This year marks the 200th anniversary of naturalist Charles Darwin’s birth. Appropriately, this year’s Galileo’s Legacy Conference at Missouri Western State University focuses on Darwin’s contributions to science.

Three Missouri Western faculty members from biology, psychology and philosophy each picked experts from other universities to deliver lectures and visit classes beginning today. The public is welcome to attend the free lectures.

Dr. Christopher Green, a professor of psychology at Toronto’s York University, opens the conference today at 2 p.m. at the Kemper Recital Hall with his lecture, “Will the Real Darwin Please Stand Up? Psychology’s Century of Trying to Capitalize on Evolutionary Theory.”

Dr. Phil Wann, professor of psychology at Western, picked Dr. Green, a leading scholar of the early American school of psychology known as functionalism.

“Much of what we are doing today is still influenced by the early psychologists,” Mr. Wann said. “Many of them were, in turn,

influenced by Darwinian theory.”

Dr. Gordon Burghardt, from the University of Tennessee, will present his lecture “Darwin, Monkeys, Serpents and the Origins of Religion” at 7 p.m., also in the recital hall. Dr. Burghardt’s abstract says Darwin’s first experiments involved informal tests of responses by monkeys to a snake.

“His work on emotions and morality was profound and seminal,” he said in the abstract.

The conference concludes Friday with Dr. Jonathan Kaplan’s presentation, “The Social and Biological Realities of ‘Race’: Social Categories and Genes in the 21st Century,” at noon in Popplewell Hall, Room 304.

Dr. Mark Mikkelson, associate professor of philosophy and humanities at Western, said Galileo’s Legacy looks at scientific controversies and their public significance, and to make sense of the issues. Past conferences dealt with global warming, evolution and intelligent design, and the relationship between neuroscience and the concept of free will.

The topics are controversial, but Dr. Mikkelsen said the controversy lies in “How a certain paradigm develops in one area of science and then is extended into another. It’s always controversial in a sense that academic disputes are controversial.”

Dr. Wann said most people relate Darwin to evolutionary theory and evolution/creationism controversy. Few realize, he said, how great his impact has been on psychology, social sciences and philosophy.

“I believe that many people will leave the conference having been exposed to ways of thinking about human nature and our relationship to the world that they have never considered before,” Dr. Wann said. “There are some ‘big ideas’ that every educated person should think about at some time in their lives. Evolutionary theory, whether one agrees with all aspects of it or not, is one of those big ideas.”

Jimmy Myers can be reached

at jimmym@npgco.com.