Tag: Darwin

Interview with Jerry in American Scientist

March 5, 2009 • 8:36 am

by Greg Mayer

An interview with Jerry on evolution vs. creationism appears in the online pages of American Scientist. In the interview, Jerry talks mostly about his approach to teaching evolution based on 25 years experience, and how he applied that experience in the writing of WEIT. A couple of highlights:

…when you read Darwin, the thing that’s most fascinating is the evidence he musters in support of it. In talking with professional biologists and evolutionists, they didn’t ever learn why people thought evolution was true, because you’re not taught that in class. But I thought that that should be passed on to the students because of the second reason I wrote the book, which is the pervasiveness of creationism in this country. I wanted to educate the students so they know that evolution really happened, so they don’t really doubt that, but also to arm them against the forces of irrationality that were going to be impinging on them and society….

And so when I teach the stuff I teach it as sort of an object lesson in how to adjudicate between competing theories in science. And that’s the way I wrote the book, too. I’m constantly asking the reader, “How does creationism explain this observation? It can’t.” So it’s more than teaching the evidence; it’s teaching them how to discriminate between good science and bad science, and that’s a good lesson for students too.

Change we can believe in

March 1, 2009 • 11:13 am

by Greg Mayer

The now iconic images of President Obama created by Shepard Fairey last year have been widely imitated. It was perhaps inevitable that Darwin should be included among those so honored.Darwin in Obama-style poster

Created by Mike Rosulek, he is selling t-shirts and posters of this, and several other designs, with proceeds to benefit the National Center for Science Education, a most worthy recipient.  I might quibble with “very gradual”, which might evoke memories of the old punctuated equilibrium debate.  Darwin was certainly a gradualist, but as understood by Darwin, and succunctly characterized in chapter 1 of WEIT, gradualism is not incompatible with highly varying rates of change across time and among lineages.  The best summary of Darwin’s views on the subject is a paper by Frank Rhodes entitled ‘Gradualism, punctuated equilibrium and the Origin of Species‘ published in Nature (305:269-272) in 1983.

(hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

More good books

February 26, 2009 • 7:57 am

by Greg Mayer

In an earlier post, Jerry called Janet Browne’s two-volume work the best of Darwin biographies, calling it “magisterial and engagingly written.”  I concur, and some of our readers have mentioned it approvingly in the comments.  But, at 1200 + pages, it may be a bit daunting as a starting place.  Let me offer two other starting places for the Darwin enthusiast.  Charles Darwin, by Tim BerraThe first is Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man, by Tim Berra, an ichthyologist from Ohio State.  In this slim (144 pp.), well illustrated, volume Berra covers most of the highlights of Darwin’s life, work, and death, and includes a handy annotated list of Darwin’s books and chronology of his life.  There is a nice section of color plates (many by Berra himself of the Galapagos and Down House, Darwin’s home), including my favorite, a painting of 32 breeds of domestic pigeon, one of Darwin’s favored study animals. An afternoon’s read, it is a good place to start.

For a broader view of the science of evolution, but, like WEIT, aimed firmly at the general reader, I highly recommend The Discovery of Evolution, The Discovery of Evolution, by David Youngby David Young of the University of Melbourne. Richly illustrated with both color and line art from contemporary scientific publications, and covering a broad sweep of history, from John Ray and Francis Willughby in the 17th century through to the Modern Synthesis, with a quick tour of more recent developments, it is one of the finest books I’ve ever read not just on the history of the field, but on evolutionary biology itself.  It achieves this distinction by introducing and explicating, in chronological sequence, not just the ideas and historical figures, but the evidence on which the major discoveries of evolutionary biology are based.  It is refreshing and, indeed, exciting, to have these discoveries and attendant scientific debates addressed through the evidence adduced by the discoverers and debaters.  Thus, for example, the phenomenon of natural extinction,  which we today take for granted, is presented as the lively debate it was at the time, and we see it is resolved not by some textbook fiat (as too much of science education seems to be), but by careful anatomical, biogeographic, and geological research, with the great Georges Cuvier’s work on elephants, mammoths, and mastodons playing a major part in the resolution.  The entire book is replete with such examples, and is itself an edifying model of how science should be taught and learned: by direct consideration of the evidence.

WEIT and Darwin’s Sacred Cause reviewed in Washington Post

February 15, 2009 • 7:49 am

Yesterday’s Washington Post reviewed my book together with Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s new book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. An o.k. review for me, though the “too textbooky” comment stung a bit. More important, it described Desmond and Moore’s book in detail, and in a way that will make us all want to read it. Darwin’s Sacred Cause apparently rests on the authors’ thesis that Darwin’s writings on evolution, including The Origin, were part of a detailed plan to demolish slavery by proving the common ancestry of all races. This idea, which is certainly novel, is said to be supported by detailed scholarly research (those who have read the authors’ earlier biography of Darwin—and every Darwin fan should—know how thorough these authors are and how well they write). Clearly this is a must-read book for all of us.

A footnote:  although Desmond and Moore’s Darwin biography is great, I give the edge to Janet Browne’s two-volume work (link is to second volume) as the best among Darwin biographies. It is magisterial and engagingly written.

Darwin the prude, sexual selection, and sperm competition

February 8, 2009 • 10:16 am

Last Thursday’s Times Higher Education Supplement (the UK one) has a series of short pieces on Darwin and his legacy.  Perhaps the most interesting is by Tim Birkhead, the noted evolutionist who works on sperm competition in birds and has written a number of academic and popular books on the topic.  Birkhead claims that Darwin was reluctant to publish work on sexual selection—and missed entirely the topics of sperm competition between males as well as the relative promiscuity of females—because of the prudishness of his Victorian milieu as well as of his daughter Henrietta.  I’m not a historian of science and so can’t evaluate these claims, but Birkhead’s piece is provocative and well worth reading, as are the other pieces in this supplement.

Review of WEIT and Darwin books in The Scotsman

February 2, 2009 • 10:09 am

An anniversary review of several of the new Darwin-year books, including mine, appears today in The Scotsman. Of special note are my friend Steve Jones’s new book, Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England, and Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. Jones, in particular, is a witty and incisive writer of popular science who is not as well known in the US as he deserves to be. Both of these books should make absorbing reading.