Darwin Anniversaries

September 12th, 2009 will mark the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. This year also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of his famous and monumental book "On the Origin of Species". The year will obviously be marked by anniversary celebrations, including on this blog and in my classroom.

Scientific American magazine has started the year off by dedicating an entire issue to the subject of evolution. Topics include the evolution of the mind, the evolutionary history of humans, the video game "Spore", the creationism/evolution controversy, and the future of the human species. This should be good reading and provide a lot of material for discussion.

Agony and Ecstasy

The December 18th issue of The Economist features an interesting article written by Craig Ward. In it, he describes a movement to alter the legal ban of the drug ecstasy (MDMA). There is, apparently, a significant amount of anecdotal and experiential evidence showing that MDMA can be used by psychotherapists to help treat their patients who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. According to Ward:

...in the 1980s MDMA, which at the time was still unregulated, escaped its semi-underground psychotherapeutic milieu and began to be taken by young people for the sheer fun of it. In a panic, America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), unaware of the therapeutic MDMA network, made an emergency classification in 1985 that placed MDMA in Schedule I—the most restrictive category for drugs with “a high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use”...Although 500,000 doses of MDMA had by this point been used in therapeutic settings, the compound was thereafter banned worldwide.

Rescheduling MDMA as schedule II would allow psychotherapist (under close DEA supervision) to resume legally using the drug for treating their patients. This article is a great follow-up to the Newsweek article that was assigned for reading in anatomy class.

Neckties

Today I talked to my classes about the necktie I was wearing, which I received as a Christmas gift. The small purple designs on it were actually drawings of Giardia lambia, which is an intestinal parasite. If anyone out there is experiencing tie jealousy and would like to order their own infectious disease tie, you can do so from the Infectious Awareables website.

Why We Like Music

The cover story from the last issue of "The Economist" for 2008 discusses theories as to why and how music has become so important to the human species. Three ideas are discussed:

1. Music evolved as a way to attract a mate.
2. Music evolved as a way for groups of humans to establish social bonds.
3. The ability to make music was an "accident" and didn't come from evolutionary pressure. Once it was "discovered", though, it became important for a variety of functions including attracting a mate and establishing social bonds.

Natural selection is a creative tinkerer in its ability to fashion new uses for existing traits. For that reason, I think that the creation of music by humans probably can't be explained as simply as these three. The truth about why music is so important to our species probably involves some accidents, some sexual selection, some social selection, and perhaps even other selective mechanisms that we haven't yet considered.

This article and the ideas presented in it are fascinating, though. And they provide a great example of how elegantly the theory of evolution explains even those aspects of our existence that we typically take for granted.

Resolutions

Have you made any resolutions for 2009? I have to admit that I was going to cop out and not make any this year. Why should I? They usually only last a couple of weeks and then I'm off whatever wagon it was and feeling guilty. So as I went through the whole eat less/exercise more/drink less/pray more list of ideas, I kind of started to wonder what the point was.

But instead of giving up entirely, I'm going to try a different approach. Instead of making a list of resolutions, I'm only going to pick one thing. One change that I want to make. And I'm going to focus on that one thing for 100 days. That's it. One specific change for a specific amount of time. At the end of 100 days, I'll pick something else to focus on for the next 100 days. That's it.

As for what it is that I'm going to "resolve" for the first 100 days of 2009...I'm not really inclined to share that. But I can tell you that there are 2 days down and 98 to go!