DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
COURSE FORMAT
The course has three parts. The first focuses on who Darwin was, what he did, and the state of natural history up to the publication of On the Origin of Species.We begin by reading Darwin's short Autobiography to learn something of the environment in which he was raised, get a sense of the kind of person he was, and what the thought he accomplished in life.I then explain the events leading up to the five-year voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, the nature and purpose of the voyage itself, and outline contemporary views of the immutability of species, the age of the earth, what fossils were thought to signify, and the problem of extinction. Students thus get a broad overview of the context out of which the Origin arose and see the sorts of problems that Darwin was to address.

The middle portion of the course is devoted to a consideration of the Origin with an explication of the work, section by section. I make clear exactly what Darwin said—and didn't say. On some key issues (e.g., the reality and importance of inherited variation) Darwin got it right, while on others (e.g., the source of such variation) he was confused or wrong. I make the point that much of science is a kind of back-and-forth questioning and reasoning, and that the so-called scientific method as often presented is not so neat and tidy as in real life.I end this middle part of the course with a discussion on the "contexts of discovery and of justification," which makes the important distinction between the discovery of new evidence and the way in which a new interpretation is justified by that evidence. For example, the discoveries Darwin made on the Beagle voyage were certainly important to his subsequent theory, but equally crucial was how he argued his case based upon those discoveries. Darwin was fully aware that to convince his colleagues of the correctness of his theory he had to follow certain established canons of proper theory building. In fact, Darwin's obvious attention to creating a sound context of justification indicates he was far more than a "lucky collector" who stumbled on to his "descent with modification."

The last third of the course looks at post-Origin issues, such as Gregor Mendel's key contribution to Darwin's evolutionary theory, especially why Mendel's work wasn't appreciated for more than three decades. This provides an excellent example of how a scientist's "answers" are not recognized as such if the answers are to questions no one else is currently asking. I then describe our present-day view of evolution, a kind of Darwinian update, and indicate where some of the hot topics now lie (e.g., extinction, rate of speciation, human origins). We then briefly review Darwin's Descent of Man and how the principles and concepts of the Origin are exmplified there as well.
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.