Smashing Agassiz's Boulder: Giving Shock to Nearly All Men
Dr. Joseph Graves, Jr.
Livestream from SUNY New Paltz
Monday, April 16, 2018
6 pm - 7:30 pm, S1-149
About the seminar
In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin proposed that all humans share a common ancestor and that our species evolution likely began in Africa. He fully expected controversy over his revolutionary idea, even suggesting that Harvard professor Louis Agassiz might "throw a boulder" at him in response. Today, 157 years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, evolutionary biology has "smashed" Agassiz's boulder and confirmed that modern humans can all trace their ancestry to Africa. This lecture discusses accepted biological and evolutionary facts of human ancestry and why these facts are difficult to communicate in our society.
About the speaker
Dr. Joseph Graves, Jr. received his Ph.D. in Environmental, Evolutionary and Systematic Biology from Wayne State University in 1988. In 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS.) In April 2002, he received the ASU-West award for Scholarly Research and Creative Activity. In 2012 he was chosen as one of the "Sensational Sixty" commemorating 60 years of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Award. His research concerns the evolutionary genomics of adaptation, particularly as relevant to postponed aging and bacterial responses to nanomaterials. He has also written extensively concerning biological concepts of race in humans. He has published over eighty papers and book chapters in these arenas. He has appeared in seven documentary films and numerous television interviews on these general topics. He has been a Principal Investigator on grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. His books on the biology of race are entitled: The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, Rutgers University Press, 2005 and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America, Dutton Press, 2005. A summary of Dr. Graves's research career can be found on Wikipedia, and he is also featured in the ABC-CLIO volume on Outstanding African American scientists.
In November 2007, he was featured in the CNN Anderson Cooper 360 program on Dr. James Watson. He has served as a member of the external advisory board for the National Human Genome Center at Howard University. In January 2006, he became a member of the "New Genetics and the African Slave Trade" working group of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University, chaired by professors Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Hammonds. He has served as the chair of the Senior Advisory Board for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) at Duke University. He is currently a member of the executive boards of the NSF Science and Technology Center: Biocomputational Evolution in Action (BEACON); NSF NRT: Integrative Bioinformatics for Investigating and Engineering Microbiomes; and NSF NNCI: Southeast Nanoinnovation Corridor. He is a former member of the board of the Evolution Institute. He was the Associate Editor for the 2nd Edition for the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, GaleCengage published in 2013.
Since 2007, he has served on editorial board of Evolution: Education and Outreach, published by Springer-Verlag. He has been an active participant in the struggle to protect and improve the teaching of science, particularly evolutionary biology in the public schools. He has been a leader in addressing the under representation of minorities in science careers, having directed successful programs in California and Arizona. He is a leading force in aiding underserved youth in Greensboro via the YMCA chess program. He is currently a member of the Racial Justice and Reconciliation Council of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina.