A Quote by Eugenie Scott
Evolution makes biology make sense. And if you don't teach your students the evolutionary core of biology, you're making it harder for them.
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If belief in evolution is a requirement to be a real scientist, it’s interesting to consider a quote from Dr. Marc Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School:
“In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.
Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.
Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.
Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world.
Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, 'Oh, I want a cure for cancer,' but that doesn't tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?
It will be in the convergence of evolutionary biology, developmental biology and cancer biology that the answer to cancer will lie. Nor will this confluence be a one-way street.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.
Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.
What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.
Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.
We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.
Whether it's in an inner-city school or a rural community, I want those students to have a chance to take A.P. biology and A.P. physics and marine biology.
I don't believe, for instance, that evolutionary biology or any scientific endeavor has much to say about love. I'm sure a lot can be learned about the importance of hormones and their effects on our feelings. But do the bleak implications of evolution have any impact on the love I feel for my family? Do they make me more likely to break the law of flaunt society's expectations of me? No. I simply does not follow that human relationships are meaningless just because we live in a godless universe subject to the natural laws of biology.
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
I teach biology, it's kind of a difficult science and time is limited. As far as I'm concerned, it's all about the students. I teach classes that are for majors, so some of them are pre-med, pre-pharmacy and pre-dentistry and veterinarians.
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