Happy birthday, Charles and Abe

Charles Darwin was born into wealth and privilege in England 210 years ago, while across the ocean on the same day Abraham Lincoln was born to a poor family in Kentucky.

Besides the coincidence of their birthdays, there are other interesting connections. Lincoln is known, of course, for preserving the Union and freeing slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation. But Lincoln also signed the law that established the National Academy of Sciences, which provides pro bono scientific advice to the federal government. And while Darwin is known for his work on evolution, he was also a prominent overseas voice in the abolitionist movement. During the voyage of HMS Beagle, Darwin had a heated argument with the captain, Robert FitzRoy, who defended the institution of slavery.

Darwin was onboard the ship as a gentleman naturalist, but the voyage was far from easy. Planned as a 2-year expedition, it was almost 5 years before 27-year-old Darwin returned to England in 1836. He was frequently seasick and, back home, often ill. Nevertheless, his observations, specimens, and notes laid the groundwork for his thinking that culminated with On the Origin of Species in 1859. That book presented Darwin’s evidence for descent with modification (what we now call evolution), and it put forward a mechanism—natural selection—that explains how species acquire traits that fit them to their environments.

Many of us first encounter the idea of evolution as children, when we see pictures or fossils of dinosaurs and other long-ago creatures. But evolution isn’t confined to the past; it continues to occur all around us. Some ongoing evolution causes problems for our health and wellbeing, such as pathogenic microbes evolving resistance to antibiotics. In many cases, though, evolution is used to solve problems in agriculture, biotechnology, and engineering. For example, Frances Arnold won a 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work using evolution to generate valuable enzymes with improved and even new functions.

In my lab, we study evolution in action using bacteria, taking advantage of their rapid generations. We can freeze and later revive living cells, allowing us to compare organisms from different generations—in essence, time travel! In an ongoing experiment I started in 1988, we’ve watched 12 populations of E. coli evolve for over 70,000 generations. We can quantify the Darwinian process of adaptation by natural selection, and we’ve sequenced the bacteria’s genomes to understand the coupling between adaptation and genotypic evolution. We’ve even seen the emergence of a new metabolic function that transcends the usual definition of E. coli as a species.

It’s amazing just how much evolution has taken place during a few decades in these small flasks. It leaves me with awe at what evolution has achieved over the last four billion years on our planet … and with wonder about what more will unfold in the fullness of time.

This post was written for the National Academy of Sciences Facebook page, where it also appears.

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Infectiously Fun Science

Science is sometimes frustrating. The work is often repetitive and even tedious. It can be hard to explain to our friends and families—and sometimes even to peers—what we’re doing and why we think it’s important and interesting. The current state of the academic job market is terrible.

But science is also often fun. There’s the joy of discovery, which grows out of the quieter excitement of seeing data come together to support or refute an existing idea and, perhaps, to generate a brand-new idea. If we’re lucky, we enjoy the recognition of our peers that comes when a paper is accepted, a grant funded, or a talk well received.

For those of us who study evolution, the frustrations can be magnified by critics and trolls who aren’t interested in evidence or reason, having already closed their minds to even the idea of evolution based on their narrow, literal reading—or, more often, someone else’s reading—of texts written in other languages long before science provided an evidence-based way to understand the world in which we live.

At the same time—and perhaps driven in part by the controversy surrounding evolution and religion—the field of evolution has long been blessed with great writers and speakers who are willing and able to engage the public. Twenty years before he published On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin had already cemented his place in the public eye with his travelogue The Voyage of the Beagle. As a result, the Origin was an instant best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. And while Darwin shied away from speaking in public about his discoveries, Thomas Henry Huxley was a gifted orator who became “Darwin’s Bulldog” in public lectures and debates.

That tradition continues to this day. Some of my favorites include The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Wonderful Life by the late Stephen Jay Gould, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett, and Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. Experts argue about scientific issues, minor and even major, contained in these books. But it’s hard for me to imagine an open-minded reader, someone interested in science and evolution, who would not find these books highly stimulating—even infectious in the sense of wanting to share them and the ideas they contain with others.

And speaking of infectious, new ways of communicating science have burst onto the scene since the printing press. For example …

Baba Brinkman is a rapper who raps about science, literature, public policy, and more. For your scientific enjoyment, here are three of my favorites from The Rap Guide to Evolution:

Performance, Feedback, Revision

Creationist Cousins

I’m A African

Here’s another from The Rap Guide to Human Nature:

Short Term Mating Dance

And here’s a brand-new one—on microbiology and disease—with a cameo appearance by yours truly and three students who work in my lab:

So Infectious

Whether you’re a scientist or not, I hope you’ll agree that these are worth sharing with your students, friends, and families!

[Image source: music.bababrinkman.com/album/the-rap-guide-to-evolution]