Questions and the understanding of evolution

For my army of loyal readers (Hi R!) I haven't been able to post much lately because it is the end of the semester and I have been very busy. I don't expect to post much for the next week or two, but I should be able to be much more active after that.

I teach a class on evolution as a general education class. One thing that I do is I give students credit for submitting questions about anything they want. It's interesting to see what those questions say about how people think about evolution.

There are a few themes or questions that keep coming up. Probably at least half of the questions I get have to do with humans. A common question is either what is the future of human evolution, or how are we affecting evolution. The questions about the future of evolution seem to reflect a view of evolution as progressive or as pre-programmed. I try to point out that the future of human evolution is simply a result of who has kids. There is no internal force making us become smarter or more complex. If less intelligent people have more kids, then the population will become less intelligent (of course, I add caveats that this assumes intelligence is genetic and some of the problems with eugenics).

Similar are questions about why everything else isn't trying to be human. Why doesn't every other organism become intelligent like us? This shows how widely people assume humans are the epitome of evolution, the high point. Most do not even realize it is an assumption and never consider the possibility it is not true. Throughout the course I try to dispel the view of evolution as a ladder or progressive. I try to show that bacteria or insects are in many ways more successful than humans. I like to use the example of the bill of the platypus. This is an amazing organ, an electrical sensing organ that can "see" nerve impulses of prey invertebrates in muddy waters, something in every way as amazing and complex as our brains. Just as we wonder why other organisms don't have as large of a brain as us, I imagine a platypus would wonder why other organisms haven't developed an electrical sense.

Other questions also betray a belief in evolution as progressive or internally driven, asking why some organism hasn't evolved into something else. It is so ingrained that even those of us who know better have to work to avoid it. Like Darwin, I have to train myself not to refer to "higher" or "lower" organisms.

Of course, I get a lot of questions about religion and many questions about how some particular structure evolved. Again, people like to know how language or other intellectual abilities evolved. With those, it's fun to be able to say that we basically don't know. We have ideas that we are trying to test, but it is often difficult to determine the selective pressure that produced a trait. I try to say we don't know fairly often. I think it's good for students to see that there are things we don't know, and that doesn't mean that somehow the whole edifice comes crashing down. All it means is that we have more fun science do.