A Death in the Family: Skip Evans

Late last night, I got word from Ed Brayton that Panda’s Thumb blogger Skip Evans was found dead at his Madison, Wisconsin home. Skip had been having problems with his cardiovascular system, and so far as we know now those problems appear to have been the cause of his death.

Skip should be well known to most of our readers, either by his posts here or by some of the contributions that he made to advancing science education and countering the socio-political machinations of the creationism movement. A couple of the high-profile things Skip did included much of the concept of NCSE’s “Project Steve” and its naming, plus taking on (now convicted felon) “Dr.” Kent Hovind concerning his “doctoral disssertation”. Skip personally requested a copy of Hovind’s dissertation from “Patriot University”, and they shipped Skip the original, including taped-in graphics Hovind had scissored out of science magazines.

I’ll plan to add some photos later, but I wanted this news to go out soonest to our community. Skip was a friend of mine, and I appreciated his good humor. I already miss him.

His colleague posted this comment on Facebook:

To ease the pain of Skip’s dear friends, please know that he has so many people who loved him here. He was only with our company a year, but brought more life and energy to us in that short time than most people do in a lifetime. I went to a presentation on the fallacies of creationism a few weeks ago, where Skip gave an irreverent and poignant and funny talk. Over 150 people were in stitches. We were lucky to know him.

This may be among the most recent photos I have of Skip. This is Skip in 2004 visiting and lending a hand in feeding Rusty, my Harris’ hawk. (Actually, the picture comes from the day after the launch of Panda’s Thumb, now that I’ve taken a closer look at my archive of photos.)