Darwin's 200th Birthday Week - 2/19/09

This was published on the font page of "The Gunk," an insert in my college newspaper, The Oracle.
Thursday February 19th, 2009.

Darwin's 200th Birthday Week
by Jesse Ordansky

Last week was “Darwin Week” at SUNY New Paltz. Students, faculty, and community members were invited to watch movies, attend lectures, and share in celebrating the 200th birthday of renowned scientist, Charles Darwin.

Although he passed over 100 years ago, “Darwin Week” emphasizes the importance of a theory that scientists still use as a building block of modern evolutionary theory.

Guest speakers came to New Paltz demonstrating applications of century-old ideas. On Monday, Gordon Gallup of Albany University lectured on the science of sex appeal. He focused specifically on how and why humans select their mates. Evidently, symmetry is the name of the game – the more symmetrical a face appears, the more attractive it is to the fairer gender.

Another guest lecturer, David Schmidt discussed his study, the International Sexual Description Project. He analyzed the likelihood of restrictive or unrestrictive mating practices in males and females. In other words, Schmidt tried to decipher whether men or woman are more selective in choosing mates. Based on factors such as culture and geography, Schmidt deduced that both men and woman are evolutionarily programmed to dissimilarly manifest both restricted and unrestricted mating tendencies.

Guest speakers illustrated how much has been learned since Darwin’s research career. Modern discoveries aside, Darwin’s findings are still relevant to scientists today. In order to understand the human being’s place in the world, analyzing natural selection and Darwinian evolution is almost necessary. As biology professor Denis Moran explains, every living thing is part of the evolutionary system. In terms of the necessity of understanding basic evolutionary theory, Dr. Moran said “Particularly, as a human being, you better understand your placement in the realm of all animals and plants and our interdependence.” Chair of the biology department and associate professor Thomas Nolan also described applications of Darwin’s selection theories.

“When you apply selection thinking or selectionist hypotheses you’re going right back to Darwin. He laid out a whole host of ways of proposing hypotheses to test questions about how adaptations and characteristics that are advantageous evolved and why certain things are not present, why things are selected against.”

Stemming from Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection, sexual selection was discussed prominently throughout Darwin Week. Sexual selection, as third-year evolutionary studies student Jesse Siegel describes, is the processes by which humans choose a mating partner. Siegel continues to explain that humans want “to mate with someone with the best genes possible so [they] can produce the best offspring possible. Sexual selection considers the traits that are innately attractive to somebody else…” This simplified explanation of a complex theory endorses the notion that Darwin’s studies have influenced scientists and students greatly. Beyond suggesting the unifying mechanism of evolution, Darwin paved the way for theories that attempt to explain universal unknowns.

Although applicable in many disciplines, not everybody subscribes to evolutionary theory. Fourth-year psychology major, Adam Gordon believes that the origin of man was a divine endeavor rather than an evolutionary anomaly. Regardless of personal views, Gordon believes that evolutionary studies have a home in the science world.

“We need to have a mixture. We need to have a free-flowing ability to explain ideas and theories from all angles. We need to be able to approach different and more intelligent ideas of how things came to be,” Gordon said.

Gordon believes that Darwinian theories and creation can coexist in the science world. With this interpretation and the fact that most early scientists believed in a deity, it becomes possible to forge a middle ground. Scientists and students should consider all theories of creation before deciding on what they consider to be factual.

Although he is not the end-all be-all of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin provided a concrete cornerstone for modern evolutionary theory. Darwin Week celebrated a founding father of modern evolutionary research.