Jun 17 2009
Evolution in a Fish Tank
Besides reading, writing, and arithmetic, I think all school systems should teach evolution. Better yet, why not demonstrate it. Young students could start an experiment with ordinary fish tank guppies in 1st grade and by the time they entered freshmen year in high school they could have a genotypically different population of guppies in that tank. Evolution confirmed!
Yes, it can be done. In When Evolution Is Not So Slow And Gradual I learned:
A new article in The American Naturalist finds that guppy populations introduced into new habitats developed new and advantageous traits in just a few years. This is one of only a few studies to look at adaptation and survival in a wild population….
One Damier [river] environment was predator-free. The other contained fish that occasionally snack on guppies….
Eight years after their introduction, the team revisited the Damier guppies to see what adaptive changes they might have picked up in their new environments. The researchers found that the females had altered their reproductive effort to match their surroundings. In the environment where predators were present, females produced more embryos each reproductive cycle.
Of course, this experiment took place in the wild, but there is no reason two fish tanks wouldn’t suffice.
People who misunderstand evolution believe that to be able to confidently say it has occurred a new species must appear where there was a distinctly different one before. To a flock of chickens must be born a woodpecker. So to speak. But that is incorrect. While speciation is a fascinating and important sub-topic, it is not the cornerstone on which the entire theory of evolution rests.
According to my current, off-hand understanding, these are the crucial elements to evolution by natural selection (evolutionary theory):
1) multiple offspring with differing qualities (not necessarily visible/morphological, but certainly detectable and measurable)
2) environmental pressure that “selects” some individuals (some individuals survive and reproduce more/better)
3) a resulting change in the characteristics of the overall population (not necessarily visible, but certainly detectable via measurement, reflecting changes at the genetic level)
Heck, in another bunch of years I wouldn’t be surprised if you could order a home gene-sequencing kit online from Amazon.com. That would come in handy for science fair projects.
Back to my school project. Not to be “intolerant” of other theories, students of parents who believe in Intelligent Design, and those few teachers who do as well, could be offered use of any supplies they needed to likewise demonstrate the validity of their supposed theory. I’m kinda curious as to what materials and supplies they would do their science with.
Is it possible that Intelligent Design isn’t science?!! That would explain why all we scientifically-inclined minds don’t care to weaken educational systems by pretending it is.
