"Brains, genes and morality" - A Presentation by Dr. Mark Reimers

The public is invited to attend a Science, Reason & Religion forum at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax, 2709 Hunter Mill Rd in Oakton on Sunday, Oct 26 at 12:30pm.

This is a free event. The on-campus meeting site is the main sanctuary. This is the annual Ira Hamburg Memorial Lecture.

What is the biological basis of morality? Scientists are just beginning to understand something of how our brain is working when we feel compassion or loyalty, or other moral emotions.

This talk explores the neurobiology of morality both in terms of moral feeling and in terms of values, relating each moral feeling and value to what we know (and what we don't) about the brain function underlying it.

This talk will address such questions as: is there a special place for a moral sense in a person's brain? What activity goes on in our brains when we make moral choices, or when we respond to another person with empathy? How are the brains of psychopaths different, and is this difference genetic?

Presented by Dr. Mark Reimers who obtained his PhD in mathematics from the University of BC in Canada, and does research integrating statistics, computing, and neurobiology. He has worked at the National Institutes of Health, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric Genetics in Richmond. His research work currently focuses on analyzing and interpreting the very large data sets now coming out of neuroscience and genomics.