Evolution Education in the American South: Culture, Politics, and Resources in and around Alabama

340 Pages·2017·4.72 MB·English

by  Christopher D. Lynn

Evolution Education in the American South
Christopher D. Lynn • Amanda L. Glaze • William A. Evans • Laura K. Reed
Editors
Evolution Education
in the American
South
Culture, Politics, and Resources in and around
Alabama
Editors
Christopher D. Lynn Amanda L. Glaze
The University of Alabama Georgia Southern University
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA Statesboro, Georgia, USA
William A. Evans Laura K. Reed
The University of Alabama The University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
ISBN 978-1-349-95138-3 ISBN 978-1-349-95139-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95139-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930346
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Cover illustration: Sketch, Charles Darwin original
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F
oreword
The world transformed in many ways with the publication of Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. But, in other respects, Darwin’s famous
book merely synthesized centuries of thought on the subject, confirmed
by Darwin’s observations, experiments, or those of his colleagues he con-
tacted for expertise or assurance.
The basic outline of pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought is laid out
in most relevant introductory texts so we provide only a brief overview.
Additionally, there are many fine studies of the reception to Origin of
Species, including Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: The Power of Place and
David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.1
During the Middle Ages, the prevailing belief was in stasis or fixity
of species, based on the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being.
People felt God had created all species in a hierarchy leading to humans
at the apex. Archbishop James Ussher gave the date of this creation using
the “begat” chapter of Genesis as 4004 BC. The Copernican challenge to
a geocentric universe in favor of one that rotates around the sun and the
finding of numerous fossils in coal mines during the Industrial Revolution
upset this model of a rigid hierarchy. John Ray and Carolus Linnaeus
introduced the taxonomic system of categorization of life that we still use
to classify and trace evolutionary lineages.
1 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of PlaceKnopf, 2011); David Quammen, The
Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His
Theory of Evolution (Great Discoveries)WW Norton & Company, 2007).
vii
viii FOREWORD
In the last few decades of the eighteenth century, numerous European
scholars openly challenged assumptions of a constant rather than dynamic
universe. Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon explored the notion
that taxa even above the species level were related by common descent,
altered through the direct influence of the environment over tens of thou-
sands of years. Invertebrate zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck provided the
most systematic mechanism for Buffon’s notion of “transmutation,” as
evolutionary modification was then known. He proposed that changes in
habitat and climate forced organisms to take on new behaviors that gradu-
ally altered internal tissues and organs, slight changes which were passed
along to the next generation—a concept that came to be known as the
Principle of Acquired Characteristics.
Lamarck’s younger colleague, renowned comparative anatomist
Georges Cuvier, agreed with his contemporaries, such as Scottish geolo-
gist James Hutton, that the earth was even older than Buffon had imag-
ined. But whereas Hutton and Lamarck emphasized gradualism and
uniformitarianism—the notion that both present and past geophysical
processes are gradual and consistent—Cuvier championed the notion that
major extinction events occasionally punctuated the equilibrium of life on
earth. Because every organism was an interlocking machine, exquisitely
adapted for the conditions of its particular ecosystem, Cuvier doubted that
transmutation above the species level was possible without these major
cataclysms wiping the slate and effectively declaring the end of each par-
ticular geological epoch. British and American scholars at that time read
into Cuvier’s catastrophism support for religious ideas like the Noachian
Deluge (Noah’s Flood).
Charles Lyell, a British geologist and contemporary of Darwin, would
have an immense effect on the latter’s work both as a supporter and
because Lyell’s Principles of Geology was one of the books Darwin read on
his five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. Darwin would also read the
work of economist Thomas Malthus upon his return to London, whose
essay on the economics of population suggested that unlimited resources
must necessarily limit the growth of any population.
Charles Darwin was born into a wealthy family of landed English gentry
and benefited from an excellent education and the leisure to explore the
natural environment of his family’s extensive country estate. He was sent
to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine like his father but did
not attend many lectures and detested surgery. Instead, he spent time with
natural historians including Robert Grant, who had studied the evolution-
FOREWORD ix
ary views of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, and promoted the ideas of
Cuvier’s opponents, Lamarck and Geoffroy St. Hiliaire. He dropped out
of Edinburgh after two years, but his father was upset about Charles’ idle-
ness and he enrolled Charles at Christ’s College, Cambridge University
to earn a divinity degree in the Anglican Church. At the time, gentlemen
naturalists were often also professional parsons in their local churches.
After university training, he accompanied Captain Robert FitzRoy on the
famous Beagle voyage as companion and naturalist. He read widely, col-
lected specimens, and kept extensive notes during the voyage.
After this seminal period, Darwin spent the remainder of his life largely
cloistered at his country estate, but he conducted hundreds of experi-
ments and kept up vast correspondences with scientists all over the world
in his search for data to develop his theory.
Darwin wrote to Lyell with some initial notes on the theory of evo-
lution by natural selection in 1842, and wrote a more extensive and
unpublished manuscript in 1844, but his seminal Origins of Species would
not be written until 1859. Meanwhile, Alfred Russel Wallace, a fellow
Englishman born into more modest circumstances, was developing a simi-
lar theory based on his travels throughout South America and Southeast
Asia, as a naturalist for hire, collecting specimens for wealthy benefactors
back home. In 1858, Wallace published an essay that laid out natural selec-
tion, which motivated Darwin to rush On the Origins of Species out by the
following year.
The basic process of evolution by natural selection, as Darwin under-
stood it, was as follows:
1. Organisms reproduce faster than food supplies increase.
2. There is biological variation within species that can be inherited.
3. There is competition between organisms within the same species for
the limited resources.
4. Biological varieties within species that out-compete their neighbors
must have had some beneficial variations that are better able to com-
pete for those limited resources.
5. Traits that are passed on must have been advantageous based on
local environmental circumstances, such that some traits in a species
are favored in one environment and other traits in the same species
may be favored in another environment.
6. Through this natural environmental process, different species may
eventually diverge from the same parent species.
x FOREWORD
Missing from Darwin and Wallace’s theory was a viable mechanism to
explain the inherited change in species. This mechanism would be pro-
vided by Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk and another contempo-
rary of Darwin, though Mendel’s work would essentially go undiscovered
until 50 years after both of their deaths.
Mendel was interested in testing a prevailing idea that when two vari-
eties of a species mated, blending or hybridization occurred. Yet it was
clear to Mendel and others of the time that sometimes offspring tended
to appear more similar to one parent than the other. Mendel tested this by
cross-breeding varieties of pea plants and determined that discrete physi-
cal traits could be distinguished that were passed down independently
of each other following mathematical probabilities. He also noticed that
some types of a discrete trait were more likely to appear, or be dominant,
in subsequent generations than others. Later researchers would identify
these discrete traits as related to genes and the variants of a gene as alleles.
In the early nineteenth century, Mendel’s work would be rediscovered
and replicated in the labs of Thomas Hunt Morgan using fruit flies. The
integration of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics is termed the
“modern synthesis” and forms the basis for contemporary evolutionary
genetics.
Evolutionary genetics focuses on the dynamics of gene pools in which
evolution may occur based on Darwinian natural selection, as well as the
other three primary forces of evolution. Mutations are changes in genetic
sequences that, when heritable, introduce new variation to a population.
Gene flow is the movement by physical migration of individuals carrying
different genes from one gene pool to another, which reduces the differ-
ences between the populations. By contrast, genetic drift is the random
accumulation of differences, due to sampling a subset of alleles each gen-
eration, which can occur between gene pools.
These processes are substantiated by repeated testing via the scientific
method, yet evolution is often disregarded as “just a theory.” As several
authors in this volume point out, this dismissal is based on the public
use of the word “theory” as something that is speculative. The scientific
definition of theory is an idea that is falsifiable—in other words, it has to
be possible to demonstrate that it is wrong—and that has been repeat-
edly tested and not disproven. A theory, then, is a well-substantiated
explanation, not speculation. Furthermore, after much additional testing
and evidence, a theory can be accepted as a law or a fact, such as the law
of gravity.
FOREWORD xi
Macroevolution, or the descent with modification from an ancestral
species, has been repeatedly demonstrated and widely considered a fact.
There is an enormous amount of evidence that supports changes from one
species to another and absolutely no evidence for independent creation of
any species we have ever discovered. This is laid out clearly in books like
Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True.2
Microevolution, or the production of variation within gene pools, pop-
ulations, and species, is what leads, ultimately, to macroevolution. But the
small changes taking place in real time can be difficult to detect, except in
some species, such as fruit flies that are easily studied in a lab environment.
What these small changes mean and how they happen in terms of the big-
ger picture is the charge of current and future scientists.
The chapters herein, we hope, provide some context for the current cli-
mate of evolution education in the American South. Before we can move
forward, we must deconstruct the past and own it for all that it is, not just
those parts we like or with which we agree.
2 Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (Penguin.com, 2009).