Congratulations to Richard Korzekwa of Los Alamos, New Mexico, who won the Florida Citizens for Science's "Stick Science Contest" with the comic strip above. (Click on image for larger view.)

Husband-and-wife team Peter Raymond Grant and Barbara Rosemary Grant have won the 2009 Kyoto Prize in basic sciences.
The Grants, both emeritus professors in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, are known for their work studying the population of birds known as "Darwin's finches" on the Galapagos island of Daphne Major and for showing evolution in action—how beak size and shape evolve through natural selection in changing environmental conditions. Beak size is important, they showed, because if the weather changed and suddenly only large, hard seeds were available, for example, finches with bigger, stronger beaks would be more likely to survive and, over generations, would become more common in the population.
"The Grants' empirical research has made the most important contribution since Darwin toward making evolutionary biology a science in which proof is possible," according to a news release from Japan's Inamori Foundation, which sponsors the award. The prize honors "those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind."
The Grants will receive the award, valued at about 500,000 dollars, in November. —Heather Wax

Robert Pennock, a professor of history and philosophy of science at Michigan State University, has won the American Institute for Biological Science’s Outstanding Service Award. Pennock, author of Tower of Babel and Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, was recognized for his work supporting evolution education and his testimony at the 2005 Dover trial, among other efforts.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize more than few names on the Scientific American 10, an honor roll that recognizes 10 people who "have recently demonstrated outstanding commitment to assuring that the benefits of new technologies and knowledge will accrue to humanity."
On the list, along with celebrities like President Barack Obama, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates, are Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and Dr. Andras Nagy, a researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
Scott was recognized for her "tireless advocacy to ensure that evolution, the cornerstone of all modern biology, is taught correctly in the nation's public schools," says John Rennie, Scientific American's editor in chief.
As the magazine notes:

"Thomas Henry Huxley was the 19th-century biologist known as 'Darwin's bulldog' for his defense of the great scientist's ideas. The 21st century has a counterpart in the woman who describes herself as 'Darwin's golden retriever.' Eugenie Scott has emerged as one of the most prominent advocates for keeping evolution an integral part of the curriculum in public schools. ... With the ever changing semantics of antievolutionists, Darwin's golden retriever will have plenty more chances to act as a loyal defender of teaching evolution in the schools."

"In effect, Nagy and his colleagues had, for the first time, created the equivalent of embryonic stem cells that were uncontroversially ethical, safe and efficient—a significant advance toward being able to use them in patients in a clinic."

Congratulations again to Bernard d'Espagnat, the French physicist and philosopher who won the 2009 Templeton Prize, valued at about 1.42 million dollars. Earlier this week, he was formally presented with the award by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

Bernard d'Espagnat, a French physicist and philosopher of science whose work has focused on the philosophical implications of quantum theory, is the 2009 Templeton Prize winner. He is accepting the award this morning at a press conference (and live Web cast) at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization headquarters in Paris.
D'Espagnat, 87, was a senior physicist at CERN (where he helped form its theoretical physics group) and a longtime professor at the University of Paris-Orsay (now the University of Paris-Sud), where he was director of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and Elementary Particles from 1970 until his retirement in 1987. He is an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Paris-Sud.
From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, he worked on foundational problems in physics and played a key role during the development of quantum mechanics, the theory that explains the rules that govern the behavior of atoms and molecules and predicts their interactions. (Specifically, he tested the "Bell's inequalities" theorem.) The impact of quantum theory was enormous: Pre-quantum physics—what we call "classical" physics—describes "reality as it really is," d'Espagnat explains, while quantum physics predicts what will be observed under certain circumstances.
Quantum physics reshaped our basic ideas about the nature of reality and challenged the way we thought about the world. Namely, d'Espagnat said in prepared remarks, "it is now clear that to strictly keep to the, apparently obvious, notion that all individual things really exist at some separate places in space whether we know about them or not is not fully compatible with our knowledge: It appears that a certain type of holism, not straightforwardly perceptible but hidden in the equations, must be taken into account."
D'Espagnat's idea is that a unifying, ultimate reality is "veiled" behind the things we perceive—"a ground of things" he calls it, that "lies so much beyond our concepts, be they familiar or mathematical, that the phenomena—those we directly perceive as well as those science describe—do not enable us to decipher it. On it they provide us with merely glimpses, and very vague ones at that."
Classical physicists, he said, seemed to think their job was to "explain everything by starting 'from the bottom up,' that is from elementary material components taken to be the fundamental entities and by showing that little by little they combine in such a way that finally the complex colorful world we see emerges." In their eyes, he explained, it was possible to reach "a knowledge of the ultimate nature of things, so that anything having to do with mystery was doomed to final elimination."
D'Espagnat sees things differently: What he calls the "ground of things" is "beyond conceptual knowledge, and mystery is not therefore something negative that has to be eliminated. On the contrary, it is one of its constitutive elements," he said.
"My own conception of present-day physics rather favors, as religions do, an explanation 'from the top,' that is ... grounded on a Being endowed with some mysterious unity and whose essence is not fully describable by means of conceptualized talk alone." And he's "convinced that those among our contemporaries who believe in a spiritual dimension of existence and live up to it are, when all is said, fully right."
The Templeton Prize, valued at about 1.42 million dollars, the largest annual monetary award given to an individual, celebrates someone who has made "an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension." It will be officially awarded to d'Espagnat by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace in London on May 5. —Heather Wax

Father George Coyne, an astronomer, Jesuit priest, and former director of the Vatican Observatory, has won the American Astronomical Society's George Van Biesbroeck Prize for 2009, awarded every two years for "long-term extraordinary or unselfish service to astronomy." The prize, says the AAS, recognizes "the diversity and scientific richness he has brought to the astronomical community through his visionary leadership of the Vatican Observatory Summer School and its long-term mentoring program, and for the unique role he has played at the juncture of science and religion."

The Science and Transcendence Advanced Research Series, a program of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, has awarded grants worth 200,000 dollars to two interdisciplinary research groups (which earlier received grants of 120,000 dollars). "Their continuing research is at the center of a wide range of scientific area spanned by the 27 STARS grants: from fundamental physics and evolutionary biology to the neurosciences and mathematics," says Robert Russell, STARS principal investigator, founder and director of CTNS, and the Ian G. Barbour Professor of Theology and Science in residence at the Graduate Theological Union. "The implications for our understanding of human spirituality, virtue ethics, the scientific question of the origin of life, and the meaning of 'ultimate reality' are very promising."
One research team will study "The Rationality of Ultimate Value: Emotion, Awareness, and Causality in Virtue Ethics and Decision Neuroscience." According to the researchers, led by Warren Brown, a professor of psychology at the Fuller Theological Seminary, and Gregory Peterson, a professor of philosophy and religion at South Dakota State University, the project "has created exciting new approaches to research on moral action and virtue. Most remarkably, the project has yielded a novel approach to neuroscience and psychological study of virtuous exemplars within a laboratory context."
The other team, led by Andrew Robinson, an honorary university fellow at the University of Exeter, and Christopher Southgate, a research fellow at the school, will study "Information and the Origin of Life." The researchers say their "new philosophical definition of 'interpretation' is providing a novel approach to the scientific question of the origin of life. We have begun to generate models and proposals that are already starting to demonstrate the advantage that even very simple entities gain by interpreting their environment. The theological part of our proposal is that these three-fold patterns in the world also provide ways of talking about the Christian understanding of the life of God and God's interaction with the world."

Julian Barnes' book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a "memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family," has been named one of the 10 best books of 2008 by The New York Times. "This absorbing memoir traces Barnes’ progress from atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the timeless questions of mortality and aging," writes the newspaper. "Barnes distills his own experiences—and those of his parents and brother—in polished and wise sentences that recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the other French masters he includes in his discussion."

The Templeton Foundation has won a 2008 National Humanities Medal "for opening new frontiers in the pursuit of answers to mankind's oldest questions" and for being a "catalyst of groundbreaking work in scientific, religious, and philosophical exploration of the deepest concerns of the humanities and the human race.” Winners of the medals, awarded annually by the National Endowment for the Humanities, are selected by the president

Congratulations to Dr. David Comings, a neuroscientist and geneticist at City of Hope Medical Center in California. His book Did Man Create God? has won the USA Book News' National "Best Books" 2008 Award in the religion category and was a finalist in the science category. The book's premise is that spirituality is hard-wired into a specific part of the brain and because it's pleasurable and critical to our evolution and survival, it will never disappear. —Heather Wax

"The Atheon: A Temple to Science," an upcoming art installation at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, has won a neighborhood improvement project grant from the University of California, Berkeley Chancellor's Community Partnership Fund. The installation, by conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, will be the first Windows exhibit on the second floor of the Jewish museum's new downtown Berkeley location and "calls forth the fusion of science and religion by building a temple for scientific worship," according to the museum's Web site. From street level, anyone walking by the building will be able to see NASA images of the universe's early years on the building's large vaulted windows, while listening to accompanying sounds on their cell phones. The Atheon exhibit begins September 27 with the start of the museum's new season. —Heather Wax

Kathryn Tabb, a graduate of the University of Chicago now working toward a master's of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, has won the Darwin Correspondence Project essay contest and a prize of 1,000 pounds (about 2,000 dollars). The award was established to reward the best student essay on a specific topic in the field of science and religion.
Tabb's essay, "Darwin at Orchis Bank," looked at Darwin's 19th-century work on orchid morphology and pollination and how it connects and contrasts with the contemporary idea of "intelligent design." Darwin wrote a lot about this work in his letters to Asa Gray, a Harvard University botanist and Presbyterian.
The essay will be posted on the project's Web site, which has already made the complete text of nearly 6,000 of Darwin's 14,500 letters available online. —Heather Wax

Ted Peters, a professor of systematic theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary known for his work in the areas of science, technology, and ethics, has been named the next Martin E. Marty Professor of Religion and the Academy at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. The position, named in honor of Martin E. Marty, a professor of religious history at the University of Chicago for 35 years, was previously held by John Barbour, a religion professor.
Peters will serve in this role during the 2009 calendar year.

Father George Coyne, an astronomer and former director of the Vatican Observatory, has won the 2008 Mendel Medal. The medal, bestowed by Villanova University, is named in honor of Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar and botanist who balanced his religious studies with his revolutionary research into genes and heredity. The award is given "to outstanding scientists who have done much by their painstaking work to advance the cause of science, and, by their lives and their standing before the world as scientists, have demonstrated that between true science and true religion there is no intrinsic conflict." Coyne will receive the medal during a ceremony at The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (which currently houses an exhibit on Mendel's life, work, and influence) on September 6.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, a 76-year-old emeritus professor at McGill University in Montreal and the 2007 winner of the Templeton Prize, has won the prestigious Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The prize recognizes people whose lifetime achievements have "contributed greatly to the progress of science, the advancement of civilization, and the enrichment and elevation of the human spirit."

Time magazine recognizes the growing importance of science and religion by jointly naming Dr. Eric Chivian and the Rev. Richard Cizik to this year's list of the world's 100 most influential people. Chivian, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Cizik, a leading figure in the National Association of Evangelicals, have brought their respective scientific and religious interests together in the Scientists and Evangelicals Initiative, which aims to unite the two groups with the common goal of taking better care of the environment.
Toping the list is the Dalai Lama, who Deepak Chopra says once told him "to ignore all organized faiths and keep to the road of higher consciousness. 'Without relying on religion, we look to common sense, common experience and the findings of science for understanding,' he said."
The Jewish Chronicle also recognizes science and religion on its "Power 100" list. Coming in at number 57 is Robert Winston, an expert in fertility studies, who told the newspaper last year that "medical research which enabled scientists to create embryos that are part-human and part-animal would not contravene Orthodox values." A working scientist and practicing Jew, Winston also tackles science-and-religion issues in his book The Story of God. —Dan Messier

Michael Heller, a Catholic priest, theologian, mathematical physicist, cosmologist, and philosophy professor at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow, Poland, is the 2008 Templeton Prize winner. He is accepting the award this morning at a press conference (and live Web cast) at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York.
For more than 40 years, and often under communist repression, Heller has explored life's ultimate questions by studying the origin and cause of the universe, focusing on the beauty and comprehensibility of its mathematical structure. "Mathematical structures that are parts of the composition determining the functioning of the universe are called laws of physics," he said in prepared remarks. "It is a very subtle composition indeed. Like in any masterly symphony, elements of chance and necessity are interwoven with each other and together span the structure of the whole. Elements of necessity determine the pattern of possibilities and dynamical paths of becoming, but they leave enough room for chancy events to make this becoming rich and individual."
Heller's insights into math, physics, and religion began to develop at early age—family friends would gather in the Heller home to discuss these topics—and his father would often talk about the great need to combine science and religion. From the time he was 10, Heller had decided both were important and would be a part of his life, setting his path to the priesthood and academia. "Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning," he said. "Both are prerequisites of the decent existence. The paradox is that these two great values seem often to be in conflict. I am frequently asked how I could reconcile them with each other. When such a question is posed by a scientist or a philosopher, I invariably wonder how educated people could be so blind not to see that science does nothing else but exploits God’s creation."
The Templeton Prize, valued at more than 1.5 million dollars, the largest annual monetary award given to an individual, celebrates someone who has engaged life's big questions, whether it be the laws of nature and the universe, or the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness, or creativity. It will be officially awarded to Heller by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace in London on May 7. —Heather Wax