Charles Darwin examinging a mockingbird he collected on the Galapagos Islands, as depicted in the first of three films in The Origin of Species seriesHHMIIn 1852, Alfred Wallace, one of evolution’s greatest theorists, spent 10 days on a lifeboat after his ship burned and sunk, swearing he would never sail again—two years before he began his famous eight-year, 14,000-mile journey to the Malay Archipelago that solidified his ideas about natural selection. Charles Darwin, Wallace’s wealthy and slightly older contemporary, also hated sailing, and succumbed to violent bouts of seasickness during his five-year cruise on the HMS Beagle. When he was feeling healthy, however, Darwin was a true adventurer, not only collecting species from around the world, but eating them, too. Apparently, the famed theorist thought the Argentinian specialty of roast armadillo tasted like duck.
These are just a few of the interesting tidbits I learned from three new educational films produced by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Educational Resources Group on the history of evolutionary theory and the ongoing research of modern scientists to understand how—and how fast—natural selection works.
The films, collectively dubbed The Origin of Species series, debuted at the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday (November 20). According to the films’ host, Sean Carroll, HHMI vice president for science education and a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin, the project was motivated by requests from teachers. “They found speciation difficult to teach,” he said. “The question of how traits get modified by natural selection, I ...
