A younger Charles Darwin is shown in this late 1830s water-color portrait by George Richmond.
This upper-class scholar from Shropshire focused his curiosity on the natural world from his earliest years. [More on Darwin’s biography…]
Our profs update the father of evolution in celebration of his 200th birthday
What better way to celebrate Charles Darwin’s birthday than by spending an afternoon chewing the fat with the famous naturalist? No problem that he’d be 200 on Feb. 12 this year, or that he died in 1882. UC Davis’ evolutionary scientists are a creative bunch, so we’ve asked five of them to tell us what topics might come up over a cup of tea with the grand master.
Their response? Five letters to Mr. Darwin in which the authors share evolutionary tales and pose the questions they’ve long been pondering.
Some offer their thanks to the father of evolution. And all update him on news from the evolutionary front, an arena in which UC Davis excels: Our campus hosts a slew of faculty members who have made important contributions to the study of evolution and natural selection, and our Department of Evolution and Ecology is consistently ranked among the top five in the country.
A case in point: In January, the prestigious journal Nature launched a new Web page highlighting work that illustrates the “breadth, depth and power” of evolutionary thinking.
Included among these “Fifteen evolutionary gems” (PDF) are two studies conducted by UC Davis scientists. One reveals the evolutionary secret behind a moray eel’s jaw that was discovered by Peter Wainwright and Rita Mehta.
The other tells how Thomas Schoener and David Spiller observed natural selection in action through an experiment they conducted with predatory lizards on several tiny Bermuda islands.
Darwin’s work has been furthered by many other notable UC Davis faculty members. Among these are geologist and MacArthur fellow Geerat Vermeij and evolution and ecology professor Charles Langley.
Vermeij may be best known for documenting ancient struggles among long-extinct mollusks and their predators to determine the evolutionary outcomes of these species. And Langley has been one of the leaders in international efforts describing and comparing the genomes of multiple species of Drosophila flies.
Mathematical geneticist Graham Coop, at 29 the youngest faculty member in UC Davis’s evolution and ecology department, apprises Darwin of the answer to a problem that the master pondered for decades: What is the basis of heredity? To illustrate his point, Coop regales Darwin with the tale of a gene that links stickleback fish directly to humans.
Geneticist David Begun confides in the father of evolution that he and other modern-day scientists still share the sense of wonder that Darwin expressed when he wrote, “ … from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
Evolutionary ecologist Rick Grosberg updates Darwin on a subject that troubled the great master: Under what circumstances – and why – will organisms die for one another … or kill one another? It seems, incidentally, that the science behind this conundrum relates to an affair that’s been nagging Grosberg, namely Darwin’s marriage to his first cousin.
Geologist Geerat Vermeij invites Mr. Darwin to discuss a slew of intriguing questions with him. For example: Why do most twining vines ascend trees in a right-handed coil, and how much further can humans push selective breeding of livestock and crops toward higher yields?
Evolutionary ecologist Maureen Stanton treads lightly in reminding Mr. Darwin of the great controversy generated by his idea that all life on Earth descended from a common ancestor. Yet over the intervening years, she is happy to inform him, the theory has been proven to have profound and universal predictive power. (But not all is well, she writes. Some people still feel threatened by the idea.)
On the UC Davis home page: This portrait of Charles Darwin was taken by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1868.
