This month we’re focusing on evolution, a subject that never fails to intrigue my students.
Physicists who study atoms have long been hunting for a valid “grand unified theory:” something that can encompass electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions at the atomic level. Add gravity to those forces and you could even create a “theory of everything” fully explaining and potentially linking together all known physical phenomena.
Biologists already have a grand unified theory – it’s called the theory of evolution. Although it is a fact that there have been (and continue to be) remarkable changes in our earth’s species, and the very basic ideas underlying the theory of evolution are relatively simple, modern evolutionary theory is neither trivial nor simple to grasp. I tell my students that one of the more amazing things about evolution is that so many people feel that they fully understand it! Perhaps this quote from Daniel Dennet, Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University illustrates the significance of the theory: “If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.”
Ironically, and delightfully, evolutionary biology turns out to be one of the best disciplines for illustrating the skeptical and evidence-based practice of science! Along with a conventional examination of evidence and mechanisms for evolution, we are reading “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shubin. A highly recommended read – get it at your local libraries. You can also look at my evolution in nutshell handout.
A few entertaining related quotes:
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? -Richard Dawkins
Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory. -Jimmy Swaggart
“There is, indeed, a design to life — an evolutionary design. Scientists should embrace this concept of ‘design,’ and in so doing, claim for science the sense of orderly rationality in nature to which the anti-evolution movement has long appealed.” -Kenneth Miller. Roman Catholic, Cell Biologist, Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence at Brown University
“All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution” -William Jennings Bryan
“Our future well-being — the well-being of all of us on the planet — depends on the education of our descendants.” -Daniel Dennet, Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University
And two by Robinson Jeffers:
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What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jeweled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?
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It is good for man
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish,
not to go down the dinosaur’s way
Until all his capacities have been explored
and it is good for him
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed, in fact,
in ten thousand years,
than the beaks of eagles.
