Finches on the Galapagos Islands have evolved to exploit almost every possible niche. This diagram shows the range of food sources available on the island and the different beak shapes adapted to exploit each of them.
This course asks students to consider the ways in which social theorists, institutional reformers, and political revolutionaries in the 17th through 19th centuries seized upon insights developed in the natural sciences and mathematics to change themselves and the society in which they lived. Students study trials, art, literature and music to understand developments in Europe and its colonies in these two centuries. Covers works by Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Darwin.
Becoming Human is an interactive documentary experience that tells the story of human origins. Multimedia, research and scholarship are presented to promote greater understanding of the course of human evolution. This site includes classroom materials, subject-designed exercises, games and activities to help make connections between the concepts that are presented and student learning. PDF versions of the resources may be downloaded from the site.
This Web site, created to complement the Museum's Darwin exhibit, examines the man and theory that changed the course of science and society.
This video segment from Evolution: "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," together with interviews with Daniel Dennett and James Moore, depicts Darwin struggling with publicizing his revolutionary theory.
" In the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin gave us a model for understanding how natural objects and systems can evidence design without positing a designer: how purpose and mechanism can exist without intelligent agency. Texts in this course deal with pre- and post-Darwinian treatment of this topic within literature and speculative thought since the eighteenth century. We will give some attention to the modern study of feedback mechanisms in artificial intelligence. Our reading will be in Hume, Voltaire, Malthus, Darwin, Butler, H. G. Wells, and Turing."
Delve into the private thoughts of a reluctant revolutionary in this Evolution Web feature.
Charles Darwin is most famous for proposing the concept of evolution through natural selection. He observed finches on the Galapagos Islands and noted that each finch had evolved a beak to suit its dietary needs.
A brief history of conflicting ideas about mankind's relation to the natural environment as exemplified in works of poetry, fiction, and discursive argument from ancient times to the present. What is the overall character of the natural world? Is mankind's relation to it one of stewardship and care, or of hostility and exploitation? Readings include Aristotle, The Book of Genesis, Shakespeare, Descartes, Robinson Crusoe, Swift, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Darwin, Thoreau, Faulkner, and Lovelock's Gaia. This subject offers a broad survey of texts (both literary and philosophical) drawn from the Western tradition and selected to trace the growth of ideas about nature and the natural environment of mankind. The term nature in this context has to do with the varying ways in which the physical world has been conceived as the habitation of mankind, a source of imperatives for the collective organization and conduct of human life. In this sense, nature is less the object of complex scientific investigation than the object of individual experience and direct observation. Using the term "nature" in this sense, we can say that modern reference to "the environment" owes much to three ideas about the relation of mankind to nature. In the first of these, which harks back to ancient medical theories and notions about weather, geographical nature was seen as a neutral agency affecting or transforming agent of mankind's character and institutions. In the second, which derives from religious and classical sources in the Western tradition, the earth was designed as a fit environment for mankind or, at the least, as adequately suited for its abode, and civic or political life was taken to be consonant with the natural world. In the third, which also makes its appearance in the ancient world but becomes important only much later, nature and mankind are regarded as antagonists, and one must conquer the other or be subjugated by it.
This in-depth, multi-part course takes you through evolutionary theory and mechanisms, from definitions to details, natural selection to genetic drift, mutations to punctuated equilibrium.
In the 18th and 19th century evolutionary biologists, including Darwin, emphasised the similarities between natural evolution and artificial ‘ improvement’ of livestock under domestication. They believed that studying domesticated animals and plants c
This video segment from Evolution: "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" illustrates the remarkable camouflage of a praying mantis against its leafy backdrop.
In this unit, we describe the theory of evolution by natural selection as proposed by Charles Darwin in his book, first published in 1859, On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. We will look at natural selection as Darwin did, taking inheritance for granted, but ignoring the mechanisms underlying it.
This video from Evolution highlights Charles Darwin's personal struggle to bring to light his theory of evolution through natural selection.
This graphic from Ecology and Evolution of Darwin's Finches by Peter Grant presents data from the Galapagos Islands, showing that a severe drought put selective pressure on the population of Darwin's finches and resulted in a change in the average beak size in the next generation.
Intensive reading and analysis of key works in the history and historiography of science. Introduces students to basic interpretive issues, bibliographic sources, and professional standards. Topics change from year to year. This seminar explores recent historiographical approaches within the history of science. Students will read a wide variety of studies covering topics from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, from the physical sciences to natural history and medicine. Emphasis will be placed on: deciphering different theoretical approaches; the pros and cons of different research questions, subjects, and sources of evidence; and what makes for good and interesting history of science.
This course describes biological changes that happen on a very large scale, across entire populations of organisms and over the course of millions of years, in the form of evolution and ecology. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: Use their understanding of Mendelian genetics and patterns of inheritance to predict genotypes and phenotypes of offspring or work backwards to identify the genotypes and phenotypes of a parental generation; Distinguish between inheritance patterns that involve autosomal vs. sex-linked traits and identify the respective consequences of each type of inheritance; Identify what distinguishes DarwinŐs theory of evolution from other arguments that attempt to explain diversity across species and/or many generations; Identify which of many types of natural selection is acting on a particular population/species; Identify which of many types of sexual selection is acting on a particular population/species; Identify the factors that alter the frequencies of alleles in populations over time and describe the effects of these factors on populations; Recognize, read, and create phylogenies and cladograms, using them to explain evolutionary relationships; Determine the ecological interactions affecting a particular community and identify the effects of specific relationships (e.g. symbiosis, competition) on species within that community; Distinguish between world biomes in terms of their climate, nutrient cycles, energy flow, and inhabitants; Use their knowledge of nutrient cycles and energy flow to estimate the effect that changes in physical or biological factors would have on a particular ecosystem. (Biology 102; See also: Psychology 204)
Nina Jablonski says that differing skin colors are simply our bodies' adaptation to varied climates and levels of UV exposure. Charles Darwin disagreed with this theory, but she explains, that's because he did not have access to NASA. Nina Jablonski is author of Skin: A Natural History, a close look at human skin's many remarkable traits: its colors, its sweatiness, the fact that we decorate it. A quiz, thought provoking question, and links for further study are provided to create a lesson around the 15-minute video. Educators may use the platform to easily "Flip" or create their own lesson for use with their students of any age or level.
This course covers the political, social and cultural history of Europe from 1815 to 1900, including the history of each major European nation.
The paradox of success is you need to embrace failure to achieve it.
This is a paper born out of a speech I gave to 600 17 year olds on entrepreneurship during the UK’s enterprise week in November 2007. It must rank as one of the most nerve jangling speeches I’ve ever done, since owning a teenager of my own I had strong clues that they can be a cynical and challenging audience. However, setting anxiety and cynicism aside, I really wanted to share something of what it takes to successfully invent an innovative new product and commercialise it. The reason for being invited to speak at these events is you’ve supposedly done something successful and the convention is to share this success as if it was the only possible outcome of your company’s brilliance. But something about this teenage audience, over half of whom said they wanted to start their own business, made me abandon convention and share the brutal, unvarnished truth that the essential, hard earned ingredient in successful creativity and entrepreneurship is…failure.
Failure is the essential ingredient that nobody talks about or acknowledges and everyone tries desperately and understandably to avoid. But as any inventor, creative or entrepreneur knows, great ideas are not born perfect but are forged in the furnace of trial and error. As Darwin showed, this is the simple but brutal algorithm of life. This seemingly random but amazingly productive cycle of mutation and natural selection, trial and error, has produced the whole of the abundant diversity of life on earth. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize winning physicist said about progress in any field, “Mistakes are at the heart of progress, so our challenge as scientists, is how to make more mistakes faster”. Or as I said to my teenage audience, “you’ve spent the last few years being told not to fail by teachers and parents and yet if you really want to create anything genuinely new; you’ve got to start learning how to fail”. Pablo Picasso, who knew a thing or two about originality, had another way of putting it when he said “There’s nothing worse than a great start” having long since learned to celebrate failures and difficulties as key to finding completely new avenues of creative expression.
