Welcome to the Website of the Workshop on Evolution: Foundations, Fundamentals, and Disease, to be held December 8-10 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology!  This Workshop is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Science and Technology, The International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter, The Croucher Foundation, the United States National Science Foundation and the United States National Cancer Institute.

This Workshop will address fundamental issues of evolution from a theoretical and experimental perspective. Jacques Monod once said that Darwin's theory of evolution was "the most important theory ever formulated because of its... tremendous philosophical, ideological and political implications". It is now 150 years after the publication of The Origin of the Species, yet unlike Maxwell’s contemporaneous theory of electromagnetism in physics, evolution remains hotly debated around the world.

In this Workshop we will examine the foundations and consequences of evolution, with a critical eye towards what is wrong, right and incomplete with the theory of evolution 150 years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species. The aim here is not to find what is right about the foundations of evolution, but what could be wrong, or even more radically from Carl Woese: "starting from the ground up, grounding our thinking in a non-Darwinian (sometimes anti-Darwinian when necessary to overcome obstructions) foundation in modern physics, not biology". We will also explore the impact of evolution in the propagation of disease, in particular cancer. The emphasis will be on the approach of physics: the development of general principles, quantitative analysis, and development of testable hypothesis.

This truly multi-disciplinary Workshop will help the establish a dialog between the centers of excellence in medicine, biology, chemistry and physics in Hong Kong concerning both the foundations of evolution, and the role that evolution plays in the progression of disease, from the present swine flu pandemic to cancer.