Swimming with the big fish

Summary 

In Four Billion Years of Evolution in Six Minutes, Prosanta Chakrabarty says that although it is called a theory, evolution is in fact a fact  solidly supported by observations we can make about the organs we share with other mammals, but also in the DNA we share with every living thing on Earth, from fish, to plants, to bacteria. This is because, as the theory of Darwinian evolution by natural selection says, life began once on Earth, so every single living thing is related to every other living thing. Another point Chatrabarty makes to correct a common mistake is that everything alive today is equally the end product of four billion years of evolution exactly as we humans are.

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Response 

Before I tried to write my summary, I listened to the talk twice last night, and again a couple of times this morning. Then I thought about the most important ideas and wrote short notes in my own words. Then I was ready to write my summary in 120 words or less. When I wrote the first draft, after listening to the talk again, probably for the sixth time, I thought it went well. Then I did the Google Word count, which returned 130 words. It wasn't a lot over the limit, but it did take me a few more minutes work to decide who to change the grammar to get of a few words, and in the end I had to decide which idea to cut. I think the current summary above, 119 carefully chosen and organized words, gives a good idea of the main points Chakrabaty makes. If you listen to his talk, which is actually a little less than the six minutes the title promises, you can decide how well I did. 

In fact, having written a few summaries of different pieces of work over this term, I'm thinking of revising the maximum limit on the number of words in the summary up from 120 words to 140 words, which might make it a bit easier while still keeping it challenging. I'll think about that more over my Christmas and New Year break. In the meantime, challenging is good. We learn when we challenge ourselves to do more than we have before: to hit a golf ball further, to play a new piece of music, to read a difficult essay, to cook a dish, to run further, to solve a mathematical problem or whatever. I hope you also find getting to the other side of a challenge rewarding. 


I like Chakrabaty's talk for a couple of reasons. First, I've been a fan of Darwin's theory of evolution since I first learned it in high school some for or more decades ago. It doesn't just explain all the life around us, but in a very brief, and relatively simple answer that our species did not fully discover until 1859, tells us why we are here, how we came to be. You can understand why it was so unpopular with popes and some other religious people: it neatly dissolves a major traditional reason for believing in gods. And the evolving history of reactions to Darwin's theory also interests me. In the US, for example, there is still strong opposition to teaching the truths of Darwin's theory in science classes in school. But in fact, the ideas in Darwin's theory go back much further. I remember when I was a young undergraduate at Sydney University how amazed I felt when I first read the Roman Epicurian poet Lucretius, whose only surviving work, the philosophical poem De Rerum Natura, includes guesses about the universe and life that are very similar to some of Darwin's fundamental ideas. We might be related to the fish, the roses and the bacteria, but the stories of our species are still fascinating.  

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Question

Since we are related to every living thing on Earth, how should we treat them? How should we treat the dogs, the pigs, the roses, the grass, the bacteria, and all of our other relatives?
(This is two sentences, but it's only one question.)