Oak Ridge Today

UT professor to discuss impact of COVID-19 on ecology, evolution

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Nina Fefferman

A University of Tennessee professor will discuss the effects of COVID-19 on ecology and evolution during an online presentation on Tuesday.

Nina Fefferman will be the speaker at the League of Women Voters event. Fefferman is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Fefferman is the associate director of UT’s One Health Initiative, and she is a member of the Covid-19 Outbreak Response Experts (CORE-19) at UT.

The principle investigator at the Fefferman Lab at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville since 2008, Fefferman focuses on disease in the human population and how disease and disease-related behavioral ecology can affect the short-term survival and long-term evolutionary success of a population during and after a pandemic, a press release said. She has done extensive work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on pandemic preparedness and has drawn on her expertise to develop models to shape policy to keep populations safe during and after pandemics.

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‘Religion in Human Evolution’ topic of local faith-science lecture

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Gordon M. Burghardt

Gordon M. Burghardt

 

Gordon M. Burghardt, Alumni Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, will speak on “Religion in Human Evolution” on Wednesday, September 12, in Oak Ridge.

Burghardt is the first lecturer in a new faith-science lecture series sponsored by First Presbyterian Church and First United Methodist Church, a press release said. The lecture, which will feature videos, will be held at 7 p.m. in the multipurpose room of FUMC, which can be reached through the double doors facing Vienna Road.

Burghardt will speak on the book “Religion in Human Evolution,” by Robert Bellah, the late distinguished sociologist of religion who taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the press release said.

Part of Bellah’s book is devoted to Burghardt’s research on ritual and play. [Read more…]

Faith column: Letting pain be pain (Part Two)

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Last month, I wrote about the problem Western civilization seems to have with pain as evidenced by the plethora of outlets we’ve created to avoid it. Central to part one is understanding the paradox of pain: that while pain certainly is no one’s friend, the laws at work on our planet are such that pain is everyone’s friend: Life depends on pain and without it, we wouldn’t be here.

It would be hard to maintain our humanity if we didn’t ask spiritual questions about pain. The Bible is loaded with “heroes” who did this very thing, including Christ himself, who from the cross issued the famous phrase found in Psalms 22: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Questioning in this way is not only natural, but also appears in both the Jewish and Christian texts as an affirmation of our human need to wrestle with the “why” of pain.

I have only one real issue with the questioning of God and pain in our modern world. It comes when a person has rejected the faith life because of the problem of pain and yet, simultaneously, accepts the story of evolution as a beautiful thing, despite the clearly painful history it details. I don’t believe these two world views are mutually exclusive and personally hold to both as examples of beauty rising out of pain. [Read more…]

‘Understanding Evolution’ at Lunch with League on Tuesday

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A licensed professional counselor will discuss evolution during “Lunch with the League” on Tuesday.

Friederica “Freddie” Nechtow will be the guest speaker, and her presentation will focus on “understanding evolution and the evidence for it rather than a debate of the pros and cons,” a press release said. [Read more…]