From the press release:
Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, will debate a simple and deep subject: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are? [I suspect neither side will be adopting the creationist position…. —Ed.]
Here are the details:
ADAM GOPNIK with STEVEN PINKER
Angels and Ages
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 7:00 PM
South Court Auditorium
The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street / Enter at Fifth Avenue
Buy Tickets & SAVE $10 on every LIVE ticket!
Become a Friend of the Library for as little at $40 and you ticket
will be $15 instead of $25 plus you will pay NO service fees.
Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, will debate a simple and deep subject: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are?
Gopnik draws a line and suggests that Darwin can take us only to the edge of art and culture and not beyond; Pinker suggests that Darwin, and Darwinian thinking, in the form of evolutionary psychology, can take us deep into the seeming mysteries of why we like stories and pictures, and the kind of stories and pictures we like.
Both ardent Darwinians [See? Told you. —Ed.], Adam Gopnik and Steven Pinker will offer different—perhaps complementary, perhaps permanently contrasting—visions of what Darwin’s legacy is on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.
About Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1986. In 2000, he began writing New York Journal, about culture and daily life in New York City. He previously spent five years in Paris, writing Paris Journal, a similar column about the life of an expatriate in Paris. Gopnik is the author of Paris to the Moon, The King in the Window, and Through the Children’s Gate. In 1998, he received the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting for his Paris Journal. Before he came to The New Yorker he was an editor at Alfred A. Knopf and a fiction editor at GQ. In 1990, Gopnik co-curated an exhibition entitled “High and Low: ModernArt and Popular Culture” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with the museum’s director, Kirk Varnedoe. He also co-authored the book under the same title.
About Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the American Psychological Association. He is the author of The
Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate, and writes frequently for The New Republic and The New York Times. He has been named Humanist of the Year, and is listed in Foreign Policy and
Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and in
Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” His latest book is The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

Martin Schneider writes:
The New Yorker Summit is taking place today at New York University. (A bit more convenient location than the Conference of previous years, which was held way over by the West Side Highway, in Chelsea.)
The lineup includes many luminaries, including Howard Dean, Geoffrey Canada, Nassim N. Taleb, Naomi Klein, and Elizabeth Edwards, along with familiar personages from the magazine like Seymour Hersh, Malcolm Gladwell, James Surowiecki, Ryan Lizza, and on and on. (Here’s the schedule.)
If I weren’t on the other side of the Atlantic, I would so be covering this. Failing that, we refer you to Jason Kottke, who has promised “some sort of live-ish coverage.”
More to come as the magazine posts reports, videos, and the like. Attendees, I wish you all intellectual, social, and culinary pleasure.
Update: The group NYU Students Organizing for America is covering the summit live via Twitter.