The ‘big idea’ that changed everything

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By Jenni Dunning
Thursday, February 5, 2009
With a worm’s tail, an elephant’s trunk and eyes that stick out on stems, the Tully Monster is an unusual-looking organism.
 
But what else do you expect from an extinct 300 million-year-old creature?
 
It’s the process of its evolution that fascinates Cam Tsujita, an earth sciences assistant professor at Western, who’s studying such organisms found in the U.S.
 
And it’s this type of work that shows the modern relevance of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species – celebrating its 150th anniversary later this year.
 
Darwin’s idea of natural selection – that all species evolved from common ancestors – is part of the basis for the study.
 
“These unusual forms . . . are the results of natural selection and reflect the evolutionary response to survival pressures in their particular environment,” Tsujita says. “Evolution still has some mystery and works in ways that are unexpected sometimes.”
 
Though Darwin’s Origin was published in 1859, it still plays a significant role in influencing today’s scientists and researchers, he said.
 
“It’s a fundamental aspect of science. It’s one of science’s best big ideas.”
 
This month marks the 200th anniversary of the English naturalist’s birth.
 
To celebrate both events, a free four-part lecture series called Why Evolution? is being held at the London Central Library’s Wolf Performance Hall Feb. 23 and March 2, 9 and 16. Organized by Western faculty members and the Humanist Association’s London chapter, speakers will discuss the basics of evolution, its future and what it means in everyday life.
 
The Origin is an important work to celebrate, but many people undervalue its significance, Tsujita says.
 
“The Origin of Species, the principles of natural selection . . . are so pervasive in biology and as well in our general culture that many people take it for granted,” he says.
 
Darwin’s theories can be found almost everywhere and many people don’t realize the evolutionary links, such as in the animated Pokemon TV series and video games, he says.
 
The main character, a yellow, mouse-like creature named Pikachu, has evolved at least twice. He transforms into Raichu and originally evolved from Pichu.
 
Darwin’s theory of evolution is his most misunderstood idea, said Western biology professor Marc-André Lachance, who’s speaking at the lecture series and teaches evolution.
 
It’s “rather difficult to understand unless you have some background in genetics,” he says. Even so, Darwin’s ideas have still shaped more than just biology but also every day life, he added.
 
Medical developments for diseases and vaccines use evolution as an underlying idea, Lachance said. For example, the discoveries of what effects certain medications have on different microbes.
 
Psychology and environmentalism use the evolutionary model, such as the conservation of different species, he says. Whole disciplines, such as molecular biology, have also been created out of Darwin’s ideas.
 
During the last 40 years, Darwin’s work has also become a “significant component” of high school curricula, says Don Santor, a retired Western education professor who’s speaking at the lecture series.
 
“It’s one of the major ideas over the last 200 years and we’d be foolish not to include it in the curriculum,” he says, adding it’s part of an optional biology course. “There was a time when evolution and Darwin was not mentioned at all.”
 
Though few students have to read the Origin for school, Lachance says it’s worth reading, and each chapter ends with a summary.
 
“Darwin is a very meticulous and very serious person. So it’s not necessarily the most gripping writing around. It’s very rich in ideas,” he says.
 
In the original first chapter, for example, Darwin writes at length about breeding pigeons.
 
“His ideas are like pearls, but they’re buried in the book.”
 
Various authors have taken a shot at re-creating the Origin, including Steve Jones, who wrote Darwin’s Ghost. It has the same number of chapters and summaries but uses modern examples to explain the theories.
 
Other researchers are using contemporary studies to further explain Darwin’s ideas.
 
Graham Thompson, an assistant biology professor at Western, is studying termite and honeybee mating.
 
Darwin suggested if certain individuals leave more offspring than others, they have a greater evolutionary fitness, but certain insects, such as worker termites and bees, are sterile. Thompson is studying whether they’re using relatives with similar genes to spawn the next generation.
 
“That remained a sticky situation that he could never really explain,” says Thompson, who has an original 1901 copy of Darwin’s Origin. “He talked a lot about (how) ants, bees, wasps . . . posed a potentially fatal flaw in (the book).”
 
Thompson is one of a handful of teams internationally studying this idea, by observing the effects of manipulating how related the insects are to each other. They hope to discover a gene for altruism.
 
It’s surprising that despite the Origin’s scientific influence, Thompson says, that it’s sometimes treated as a “fringe topic.”
 
“It’s accepted as a really, really powerful hypothesis, (but) a lot of people have not been well schooled in it,” he says. “To think that before (it was published) there was no general understanding of biological diversity. It’s a very important book.”  
 
Origin of the Species
Published: Nov. 24, 1859
Full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, changed in 1872 to Origin of the Species.
Theme: Populations evolve with each generation through natural selection. This takes place in response to their environment at that time. The book was largely based on evidence collected during a voyage of the ship Beagle during the 1830s. The book went through six editions during Darwin’s lifetime to respond to new information or arguments raised about his work. The fifth edition included the phase “survival of the fittest”, coined by philosopher Herbert Spenser after reading Origin of the Species.
 
Excerpt
“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.”
 
The writer is a Western Journalism graduate and freelance writer in London.

 

 

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