BYOD. Darwin's Birthday. 9th Grade

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Use this text for the activity.

Darwin's Birthday - Text A

Charles Darwin was born on 12th February two hundred years ago. He hated school, especially learning Latin, but he loved reading and studying the details of the natural world. He had a famous grandfather who was a radical thinker. Erasmus Darwin was the doctor of George III, an inventor of engines and very interested in natural philosophy. In fact, Erasmus had influenced the ideas of Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein. His mother, Susannah, was the daughter of Josiah Wedgewood. The Wedgewood pottery was very advanced for its time. The Wedgewoods were radical, technological minded business people.

Charles Darwin went first to Edinburgh to study medicine. He met a lot of radical thinkers. He also met a freed slave who taught him to stuff birds. His father thought he was lazy, and sent him to study theology in Cambridge. He might then have become a clergyman, and spent a quiet life studying natural history. However, he was invited to travel around the world on a government survey ship called the Beagle as a companion for the captain. He thought he was going to be away for two years, but he was away for five years. Everywhere he went he collected specimens. He collected rocks and fossils.

He collected plants and animals. He wrote lots of notes and made lots of drawings. He also met a wide variety of human beings. He saw slaves in Brazil, and was very shocked and angry. He strongly disagreed with Captain Fitzroy who thought that slaves were an inferior family of humans who had to be controlled.

After he came back to England, he married another Wedgewood, and moved to Kent. He continued to study plants and animals, and think about how forms of life were linked to each other. He was worried about publishing his ideas, because he thought many people would be angry about them. Only when he heard that someone else was going to publish similar ideas he published "The Origin of the Species" in 1859. This book was about natural selection in animals, but he decided not to write about humans. When others put forward the theory that there were eight different races of men that had evolved separately he decided to publish "The Descent of Man" in 1871. He put all the races in one family and undermined the arguments for slavery. Many thousands of copies of the book were published. It was quickly translated into many languages. His ideas were taken up by sociologists, psychologists, biologists, politicians and philosophers. Many people were worried that his ideas were dangerous.

Many advances in science—the development of genetics after Darwin’s death, for example, have greatly increased our thinking about evolution. Even with our new knowledge of genes and DNA, the theory of evolution still persists today much as Darwin first described it, and is universally accepted by scientists.

Darwin's Birthday - Text B

Some ideas in science are difficult to understand, because our intuitions don't like them very much. Some scientists argue that this may be because our brains have not evolved fast enough, and are better designed to work for small groups of hunter/gatherers. This is what most of us were doing four to five thousand years ago. So, for instance, we think we have a good chance of winning the National Lottery, we see significance in coincidences and we read astrology predictions and only remember when they come true.

We have trouble in comprehending very large and very small things. We have trouble comprending the distance to the sun and other stars and galaxies. We have trouble getting our heads around the age of the earth.

Sometimes analogy, metaphor and even poetry can help our understanding. Imagine you are lying in the bath looking at your big toe poking up out of the water. Imagine you are the size of the toe, and you are lying in a smaller bath looking at your big toe. How many times would you need to do this to be the size of a cell? A molecule?

The earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and life on earth is much shorter than that: 4,000 million years. Stretch out your arms. From the beginning of life at your left hand fingertips, there is nothing except bacteria until well beyond your right shoulder. Invertebrates turn up at your right elbow and dinosaurs in the palm of your right hand. Dinosaurs go extinct in the last joint of your big finger. A thin nail clipping represents the time 200,000 years ago since homo sapiens appeared. You would brush off the whole of recorded history (5000 years) with one brush of a nail file.

Richard Dawkins, who works hard to make science comprehensible to non-scientists, has an analogy to help to explain evolution throught natural selection and the mutations of genes. Imagine a mountain five miles high with a vertical precipice on one side and a gentle slope (4 thousand million miles long) on the other. When we look at a squid (500 million years old) it is difficult to imagine how it evolved into a monkey. It is difficult even to comprehend the five million year journey from chimpanzee to human being. The slope at the back of the mountain is so gentle that you would probably have to pedal down it on a bicycle. Animals have evolved up this gentle slope through natural selection and mutation. The changes have not been steady. They go in spurts for a thousand years or so and then nothing much happens for a few thousand more.

Darwin's Birthday - Text C

Before Darwin was born, most people in England thought that species were not linked in a single “family tree.” They were unconnected, unrelated and unchanged since the moment of their creation. Earth itself was thought to be 6,000 years old. There would not have been time for species to change. People were not part of the natural world; they were above and outside it. They had been created to rule over the animals. Many also believed that there were superior races created to rule over inferior races. Before 1800, only a handful of naturalists in England and France had given the idea of evolution serious consideration. And even they couldn’t see how there could have been enough time for evolution to occur.

After Darwin returned from his trip around the world, he began to think about all the different animals and plants he had found. Darwin relied on his notebooks. In them, he jotted private ideas, questions and fragments of conversations related to his thinking on “transmutation”; what we now call “evolution.” The notebooks reveal a great mind homing in on a great idea: plants and animals are not fixed and unchanging. Instead, all species are related through common ancestry, and they change over time. By the late summer of 1842 Darwin felt ready to commit an outline of his theory to paper. The main points were clear: plants and animals with useful variations were likely to live longer. That meant they could leave more offspring, some of which would carry the new variation. Over time, species could change through this process of natural selection.

Darwin did not rush to publish. He lived on inherited wealth and was part of the establishment. The world was full of reform and revolution. The 1848 revolutions in France, the 1867 Reform Bills giving richer working classes the vote, the American Civil War, the Fenian uprisings in Ireland created unease. As a young man he wanted to see the end of slavery, but later he showed racial prejudice against the Irish. He did not always agee with social reform. His books when published cost the same as a working man's weekly wage. When Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh were accused of obscenity by publishing a birth contral leaflet, Darwin refused to support their case.

The tension between scientific theory and social change still exists. The current atheist buses are an example. Even nowadays, atheism is viewed by many as immoral and destructive. The Humanist Society is national charity supporting and representing people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs. Their vision is of a world without religious privilege or discrimination, where people are free to live good lives on the basis of reason, experience and shared human values. They want 12th February to become Darwin Day. Our increasing knowledge of evolution puts us in the strong position of being able to counteract the worse effects of natural selection.

Darwin's Birthday - Text D

Natural selection is a simple mechanism that causes populations of living things to change over time. In fact, it is so simple that it can be broken down into five basic steps: V.I.S.T.A.: Variation, Inheritance, Selection, Time and Adaptation. Members of any given species are seldom exactly the same, either inside or outside. Organisms can vary in size, colour, ability to fight off diseases and countless other traits. These traits arise from spontaneous mutation and enable the organism to survive and pass them to future generations.

DNA contains a set of instructions for building bodies. When organisms reproduce, they pass on their DNA. The traits are encoded in the DNA and offspring often inherit the variations of their parents. Tall people, for example, tend to have tall children.

Overwhelming evidence shows us that all species are related — that is, that they are all descended from a common ancestor. One hundred and fifty years ago, Darwin saw evidence of these relationships in striking anatomical similarities between diverse species, both living and extinct. Today, we realize that most such resemblances, in both physical structure and embryonic development, are expressions of shared DNA, the direct outcome of a common ancestry.

Cave-dwelling tetra fish are blind; they have small vestigial eyes that do not work. Then why have them at all? Biologists have long struggled to explain, how natural selection could fully account for such degenerations, and recently they have found another possible answer: genetic mutations that hamper eye development also may increase the number of taste buds. Thus, mutations that happened to give the fish an advantage in tasting and smelling, a huge benefit in a dark environment, might also have caused the degeneration of their eyes. Humans also have vestigial features, evidence of our own evolutionary history. The appendix, for instance, is believed to be a remnant of a larger, plant-digesting structure found in our ancestors.

influenza viruses can evolve very rapidly by frequent mutation. Each year scientists study flu viruses from around the world in order to find out how they have evolved. They then create a vaccine designed to help the body’s immune system ward off the most dangerous of the upcoming year’s mutants. This process has saved countless lives. Any one vaccine can help immune systems fight only some varieties of flu. The viruses newly evolved survive and reproduce . New flu vaccines are needed every year to fight newly evolved or re-emergent varieties of the virus. This shows how mutations in viruses help them to survive, but humans suffer.