Natural Selection

We should ponder the fact that Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, probably the most influential of all theories (though now under challenge), asserts that the survival of types is dependent upon traits that avoid influences that threaten their extinction. In the light of current announcements of the catastrophic spread of AIDS, is there not an implication that far in the future there will be a tendency toward the extinction of promiscuous and drug-addicted people? Leon S. Rhodes Bryn Athyn.

Life is good for Pennsylvania State University physicist Lee Smolin. He's thought of a way to explain why the laws of nature are what they are - why electricity, gravity and the other forces are set just right to organize the universe into planets, stars and galaxies, as opposed to, say, a vast swarm of dust grains or inert rocks. He also has a theory to explain the origin of life, but he says he wants to do some more checking before he goes public with it. "I have an optimistic sense," says Smolin, 42, from one of his New York haunts, a Brazilian cafe in SoHo, near his part-time home in Brooklyn.

The apparent tendency for people to play fair and demand a fair deal from others - even at a cost - has long baffled economists and other social scientists. But researchers who took a different approach say they have found a way that natural selection could have bred a kind of fairness instinct into the human race. Not that Darwin's evolution offers a straightforward answer to the puzzle. "Natural selection generally prefers the strategy of keeping everything to yourself," said Martin Nowak, a theoretical biologist at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, lead author of the paper in today's issue of the journal Science.

By Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 264 pp. $26. Reviewed by John Horgan I wanted to like What Darwin Got Wrong by philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. I had several reasons. I love the spectacle of scientific dogmas - even ones to which I cleave - getting whacked by intellectual tough guys like Fodor. I've enjoyed Fodor's sardonic essays over the years, especially his skewerings of the much-hyped field of evolutionary psychology, which purports to explain everything we think and do in Darwinian terms.

George C. Williams, 83, an evolutionary biologist who helped shape modern theories of natural selection, died last Wednesday at his home in South Setauket on Long Island, near Stony Brook University, where he taught for 30 years. The cause was Parkinson's disease, said his wife, Doris Williams. Mr. Williams played a leading role in establishing the now-prevailing, though not unanimous, view among evolutionary biologists that natural selection works at the level of the gene and the individual and not for the benefit of the group or species.

1. c. Earth, not the sun, moves. 2. j. Theory of natural selection. 3. d. General relativity. 4. e. Law of falling bodies. 5. g. Planetary orbits are elliptical. 6. a. Classification of species. 7. i. Some genes can "jump. " 8. h. Rules of heredity. 9. f. Laws of motion. 10. b. DNA is a double helix.

Like Beckett's tramps in Waiting for Godot, the two women in Natural Selection inhabit their own little world, doing pretty much the same thing day in and day out. Myrtle and Avis, the 40ish characters of Theatre Exile's world premiere presented in Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5, busy themselves in a small room by putting lids on bottoms to form small, square cardboard boxes. Their employer is a mysterious "they," and there are no visible signs of supervision; the pair's workday is controlled by a buzzer that periodically indicates their breaks.

The mood was far from somber at the J. Cresswell Stuart Elementary School in Willingboro yesterday morning as students, faculty and staff celebrated the life of their late principal, Douglas J. Austin. "J.C. Stuart let's make some noise," Keith Ellerbe, principal of Memorial Upper Elementary School, shouted to a crowd of 500 cheering prekindergarten to fourth-grade students. "We are truly here to remember a friend, a friend who was just as loud as you are in the hallways, but in his loudness he had an admirable quality.

It's a common misconception that evolution is a matter of faith, because it happens too slowly to observe. Here's the way one reader sees it: "I don't see any fish walking around, nor do I see any other creature in mid-evolving mode. . . . Simply stated, both creationism and evolution should be taught as competing theories; both are not provable, and both cannot be duplicated in a lab. " But evolution does happen in the lab, in real time, and it's bad news for us because such rapid evolution allows organisms that can kill us by evading drugs, vaccines, and our own immune systems.

Creation marks Paul Bettany's second go-round as a 19th-century naturalist in a movie from screenwriter John Collee. In Master and Commander, Bettany was the proto-Darwin whose findings about how animals use camouflage to elude predators had immediate application during the Napoleonic Wars. In Creation, he is Darwin himself, decades pregnant with the research for his seminal On the Origin of Species, but too hopeless to deliver the manuscript. Does Darwin have prepartum depression because he fears the laws of natural selection he has so carefully documented will challenge the laws of God?

1. c. Earth, not the sun, moves. 2. j. Theory of natural selection. 3. d. General relativity. 4. e. Law of falling bodies. 5. g. Planetary orbits are elliptical. 6. a. Classification of species. 7. i. Some genes can "jump. " 8. h. Rules of heredity. 9. f. Laws of motion. 10. b. DNA is a double helix.

Blurring the lines between life and inanimate matter, biologists announced Friday that they'd created six different chemical alternatives to DNA and coaxed them to undergo evolution. A description of these code-carrying molecules, called XNAs, was published in the journal Science. The work bolsters a prevailing hypothesis that life as we know it evolved from simpler life forms, no longer here, and those evolved from something simpler. There may be no moment when the first life emerged, but instead an evolutionary process by which chemicals that most of us would consider non-life gradually gave rise to living cells through natural selection.

Timing is everything, and if there was ever a scientist whose legacy was tarnished by bad timing, it was Jean Baptiste Lamarck. The French naturalist lived from 1744 to 1829 - and published his own evolutionary theory decades before Darwin's theory went public in 1859. In the popular imagination, those who've heard of Lamarck tend to associate him with a wrongheaded version of evolution in which giraffes can grant their offspring longer necks by reaching for high leaves. Historians say this unfair portrayal was engineered by Lamarck's enemies.

It's a common misconception that evolution is a matter of faith, because it happens too slowly to observe. Here's the way one reader sees it: "I don't see any fish walking around, nor do I see any other creature in mid-evolving mode. . . . Simply stated, both creationism and evolution should be taught as competing theories; both are not provable, and both cannot be duplicated in a lab. " But evolution does happen in the lab, in real time, and it's bad news for us because such rapid evolution allows organisms that can kill us by evading drugs, vaccines, and our own immune systems.

To some creationists, Darwin was not only wrong but poisonous - his evolutionary theory, they say, directly influenced Hitler's genocidal ideology. Historian Richard Weikart appeared in the anti-evolution film Expelled, promoting this alleged Darwin-Hitler link. Weikart has written extensively on this, arguing that Darwinian evolution destroyed Judeo-Christian morality, especially the notion of reverence for life. Weikart does not try to push the idea that this invalidates evolution as a scientific idea.

One recurring theme in reader questions, especially from creationists, is that Darwinian evolution can't explain big changes - the invention of fur or feathers, kidneys or brains. These readers don't see how such innovation could possibly come about through random spelling errors in DNA, no matter how many millions of years they had to accumulate. ". . . the concept of 'descent with modification' cannot generate more complex systems . . . the old adage that if you give 1,000 monkeys 1,000 years to randomly type we could get the works of Shakespeare is false.

Welcome to the first official Planet of the Apes brain-twisting evolution quiz. After four months and change, I've covered a lot of territory, from inbred royals to endangered frogs to the evolution views of Miss USA contestants. This superhard quiz is "open-book," so feel free to refer to my blog ( http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/evolution ) 1. What did Judge John E. Jones rule at the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial in Dover, Pa.? a)

A cancer is sweeping through the population of Tasmanian devils, plaguing these small, carnivorous marsupials with tumors on their noses, eyes, and mouths. The tumors kill these creatures in months by interfering with their ability to see, smell, or eat. But this is no ordinary story of animal vs. cancer. The Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD) is a rare instance of a transmissible cancer, making this an evolutionary battle for survival between the devils and a line of mutated cells that has taken on a life of its own. In 15 years, the cancer has wiped out 70 percent of the population.

Darwinism is more often associated with the liberal left than the conservative right, but it's moved a long way across the political spectrum from Darwin's day, when it was embraced by advocates of free-market economics, colonialism, and similar ideas today associated with the right. Apparently, Darwinism is still sometimes invoked in arguments for economic conservatism. It's reflected in a recent e-mail I received from a reader: "Maybe you should write about the current reversing of evolution by humans, using technology.

George C. Williams, 83, an evolutionary biologist who helped shape modern theories of natural selection, died last Wednesday at his home in South Setauket on Long Island, near Stony Brook University, where he taught for 30 years. The cause was Parkinson's disease, said his wife, Doris Williams. Mr. Williams played a leading role in establishing the now-prevailing, though not unanimous, view among evolutionary biologists that natural selection works at the level of the gene and the individual and not for the benefit of the group or species.