Darwin's Ghost: Introductory Thoughts

Our first text is Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated, by Steve Jones (2000), and our first topic is, of course, evolutionary theory. We mentioned in class on Monday that, for biological anthropologists (as well as for some few archaeologists and even fewer cultural anthropologists), evolution is the major theoretical paradigm for all of our work: we see everything that we do through the lens of evolutionary theory. The famous Drosophila geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said "nothing in Biology makes sense except in light of Evolution", and the same is true for biological anthropology. So we are very interested in this class in coming to terms with what Darwin's theory is all about.

What did Darwin say in the Origin (first published in 1859, 150 years ago), and what are the major modifications and additions to Darwin's version of evolution by natural selection that have accumulated over the past 150 years? Darwin's Ghost is an attempt to present a modern exposition of evolution by natural selection, retaining the structure of Darwin's great work, but filling in the details and gaps with the results of 150 years of scientific work. We will see that in nearly all major details, Darwin's work still stands today as relevant and, at times, astonishingly accurate: something which cannot be said for many scientific works produced in the middle 19th century. The one place where Darwin was simply wrong was in his groping attempts to understand the nature of heredity. We will see that his theory of "blending inheritance" was the one real error in his theory. Ironically, the true nature of inheritance (particulate, not blending) had been worked out in great detail by a contemporary, the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who published the results of his experiments in plant hybridization on the common pea plant in an obscure German language botanical journal in 1865 that was ignored by Darwin and most other biologists of the time. But in most respects, Darwin got things right, and much of the work of the past 150 years has been filling in the details. Darwin's Ghost will help us learn about these details and to answer the question, what evidence has modern science amassed in favor of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection?

2009 is being celebrated as the Year of Darwin since he was born 200 years ago on Feb.12, 1809 (the same day and year as Abraham Lincoln) and the Origin was published 150 years ago on November 26, 1859. Below are a few links to some excellent web sites about Darwin.

• The Darwin Correspondence Project
• The Complete Darwin Online
• The Darwin 2009 Conference at the University of Chicago
• Creation: A new feature film about Darwin
• The Darwin 2009 Festival at Cambridge University
• About Darwin.com
• The Darwin Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History
• Darwin 200 at the Natural History Museum, London
• The Darwin Awards