July 2024
Eric J. Simon, Ph.D. has been a professor of Biology for over 25 years. An avid traveler and award-winning photographer, he is also the author of a widely used series of college biology textbooks used by students in over 40 countries.
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When did your fascination with Darwin and the principles of natural selection begin?
I was always interested in biology, but growing up I was basically taught that if you're interested in biology you should be a doctor. So I imagined myself being a doctor up until college, when I started to get involved in research and soon realized that I was much more interested in being a professor. Basically, I loved college so much I decided never to leave. I did four years at Wesleyan and seven years at Harvard, got my PhD, and then immediately started teaching.
Darwinian evolution and the principles of natural selection weren't particularly relevant to the work I was doing. My training is in molecular biology and biochemistry, extremely small scale biology. I wasn't thinking on the larger scale. It wasn't until I started to write textbooks in 2001 that I came to understand the importance of Darwin and the overarching significance of his work to every field of biology.
One feature of the first textbook that I worked on is that every chapter ends with a section called “evolution connection.” It shows how Darwinian evolution informs every aspect of biology whether it's about cells or ecosystems or plants or the human respiratory system. That’s when I started to think about it in a deeper way.
More recently, I brought my students to the Galapagos, which is a dream destination for every biologist. Every 10-year-old wants to go to Disney World, every biologist wants to go to Galapagos. Whenever I visit someplace new and exotic, it falls into one of two categories: either I'm glad I went but I don't feel the need to go back, or I can't wait to go back. The Galapagos was the latter.
Did Darwin immediately understand what he was witnessing in the Galapagos?
Absolutely not. He was only 22-years-old when he set out on a general surveying trip of South America. Out of his five year journey he only spent about 5% of it in the Galapagos. It wasn't until about 10 years after his return that he realized the significance of that particular place to the ideas that he was just creating. And it was 23 years after his journey before On the Origin of Species was published. The experience primed him and would provide crucial evidence for his book but he had absolutely no idea of the extent that the Galapagos was going to be linked with his own biography.
A sort of funny fact is that he commingled his specimens from the different islands in a way that he wasn't able to unmingle. Once he realized that this was happening and that the individual Galapagos Islands needed to be studied separately, he had to call on other people to help him sort his specimens, to figure out what went where.
Set the scene for the arrival of On the Origin of Species. What were the dominant ideas at the time?
For the previous 2000 years or so it was Divine Creation. The idea that approximately 5000 or 6000 years ago a superior being for his or her own purposes created every creature in exactly the form that it is today, in exactly the place that it was today.
During Darwin’s time, people like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Alfred Wallace had started to question this idea. Alternative theories were percolating, but they were essentially thought pieces and more philosophy than anything else. There wasn’t any sort of consensus and they definitely weren’t mainstream. It was Darwin and the publication of his book in 1859 that introduced these ideas to the general public. Suddenly, if you were an intelligent person in the early 1860s, this is what you were talking about. You could say it went viral.
Darwin gathered tremendous quantities of evidence. In a single chapter, he might cite the work of 40 other people bearing on the idea that he was talking about, and he even conducted his own experiments. This is why it took him 23 years to publish it. He was meticulous. He was also a prolific letter writer. He wrote to people all over the world, asking their opinions and their data. What really made the On The Origin of Species stand apart was the map of evidence that he presented on top of the philosophical discussion.
Sounds like his openness and seeming lack of ego was part of his success.
Absolutely, yes. There's something like 15,000 letters of his still in existence. He was prolific and also a model scientist. He basically says, “Look, I'm willing to abandon any idea. Just show me the evidence.” He had an unusually keen scientific mind with respect to a lack of prejudice and preconception. He was a really independent thinker who was open to wherever the data took him. There was no ego involved.
Let's travel back to the Galapagos for a moment. What makes it so extraordinary?
First, it’s the tremendous variety of megafauna, the large, charismatic animals. There are giant tortoises, penguins, marine iguanas, sea lions, many birds, animals of different shapes and sizes, plus amazing flora, fascinating cacti. It's altogether a unique landscape. The islands are actually all relatively newly formed. The oldest Island is about three and a half million years old and the newest is being formed as we speak. It's this chain of volcanic islands, like Hawaii, filled with different landscapes. Some are heavily forested, some are barren lava scapes. There are active volcanoes, beautiful coral reefs, tropical waters.
I've traveled widely so it isn't often that I see something that I've never seen before. But the tremendous biodiversity stunned me at every turn.
One of the only downsides about the Galapagos is that it’s sufficiently far away and difficult to get to, but in my experience that's always going to make a travel experience worthwhile. One of my sayings when I leave for trips, is that it’s awesome because traveling there sucks. It’s absolutely beautiful and not overrun.
What do you hope OLLI members take away from the course?
What I hope they take away is a lesson in how science gets done in the real world. I want them to take away an appreciation of evolution by natural selection, what it is, and what it means, because it doesn't mean what most people think it means. I think that most people have a narrow view that it represents biodiversity and how species are different.
But, to me, equally interesting and far less obvious are the similarities. Why does all life on earth share such basic similarities? And, at the next level, how can it be true that there is both tremendous variety and tremendous similarity? Those two things would seem to be diametrically opposed, and so it's almost a paradox.
Evolution is a hidden thread that runs through everything. I love opening people's eyes to that.