In 2009 I volunteered to chair the committee for the Year of Science for southern New Mexico and El Paso County, Texas. It was a great experience and I really enjoyed it. I talked to one of the people at the local NPR station and we arranged a series of interviews with local scientists which were aired on the station at intervals. I got a professional impersonator to be Charles Darwin as a young man after the voyage of the Beagle and I (probably ill-advisedly) volunteered to be the elder Darwin and to explain the Theory of Natural Selection. I am not a professional actor, so I did this with some trepidation. I warned our Dean that this might make us a target for right-wing religious types, but he (to his credit) said that we were a university and we did not censor research or teaching, even if that disturbed somebody. Fortunately we never had an incident. He funded the actor we hired and I started by giving a presentation as Darwin at the university library. It was a relatively small meeting room, but it was packed- standing room only- and I managed to pull it off well enough that a science historian who attended complimented me on the presentation. I then gave two more presentations on “after the Origin” and later appeared as Darwin at a science event at the mall and as part of a Halloween block party. It helped that at the time I had a long white beard, which I recently regrew for another version of the first presentation at a salmon hatchery on Puget Sound. I hope that my performances enlightened my audiance to the real story of Darwin’s life and achievement and to the basic ideas that guide biological thought today.
Because of the coronavirus I have shortened my beard so that I can now wear a face mask, but beards grow and if I ever need to recreate that presentation I can. The gist of my presentation, after my review of Darwin’s life, highlighted the main points of natural selection.
1. Nature produces huge numbers of individuals
2. There are not enough resources for all to survive
3. There are variations between individuals
4. Some of these variations confer an advantage on the individual that is inheritable
5. Thus the survivors in the struggle for life are not random, but selected by natural processes
6. The traits selected for can be pushed by selection to produced new species
As T. H. Huxley is reported to have said “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”
Evolution by Natural Selection has stood the test of time, with some modifications regarding the sources of variation and the knowledge of the structure and functions of genes in the processes as well as recent discoveries in epigenetics, which indicate that modification of gene expression by turning on or off gene sequences can sometimes occur within living organisms and that occasionally those changes may be passed on to progeny. Evolution can also apparently proceed by jumps- punctuated equilibrium — which Darwin did not believe. Like all theories details had to be worked out and still almost certainly will provide surprises, but the basic idea of natural selection is a solid foundation for biological sciences and is demonstrated every day in epidemiology in the mutation of disease organisms. In order to demonstrate evolution in higher organisms long-term studies are needed, as the Grants did with Darwin’s famous Galapagos Finches.
In short evolution is a fact and natural selection is the major mechanism involved.
I got most of my inspiration from the definitive two volume biography of Darwin by Janet E. Browne.
References:
Browne, Janet E., 1996. Charles Darwin: vol. 1 Voyaging. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Browne, Janet E., 2002. Charles Darwin: vol. 2 The Power of Place. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Weiner, Jonathan, 1994, Reprinted 2014. The Beak of the Finch. Random House.