Arts & Sciences

A review published in the Nov. 9 issue of Science explores the complexity of evolution’s predictability in extraordinary detail. Jonathan Losos of Arts & Sciences takes on a classic question posed by Stephen Jay Gould in an effort to fully interrogate ideas about contingency’s role in evolution.

Erin McGlothlin, associate professor of German, and Anika Walke, assistant professor of history, both in Arts & Sciences, served as conference hosts for “Lessons and Legacies,” the premier intellectual gathering in Holocaust studies.

David Charbonneau, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, will deliver the annual Robert M. Walker Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, in Whitaker Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The talk, titled “How to Find an Inhabited Exoplanet,” is free and open to the public.

Emotions such as anger, fear, disgust and disillusionment can have dramatically different effects on voter apathy and turnout, said Alan Lambert, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

In the age of reality TV, what does it mean to be “authentic”? So asks senior Grace Haselhorst in “The Realness.” Thyrsus, Washington University’s student-run experimental theater group, will debut the play Nov. 9-11.

David L. Kirk, former professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, died Nov. 1, 2018, in St. Louis after a long illness. He was 84. Kirk spent a lifetime teaching and researching developmental biology and, in retirement, worked to improve the way evolution is taught in K-12 schools.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch its 2018 Informal Cities Workshop at 12:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, with a free talk by Jorge Mario Jáuregui, a Brazilian architect taking on the challenge of population growth in informal settings.

During an 8-mile journey from the Columbia Bottom conservation area over the Chain of Rocks in a canoe, Bob Criss in Arts & Sciences talks about Lewis and Clark, navigation and the relevance of rivers today.

Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist, will discuss the estimated half-trillion-dollar cost of the nation’s opioid crisis in the inaugural Murray Weidenbaum Memorial Lecture at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12, in Anheuser-Busch Hall’s Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom.

Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will receive the 2018 Tradition of Literary Excellence Award Oct. 27.