Our property at 627 W. 8th Street in Mesa (between Country Club and Alma School) served as the location for a delightful Fall event as we joined with our fellow Humanists and Freethinkers in an afternoon of fun, food and friends. There were pony rides, a trivia contest, and much more! Hot dogs and soft drinks were provided.

Dr. Ann Kinzig is an Associate Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University. Dr. Kinzig received her B.A. in Physics from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (1986), her M.A. in Physics from University of California at Berkeley (1989), and her Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from Berkeley (1994). Before arriving at ASU, Dr. Kinzig was a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at Princeton University (1994-1998).

Ann Kinzig's research interests focus broadly on ecosystem services, conservation-development interactions, and the resilience of natural-resource systems. She is currently involved in three major research projects, including: (1) Advancing Conservation in a Social Context (examining the trade-offs between conservation and development goals in developing nations); (2) The resilience of pre-historic landscapes in the American Southwest; and (3) Assessments of ecosystem services, their valuation, and mechanisms for ensuring their continued delivery.

The Humanist Book Club meets on the fourth Saturday of each month at 10:30 a.m., Mesa Main Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)

From "Booklist":

A historian of science, Freely chronicles the transmission of scientific ideas from ancient Greece and Rome to an early modern Europe on the cusp of the scientific revolution. Many ancients’ notions about nature were, Freely recounts, preserved from oblivion by scholars based in centers of Islamic learning such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba. Before reaching those destinations, Freely profiles the Greek sages, enumerating their surviving works and what information they held about mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, among other subjects. Leaving behind a roster of names that is likely familiar to the core audience, Freely’s account then addresses Islamic rulers, such as the first caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty around 800, who sponsored translations into Arabic of Greek texts. Freely ranges over the names of Islamic scholars so occupied, who served as arks for Greek science, and of original thinkers who formulated such topics as algebra, all of which reached the West in the cultural diffusion Freely describes. A sinuous odyssey through scientific ideas, Freely’s work will most appeal to tastes for intellectual history. --Gilbert Taylor

HSGP member Dr. Harvey Turner was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1932. His undergraduate work was at Columbia University, where he majored in psychology and contemporary civilization. He attended medical school at University of Berne, Switzerland. That was followed by an internship in 1960 and general surgery residency in Brooklyn, NY and thoracic surgery residency in Boston, MA. Dr. Turner has been an Arizona resident since 1987 and is on several hospital ethics committees. He taught medical ethics at Gateway Community College for several years. Dr. Turner retired from active practice in 2000.

We were pleased to welcome Dr. John Lynch back for his fourth visit to HSGP!

Dr. Lynch teaches for Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University (where he is also affiliated with the Center for Biology & Society, and the History and Philosophy of Science Program). He received his initial training as an evolutionary biologist and, while he continues biological research, he now largely teaches and researches within the history of biology. Specializing in theological and cultural responses to evolutionary ideas, his ongoing primary research is an examination of Catholic responses to evolutionary thought. He has been studying American anti-evolutionism since 1996, and was involved (with other ASU faculty) with the fight to maintain strong evolutionary principles in the AZ K12 standards following challenges in 1998 and 2004. He has presented on anti-evolutionism and Intelligent Design Creationism at legal, educational, scientific, and public gatherings country-wide.

Dr. Lynch writes: "In 2006 I talked about the history of the intelligent design movement (IDM) and how it was dealt a decisive blow with Judge John Jones III's decision in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover. Since that decision, the IDM appears to have adopted two arguments. The first is to argue that the academic freedom of members of the IDM is being infringed by the academic mainstream. Secondly, they argue that 'Darwinism' has pernicious social effects and lead to the Holocaust. Both of these arguments were presented in Ben Stein's 2008 movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which portrayed 'Darwinism' as an evil empire bent on destroying freedom of thought. My talk... [debunked] these arguments"."

Dr. Maureen Sander-Staudt returns for her third talk to our group. Always delightful, Dr. Sander-Staudt will speak on a number of hot-button issues, including same-sex marriage, gender identity and inter-sex, the ethics of pornography, care-giving, the ethics of public breast feeding and more!

Dr. Sander-Staudt holds a BA in English Literature from Alverno College in Milwaukee, WI and an MA from the Univ. of WI-Milwaukee. Dr. Sander-Staudt completed her Ph.D.at the Univ. of Colorado-Boulder where she specialized in gender theory and feminist ethics. Her dissertation work was on the topic of the political implications of the ethics of care, and in it she develops the beginnings of a political philosophy of care. During this time, she received several fellowships and served as a teaching mentor to her department.

Her current scholarly interests continue to be in the area of care ethics, as well as applied ethics, particularly bioethics, reproductive technologies, and moral education. Her most recent work examines the impact of women’s responsibilities as care-givers on their political understandings and activism. Dr. Sander-Staudt has also written an essay using feminist ethics to assess the development and use of artificial womb technology. She has continued an interest in philosophy and popular culture, Eastern philosophy, and the applications of gender and sexuality to reproductive technology, criminal justice, and spirituality. Future projects include a paper on the role of bodily perception in moral experience, an analysis of the human genome project and stem cell research from the perspective of Care Ethics, and an application of Care Ethics to the comparative status of fetuses in abortion and crimes against pregnant women.

The Humanist Book Club meets on the fourth Saturday of each month at 10:30 a.m., Mesa Main Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)

From Amazon.com:

Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society's response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster. Still, right from the outset of Collapse, the author makes clear that this is not a mere environmentalist's diatribe. He begins by setting the book's main question in the small communities of present-day Montana as they face a decline in living standards and a depletion of natural resources. Once-vital mines now leak toxins into the soil, while prion diseases infect some deer and elk and older hydroelectric dams have become decrepit. On all these issues, and particularly with the hot-button topic of logging and wildfires, Diamond writes with equanimity.

Because he's addressing such significant issues within a vast span of time, Diamond can occasionally speak too briefly and assume too much, and at times his shorthand remarks may cause careful readers to raise an eyebrow. But in general, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned historical examples, making the case that many times, economic and environmental concerns are one and the same. With Collapse, Diamond hopes to jog our collective memory to keep us from falling for false analogies or forgetting prior experiences, and thereby save us from potential devastations to come. While it might seem a stretch to use medieval Greenland and the Maya to convince a skeptic about the seriousness of global warming, it's exactly this type of cross-referencing that makes Collapse so compelling. --Jennifer Buckendorff

Join us for a discussion and planning session for educating the "next generation" of Humanists! We will welcome parents and grandparents as well as interested members as we discuss the plans for our Childhood Education program. Share your ideas, interests and concerns. Discover how we can make our organization "family friendly."