The Evolution of Evolution

Science Talk

Scientific American

Science

4.2 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2009

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Scientific American Editor in Chief John Rennie discusses the special January issue of the magazine, which focuses on evolution--2009 being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. Subjects in the issue include the importance of natural selection, the sources of genetic variability, human evolution's past and future, pop evolutionary psychology, everyday applications of evolutionary theory, the science of the game Spore, and the ongoing threat to science education posed by creationist activists. Plus, we'll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news. Web sites related to this episode include www.SciAm.com/jan2009 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:43.4	Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American for the seven days starting January 7, 2009. I'm Steve Murski. This week on the podcast, we'll talk about the January
0:49.2	issue of Scientific American magazine, which is devoted to evolution and the evolution of evolutionary
0:55.5	theory, because today's evolution is not your grandfathers or even your monkey's uncle.
1:00.7	Editor-in-chief John Rennie and I spoke at the magazine's offices.
1:04.2	What's the big deal with evolution, John? Evolution, Steve, evolution. It's only the most
1:09.3	powerful idea in science, and 2009 is a very big year.
1:13.8	I figured that probably had something to do with it. Why don't you tell everybody what the bigness is about 2009?
1:19.9	Well, sure. It's actually, it's kind of a double header of anniversaries related to evolution.
1:24.7	First of all, it marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin,
1:30.5	so happy birthday Chuck in February. And then it also marks the 150th anniversary, conveniently,
1:39.6	of the publication of On the Origin of Species, in which Darwin laid out his theory of evolution.
1:46.5	Which means, for those of you doing the math at home, Darwin was 50 when origin of species came out.
1:53.8	That's right.
1:54.2	And he had spent about 30 or about 20 years basically sitting at home, about things and writing the book.
2:02.2	And, well, we get into that in our opening article in the issue.
2:07.7	For those of you not familiar with the Darwin story, you know, he was very leery about publishing.
	...

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