A&S All Star Professor Lee Dugatkin presents
"The Evolution of Goodness:
Why Are Animals and Humans Ever Nice?" 

In a world supposedly governed by ruthless survival of the fittest, why do we see acts of goodness in both animals and humans? This problem plagued Charles Darwin in the 1850s as he developed his theory of evolution through natural selection. Indeed, Darwin worried that the goodness he observed in nature could be the Achilles heel of his theory. Ever since then, scientists and other thinkers have engaged in a fierce debate about the origins of goodness that has dragged politics, philosophy, and religion into what remains a major question for evolutionary biology. 

Biology Professor Lee Alan Dugatkin is a distinguished university scholar at the University of Louisville. He is well known for his research on the evolution of goodness in humans and nonhumans. He has written several books and texts on the subject and has had more than 125 articles published in such journals as Nature, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The Proceedings of The Royal Society of London.