Australopithecus or Adam's rib? (Page 2)

The idea of acceleration can be a tough one to get across to students, and it's the job of education faculties to come up with strategies for teaching the concept better, Alters says. This is exactly the kind of thing the Evolution Education Research Centre will do for evolution, once it's up and running.

Approved by the McGill Senate last October, the Centre is a joint endeavour with Harvard. Its board is deciding on priorities and hopes to have the first research projects under way soon. In addition to director Alters, the board includes some of the brightest lights in evolutionary and educational thought. McGill's contingent consists of paleontologist Robert Carroll, philosopher Mario Bunge, evolutionary psychologist Joyce Benenson and Molson Professor of Genetics Graham Bell. The Harvard members are Steven Jay Gould, DSc'98, paleontologist and noted science writer; Israel Scheffler, professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Vernon Howard, philosopher of education; and Philip Sadler, director of science education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Collaboration between Harvard and McGill is already under way: Alters and Bell were the pro-evolution team for a panel discussion on "Creationism in Schools" at Harvard shortly after McGill's lecture series.

But why this interest in evolution now? Don't most people accept the idea that the species of animals and plants on earth have changed over long periods of time through natural selection?

	Evolution: Change in the hereditary characteristics of groups of organisms over the course of generations. (Darwin referred to this process as "descent with modification.") Species: In general, a group of organisms that can potentially breed with each other to produce fertile offspring and cannot breed with the members of other such groups. Variation: Genetically determined differences in the characteristics of members of the same species. Natural selection: Greater reproductive success among particular members of a species arising from genetically determined characteristics that confer an advantage in a particular environment. FROM TEACHING ABOUT EVOLUTION AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

Well, no, actually most people don't. An Angus Reid poll done in 1993 showed that 53% of Canadians surveyed didn't believe the statement: "Human beings as we know them today developed from earlier species of animals." The rate of disagreement with Darwinian ideas is even higher in the U.S. and opposition is much fiercer. Last summer Biblical literalists in Kansas even succeeded, in effect, in getting the state Board of Education to remove evolution from the state curriculum. Several states also require inserts in biology texts which say that Darwinian evolutionary ideas are only theories, on the same footing with the Biblical Creation story.

So far Canada has escaped such militant anti-evolutionist pressures. Alters says that Canada is a "little more secular and doesn't have as many fundamentalist, Protestant literalists." A more centralized education system helps too, he says, pointing to an attempt to quash evolutionary teaching a few years ago by a local school board in British Columbia which was promptly ruled out of order by the provincial Ministry of Education.

There are major similarities between Canada and the U.S., however. Alters says something like 20% of the students he has encountered at the McGill and Harvard education faculties and who are preparing to teach science say they don't really believe in evolution.

		Creation science: Creation science is the idea that scientific evidence can support a literal interpretation of Genesis - that the whole universe was created all at once about 10,000 years ago. Creationism can be studied and taught in any of three basic forms, as follows: Scientific creationism: No reliance on Biblical revelation, utilizing only scientific data to support and expound the creation model. Biblical creationism: No reliance on scientific data, using only the Bible to expound and defend the creation model. Scientific Biblical creationism: Full reliance on Biblical revelation but also using scientific data to support and develop the creation model. 3 DEFINITIONS FROM THE TENETS OF CREATIONISM

"Others will say, 'I'll teach evolution even though I'm a Catholic,'" he adds. "They don't seem to be aware that several popes have said that they have nothing against evolution. Their interest is in how the soul of man was put there: the science that God used to do that is of much lesser interest to the Roman Catholic Church."

There also are "a good number of reports from teachers who say they are not going to teach evolution because it is too controversial, that parents will come in and complain, and that principals get upset. They say: 'It's just not worth it.'

"Can you imagine! We don't have parents coming in and protesting that the heliocentric vision of the solar system is just a theory."

Newton and Galileo did, however, run into a lot of religious opposition when they came up with their ideas about the cosmic order, light and gravitation, says Graham Bell. These world views do remove God from His central role as organizer of the universe, and replace Him by mechanisms which operate without divine intervention. Today few religious fundamentalists question Newtonian physics, but a sizable number of people still consider Darwinism merely an unproven theory at odds with religious texts.

That proposition upsets scientists. Evolution is the basic paradigm underlying the biological sciences, most agree. Within it they can test a multitude of ideas which are "falsifiable" -- that is, experiments can be set up to disprove them. At McGill the kinds of research projects vary widely.

For example, paleontologist Carroll is studying both living and fossil frogs, salamanders and a related tropical group, the caecilians, to explore the mechanisms that led to evolution of the modern species. These include changes in the genes which act as switches regulating the development of an animal's body. Two of these control the rate at which parts of the body turn into bone: in frogs today they make the tadpole's tail stay boneless, but in salamanders they create tail bones at an early stage.

Millions of years ago, however, a "frogamander" existed whose fossils show salamander-like external gills and frog-like vertebrae. Carroll says that he'd like to convince somebody to "fiddle" with the genes in living animals. "Perhaps we might be able to produce salamander-like vertebral development in frogs, and vice versa," he says.