Instructor: Maureen Stanton, Department of Evolution and Ecology, College of Biological Sciences
Description: Fewer than 50% of Americans say that they “believe” in evolution, and yet the scientific evidence for the evolution of all life on Earth, including humans, from a single common ancestor is overwhelming. An evolutionary perspective is commonly believed to be inconsistent with Christian belief in the U.S., but no such conflict is perceived in most other nations around the world. In the past decade, the public effort by so-called “Creation Scientists” to inject creationism into U.S. classrooms has, under legal pressure, been re-packaged as “Intelligent Design” and carried into a courtrooms and school boards. The ongoing controversy, while not a legitimate scientific debate, has much to teach us about the scientific method, about the limits of science within social and spiritual realms, about the dangers of scientists being poor public communicators, and about the uses and misuses of evidence and information. The focus of this Freshman Seminar will be to examine the origins, nature, and importance of this ongoing controversy. My primary goal in this course is to increase the students’ scientific literacy in the most general sense, so that they understand what does and does not constitute legitimate science, and they appreciate the fact that many important questions cannot be addressed scientifically.
Format: Each student will have shared reading assignments for at least the first 5 weeks of the course. Readings will be taken from articles written for educated laypersons, as well as books like Darwin’s Legacy by Dupré, Creationism’s Trojan Horse by Forrest and Gross, and Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe. (However, this topic is so “hot” right now, that other options will almost certainly emerge in the next 10 months.) After the introductory period, student readings will be focused on their term papers, but some additional short readings may be required for class discussions. Grading: Each student’s grade will be based on class participation in discussions (30%), the oral presentation (20%) and the 5-7 page term paper (50%).
About the Instructor: Professor Stanton has been on the UCD faculty since 1982, and she is now Chair of the Section of Evolution and Ecology. She has taught courses in evolutionary biology for the past 15 years, and in 2005, she was awarded the UC Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. Professor Stanton has two major lines of research. In the U.S., she works on the evolutionary ecology of plants, particularly the ways in which plant species adapt to stressful environments and how variation in plant mating success leads to the evolution of floral features. In East Africa, she studies the ecology of symbiotic ant-acacia associations.