Darwin remembered

The short film opening Sean Carroll’s lecture Friday (Oct. 9) at Chico State included footage of camels trekking across the desert and early archaeologists piecing together what looked like the remains of a human skull—to the tune of “Here Comes the Sun.”

His choice of the Beatles’ song for the film (made by Carroll and a colleague) was apt. After all, Carroll—a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin who is at the forefront of the cutting-edge evolutionary-developmental—or “evo-devo”—movement in biology was there to pay homage to iconic British naturalist-explorer Charles Darwin and his contemporaries, Alfred Wallace and Henry Walter Bates—fellow British naturalists and explorers whose Indiana Jones-like world travels and studies led them to support the same theory of evolution and natural selection that Darwin wrote about in his trailblazing book On the Origin of Species.

Nov. 24 will mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s book that in its day—as it still does in some quarters—amounted to heresy, as it went against Christianity’s creationist teachings.

Carroll’s talk at Laxson Auditorium was also part of a tour promoting his latest book, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species.

As Darwin managed to do in his famous book, the bearded, bespectacled and cheery Carroll presented his material on what he termed “the first Golden Age of evolutionary biology” in a manner accessible to the layperson. He injected bits of humor and pop culture (such as the Beatles’ song) into what could easily have been, from a less charismatic speaker, a rather dry lecture.

Carroll chronicled the trip that Wallace and Bates took from “gray, drab England” to the Amazon basin in search of biological specimens that would help them solve “the mystery of the origin of the species.”

“In 1848, they landed on the coast of Brazil. They collected specimens for about a year, then they split up ‘to cover more territory,’ ” Carroll explained, “which was a polite way of saying they got on each other’s nerves.”

He told tales of Wallace’s and Bates’ daring South American specimen-collecting adventures, stories full of hostile tribes, diseases, wild animals and bad weather, of Wallace’s subsequent nightmarish trip home to England via a ship that caught fire and a leaky lifeboat (resulting in the loss of all of the live, exotic animals and specimens it took him four years to amass). He also described Wallace’s adventures to Indonesia and Singapore, and Darwin’s voyage to South America and the Galapagos Islands on the HMS Beagle during which he famously found fossils that led to his ideas of how species adapt and evolve.

At one point, Carroll drew the audience’s attention to an 1839 publication in which Darwin, who as a result of his 1831-36 Beagle trip had already developed his thinking about how species change, dodged the issue of evolution because he was, well, afraid of the public backlash. In this way, Carroll showed that Darwin—whose iconic stature may make him seem infallible or superhuman to us today—had fears and insecurities like any human being.

Bates, Darwin and Wallace, it turns out, were all good friends, not fiercely competitive enemies—heartwarming to know considering that it could easily have been otherwise.

At the end of his engrossing presentation, Carroll reiterated that currently “we are in the second Golden Age of evolutionary science”—an age that happens to star Carroll as a modern-day, indoor Darwin, and his evo-devo colleagues and their groundbreaking work in the lab studying genetic information contained in animal and plant DNA to determine such things as the ancestral relationship between various organisms and how these organisms developed over time in relation to their environment.

In response to a question following his talk, about how to get those who do not believe in the theory of evolution to come around, Carroll called for “an alliance of theologians and scientists to get those who are undecided to embrace it.

“If you can’t see evolution—wow!” he said, shaking his head.