Welcome to Module 11!
Living on Earth I: Evolution & Extinction
Ah, memory lane. Dr. Alley's best friend in early elementary school had a father who sold "pop" (also called soda, or soft drinks) to dealers in Ohio and often had free samples sitting around, and a mother who drove a 1964-and-a-half white Ford Mustang with a black convertible top. Hard to beat. And what a beauty that car was! Dr. Alley's Hot Wheels Mustang was a 1967, recognizably different from the '64-and-a-half. In fact, he could easily put the Mustangs in chronological order based on the differences between models.
The early geologists of the late 1600s and 1700s had never heard of Ford Mustangs, but those geologists faced a Ford Mustang problem. Recognition of unconformities and other features in the rock record opened a world far older than written records. William Smith had demonstrated the usefulness of the law of faunal succession, so those geologists knew that putting the rocks in order put the fossils in order, and thus the biological change had accompanied geological change. But was the biological change gradual, parent to child in a great, unbroken evolutionary chain of being? Or did unknown cataclysms, or a tinkering god, or an angry god, repeatedly replace one world with another as Ford would one day replace each Mustang with a new model the next year?
Erasmus Darwin was a doctor with an interest in nature, and he put his ideas about evolution into poetry, which was published after he died. A few of his lines from The Temple of Nature (1802):
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
OK, maybe this excerpt wouldn't make a hit song if put to music. But when his grandson Charles Darwin added observations and understanding of mechanisms of evolution to Erasmus' speculations, the evolutionists won the scientific argument over the Ford-Mustang "catastrophists." What convinced the scientific community (and "polite society") that evolution is indeed correct? We'll try to answer that fascinating question in this lesson.
Learning Objectives
- Understand that evolution is fact and more, predicts as well as explains, helps people do useful things, is not anti-religious, and that there are no serious competing scientific ideas.
- Explain how diversity generated during the reproduction of living things affects the ability to survive and reproduce, with successful experiments being passed on to accumulate and drive evolution.
- Describe how natural climate changes, and in one case a meteorite impact, have led to rapid mass extinctions that opened up opportunities for the slow evolution of new types.
What to do for Module 11?
You will have one week to complete Module 11. See the course calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
- Take the RockOn Quiz
- Take the StudentSpeak #12 Survey
- Continue working on Exercise #6
Questions?
If you have any questions, send an email via Canvas, to ALL the Teachers and TAs. To do this, add each teacher individually in the “To” line of your email. By adding all the teachers, the TAs will be included. Failure to email ALL the teachers may result in a delayed or missed response. For detailed directions on how to do this, see How to send an email in GEOSC 10 in the Important Information module.
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