Preceding the opening of the 5th Annual MU Life Sciences & Society Symposium [Darwin’s Ongoing Revolution: Evolutionary Thought in Emerging Fields] on March 13th the MU Libraries received a request from two of the distinguished presenters at the symposium to have a tour of the exhibit entitled “150 Years of the Origin of Species – The Historical Journey from Specimens to Species to Genes” located in the Ellis Library Colonnade. The library exhibit was developed and installed by the Special Collections, Archives & Rare Books Division of the MU Libraries. The guests were received by Jim Cogswell, Director of Libraries, and Alla Barabtarlo and Michael Holland from the Special Collections, Archives & Rare Books Division.

Among the two distinguished guests visiting the exhibit were Dame Gillian Beer a revered literary scholar in Victorian studies who is the King Edward VII Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University and in 1998 was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (the second highest level of the OBE) for her services to English Literature. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature and is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dame Gillian came to the University of Missouri to participate in the Darwin Symposium largely because of her critically acclaimed book, Darwin Plots, now in the 3rd edition, which relates the form and language of Victorian novels to Darwinist thinking.

The other scholarly visitor to the Ellis Library exhibit, on the 13th of March was also a British citizen. Professor Michael Ruse is a philosopher of science specializing in the philosophy of biology, and is most widely known for his work on the relationship between evolutionary biology and religion. After a 35 year teaching career at the University of Guelph in Canada, Professor Ruse was named the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University in 2000. He is the author of many books, including The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, Monad to Man: the Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology, and Can a Darwinian be a Christian? In 1986, he was elected as a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.