Ethics panel discusses Darwin’s legacy

By Jason Koole
Western Herald

Celebrating the  200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, the Western Michigan University Center for the Study of Ethics in Society  hosted an open panel discussion on Darwin’s most recognized work “On the Origin of Species” at 4 p.m. Thursday Nov. 12 in room 204 of the Bernhard Center.

The panel consisted of four WMU professors who discussed how Darwin’s basic ideas, history, and how some of the holes in his theory were solved. The panelists included Fritz Alloff, Ph.D., assistant professor David Rudge Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology Robert Anemone Ph.D., and Todd Barkman, Ph.D.

The event started off with Alloff giving an overview of Darwin’s history, letting the audience get an idea of what kind of man Darwin was like.

The second portion of the event involved David Rudge talking about the two major portions of Darwin’s theory, and how it was viewed in his time and today.

“First is the theory of common descent; life and all of its diversity represent the branching pattern of descent…” Rudge said. “[Darwin] also proposed a mechanism for why which evolution occurs his theory of natural selection. What he does in this is he draws attention to three circumstances, three conditions of nature that he believes have logical implication.”

These three reasons explain why organisms vary in ways that affect how they survive and reproduce; some of this variation is hereditary and that there is a competition in nature to survive.

Another main point is that, over time, favorable traits will accumulate.  Rudge suggests is that it was the idea of natural selection that posed the problem, whereas in today’s society it is the idea of having an ancestor that is of common descent that is debated.

The next part of the presentation was lead by Robert Anemone. The first part of Anemone’s portion was on the idea of missing links.

“I’m going to take the approach to look at the fossil evidence for this notion of transitional forms, or this term that I really don’t like, missing links,” said Anemone. “I’m going to talk briefly about many of these spectacular fossils you see here, some reconstruction’s of them, and end up with one of our favorite missing link issues, the link between human’s and non-humans.”

Anemone also discusses Darwin’s lack of evidence his theory. The idea—and supposed flaw with Darwin’s theory—was that he had no evidence to support and show the evolution of traits in a species. The reason for this, as both Darwin and Anemone stated, was that there just wasn’t enough fossil evidence. Anemone then went to point out all of the recent “missing links” that have been found so far.

The last part of the presentation was a discussion of the model of Darwin’s evolutionary tree by Todd Barkman.

“I feel like I have a real privilege to talk to you about the impact of the genomic era on our understanding of evolution by natural selection,” Barkman said. “I think if Charles Darwin were alive today he would be extremely pleased with what we’ve learned today through the study of organism’s genomes.”

Barkman discussed how the evolutionary tree has evolved into what it has today, and how our study of genetics has changed and revolutionized the categorization of species.
The final part of the panel was a question and answer forum.  One of the main ideas that was brought up was the role of religion in Darwin’s theories and the role of religion in teaching evolution. Rudge said that people should think critically for themselves and that the problem is not teaching evolution because it sparks this controversy.
“I think critically reflecting on coming to your own conclusions about how you think these two [religion and evolution] are related is a wonderful thing for our students to do,” Rudge said.

“But for many of us, it is such a non issue that we don’t want to deal with it in out classrooms, and that’s unfortunately the perspective that scientists take.”

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=11858

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Nov 13 2009. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Cody Kimball
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