamburg, Germany.<\/span>\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>Jim’s books include <\/span>“The Annotated Origin<\/span>,” “<\/span>Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species<\/span>,” and <\/span>“Darwin’s Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory<\/span>.”\u00a0 His latest book, <\/span>“Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace”<\/span> (Princeton University Press) is his homage <\/span>to Wallace, marking the bicentennial year of the<\/span><\/span> birth of the incomparable explorer, naturalist, and humanitarian.<\/span><\/p>\n