Evolutio
Evolution and Society
These lecture notes are a remix of those from MIT's Spring 2012, class Evolution and Society by Prof. John Durant, Jeanne Wildman, and Michaela Thompson. Most of the courseware comes from MIT's Open Courseware Initiative, though some of those lectures are not accompanied by PDFs. In those cases links have been provided to relevant Wikipedia articles as substitutes. Here only the order of the lectures has been changed; however, one could changed the content of these PDFs any way they choose.
Lecture A
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Lecture 2
The Revival of Darwinism After 1900
Lecture 3
Evolution and the Rise of Christian Fundamentalism
The idea of evolution became fairly widely accepted in late–19th century America, even among Christian communities. However, after 1900 the emergence of populist "Fundamentalism" powered the first serious resistance to Darwin's ideas since the early 1860s. The single most famous expression of this resistance was the notorious Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.
Lecture 5
The "Eclipse of Darwinism" in Biology Around 1900
The Darwinists didn't have things all their own way in the late–19th century; in fact, by around 1900 it was probably only a minority among professional biologists who still thought that Darwin and Wallace had essentially gotten things right in 1858. We shall review the reasons for what Bowler dubbed "The Eclipse of Darwinism" around 1900, paying particular attention to the technical problems that evolutionary theory faced in the absence of a satisfactory theory of biological inheritance.
Lecture 6
Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was inspired by his reading of the Origin of Species to take a lifelong interest in the role of inheritance in shaping human character. The chief result of this interest, the social philosophy of "Eugenics" (the term is Galton's) was to inspire some of the most notorious misuses of evolutionary and biological ideas in the 20th century.
Lecture 7
The "Gospel of Evolution" in the Late–19thCentury
Darwin's theory seized the imaginations of late-Victorians, and soon the idea of evolution was being applied to everything—from the fortunes of individuals, to the fate of empires. We will review the extraordinary range of views about the wider significance of evolution—in Britain, and in the United States, home to some of the most striking forms of "Social Darwinism" in the late–19th century.
Lecture 8
The publication of the Origin provoked a very wide-ranging and intense debate. We shall review the principal positions adopted, finding that Darwin had some unlikely supporters and some almost equally unlikely critics. We shall also prepare the ground for organized debates of our own, in which individual students will play the parts of leading characters in the arguments about the Origin after 1859. These debates will take place in the discussion sections in week 13.
Lecture 9
Guest Lecture: Andrew Berry
"The 'Other Man' of Evolution by Natural Selection" Dr Andrew Berry (Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University) will consider what can be learnt by looking at Alfred Russel Wallace's independent path to discovery of the theory of evolution by natural selection.