Happy birthday, dear Charles

"...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful have been, and are being, evolved."
-Charles Darwin

You'd be hard pressed to find a biology teacher who doesn't recognize that quote! The insights of Charles Darwin, and the biological research they spawned, forever changed the field of biology. Today you cannot fully understand biology unless you understand evolution; in the words of Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

I could wax on for hours about evolutionary biology; I appreciate it so much more now than I did as a college student, simply because I now understand it far better. Interestingly, coming up against parents or students who don't want to learn about evolution has simply strengthened my passion for teaching it and my desire to come up with ever more innovative and engaging labs and activities.

So it is with great joy that I point out that this year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. In honor of this, the BBC has come out with a website which includes interviews with scientists and historians, as well as links to the complete works of Darwin online and British museum exhibitions. What a terrific resource!

Comment by Erin Nash on January 8, 2009 at 7:30pm: Elissa,
Thanks for posting this blog - I really appreciate your discussion as well as the website you posted. The site looks as if it contains a lot of great resources - I only wish I could view the BBC episodes as well!

Just a quick question - do you try to structure your course so evolution is an underlying theme, or big idea, throughout your course?

Comment by Elissa Hoffman on January 8, 2009 at 7:48pm: I do try to make evolution an underlying theme for the course. I started this year with ch 26 (Campbell book), which is the history of life on Earth - I figured it might be a nice thing to start with. Next year I'm toying with the idea of starting with "what is DNA" and moving from there into evolution before starting with cells, biochem, etc.

Comment by Stacy Baker on January 10, 2009 at 10:44am: It's AWESOME that anti-evolution students have motivated you to teach evolution even better than before! That's not exactly what they're going for, is it? :-) I still find myself getting too upset about it, but it's because they try to attack my sense of justice and fairness and I really get upset at that. It's so wonderful to have colleagues like you to help keep me from losing sight of what's important.

I'm going to be participating in the Blog for Darwin Blog Swarm! Hopefully, I can get a few students to write posts as well.