Australopithecus or Adam's rib? (Page 3)

Evolutionary psychologist Joyce Benenson has set up experiments designed to test the idea that many aspects of human behaviour which stood us in good stead as hunters and gatherers should be found in people today. The 10,000 years since humans began to settle down to farm, herd and industrialize isn't long enough for natural selection to work its changes on built-in behaviours, she explains.

		1925: The Scopes Monkey Trial — In Dayton, Tennessee, high school science teacher John T. Scopes was accused of teaching Darwin's theory of evolution, in contravention of state laws. Defence counsel in the trial was Clarence Darrow and the prosecutor was William Jennings Bryan. Although Scopes was convicted and fined $100, the conviction was subsequently overturned on a technicality. The section of Tennessee state code prohibiting the teaching of evolution was not repealed until 1967. 1968: The United States Supreme Court invalidated an Arkansas statute that prohibited the teaching of evolution. 1982: U.S. federal court held that an Arkansas statute requiring public schools to give balanced treatment to both creation science and evolution science violated the U.S. Constitution. 1986: 72 Nobel laureates and 23 scientific societies representing tens of thousands of working scientists submitted a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court to oppose teaching Biblical literalism as science. 1987: U.S. Supreme Court held Louisiana's "Creationism Act," which prohibited the teaching of evolution unless accompanied by instruction in creation science, to be unconstitutional. The Court ruled creation science was a religious concept and therefore could not be taught in public schools. 1995: The Alabama board of education ordered that all biology textbooks in public schools carry inserts that read, in part, as follows: "This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals and humans. No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life's origins should be considered theory, not fact." 1999: The Kansas board of education rejected evolution as a scientific principle and removed it from the required curriculum. While Kansas did not ban the teaching of evolution, no knowledge of it is required to pass state assessment tests.

Her work examines whether girls prefer to relate one to one with other girls and women, and whether boys prefer to relate with groups of boys their own age. "The theory," she says, "predicts that females needed to be able to develop strong dyad relationships, with children and with spouses, while males needed to have the group relationships for hunting and fighting."

Graham Bell works at the other end of the spectrum: he's researching ongoing evolution among one-cell green micro-organisms. The basic question he's asking is: Under what conditions do the organisms specialize or generalize?

If the environment is "a patchy place" with several different kinds of conditions, organisms may specialize, he explains. But if the conditions vary over time, organisms may evolve to generalize, so that they can take advantage of different sorts of conditions.

These are all examples of testing ideas, and science is above all something that you can test, Alters agrees. Given that, how will he and the new centre go about improving the teaching of evolution?

"We'll start with the basics," Alters says. "Why do one out of every two North Americans reject evolution?" He says his own research has included interviewing at length 35 first-year university students who said they didn't believe in evolution.

"We got them talking about what they perceived as being wrong with evolution, and they said that they'd heard that carbon dating isn't all that good, that the theory is in crisis, that human footsteps had been found alongside dinosaurs and things like that. We worked with them to make a succinct list of things they believe which we then presented to more than 1,200 college freshmen all over North America, to see what their responses were."

Somewhat to their surprise, Alters and his colleagues discovered that acceptance of evolution wasn't positively correlated with more instruction in evolution, but with smaller misconceptions about what the scientific evidence really is. "This definitely is an area where we're going to be working," Alters says.

It's hard to say whether Sir William Dawson would have changed his mind about evolution had it been presented to him the way that Alters and his colleagues propose. Dawson was already a widely respected geologist and authority on several kinds of fossils when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and he was far from being the only scientist to question Darwin's ideas — and his evidence — when they were first advanced.

Indeed, notes his biographer Susan Sheets-Pyenson, "Dawson differed from other critics only in the tenacity with which he upheld (his) view, unlike most naturalists who relatively quickly accepted Darwin's analysis."

And, says Bell, Dawson realized that the world had been in existence far longer than the few thousand years literal Biblical scholars then and now set as its age. "But Dawson could not accept that the changes he saw were due to evolution," says Bell. "He wasn't entirely clear about what he thought was responsible, but it seems to have been a sort of continuing creation" in which species, once created, didn't change.

Ironically, though, Sir William is contributing to some of the evolutionary work being done at McGill today. He was the moving force behind setting up the Redpath Museum, of which Graham Bell is now the director, and where collections are being used by McGill researchers working with new techniques and looking at things with new eyes. In fact, paleontologist Carroll, now curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum, came to McGill in 1962 expressly to do post-doctoral studies on fossils that Sir William had found.

Michael Bisson, professor of anthropology, is another McGill scholar who's found the Redpath's collections valuable for evolutionary research. It has a collection of early stone tools, excavated during the 1930s from a cave in what is now Israel. Bones from early anatomically modern man were found in the cave, and Neanderthals were found in an adjacent site, indicating that the two lived near each other and made very similar tools from 80,000 to 100,000 years ago. The puzzle is: Why did these physically different creatures make the same sort of tools?

Well, they weren't the same, Bisson has decided. After study, he found that 25% of tools made by the early modern humans had evidence that the butt ends had been thinned or reformed so that they could fit into a shaft or handle. None of the Neanderthal tools, however, showed evidence that the butt ends were modified. What was happening, Bisson thinks, is that the early "modern men had begun to experiment with more efficient designs, and had begun to impose form on tools rather than reacting to the form of the blank. This has got to be some of the earliest glimmerings of modern culture," he says. "And it shows how it's possible for researchers to get cultural information from stuff that has been looked at before."

All of which is part of Sir William's legacy, as well as evidence that institutions evolve too. If McGill is in the forefront of scientific research 100 years after Dawson's death, it is a tribute to the strong foundation which he played a major part in laying, and which — dare we suggest it? — has contributed to the survival of the fittest among universities.