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Inspired by Darwin’s Work
Each topic summary below includes a link to Darwin’s observations
and writings, and the explanations in italics are extracted from
the National Curriculum (England and Wales) to indicate how Darwin’s
work might be included in schools.
WEEDS - PLANT NUMBERS ARE KEPT IN CHECK
How predation and competition for resources affect population
size. About food webs composed of several food chains, and how
food chains can be quantified.
“But the real importance of a large number of eggs or
seeds is to make up for much destruction at some period in life;
and this period in the great majority of cases is an early one.” |
WORMS BRING SUBSOIL TO THE SURFACE
The distribution of organisms depends on environmental factors;
sustainability is affected by human activity; fauna, such as
worms, act as environmental indicators.
Darwin tells us that the action of the worms caused his worm
stone to sink at a rate of 2.2 mm a year. He estimated that
the action of earthworms on every acre of his land brought some
18 tons of soil to the surface annually. |
A TANGLED BANK
That habitats support a diversity of plants and animals
which are interdependent.
“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed
with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,
with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling
through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately
constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent
on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced
by laws acting around us.” |
ARTIFICIAL SELECTION
That selective breeding can lead to new varieties. Human
management of food production has environmental implications
for animal and plant populations.
Darwin relates selective breeding of food plants to human survival.
“We probably owe our knowledge of the uses of almost all
plants to man having originally existed in a barbarous state,
and having been often compelled by severe want to try as food
almost everything which he could chew and swallow…. Accustomed
as we are to our excellent vegetables and luscious fruits, we
can hardly persuade ourselves that the stringy roots of the
wild carrot and parsnip, or the little shoots of the wild asparagus,
or crabs, sloes, &c., should ever have been valued.” |
NATURAL SELECTION
Small inherited changes can assist individuals to survive.
“When we reflect that certain extraordinary peculiarities
have thus appeared in a single individual out of many millions,
all exposed in the same country to the same general conditions
of life, and, again, that the same extraordinary peculiarity
has sometimes appeared in individuals living under widely different
conditions of life, we are driven to conclude that such peculiarities
are not directly due to the action of the surrounding conditions,
but to unknown laws acting on the organization or constitution
of the individual.” |
POLLINATION
Variability is the raw material of evolution. Variation
in plant species starts with exploration of how they are pollinated.
“Cross fertilisation is also ensured in many cases by
mechanical contrivances of wonderful beauty, preventing the
impregnation of the flowers by their own pollen.” Seeing
insects entering and leaving flowers filled Darwin with pleasure. |
HOW DARWIN WORKED
Secondary students think about how Darwin worked and find
examples in Down House and Garden.
CDT is also developing and delivering programmes for gifted
and talented students. In November 2005, the Forum delivered
a programme for London Gifted &Talented following the launch
of its on-line science programme Interdependence. In August
2006, 20 students from the National Academy for Gifted &
Talented Youth/Imperial College London Summer School (Life Strand)
spent a day investigating Darwin’s ways of working in
the nominated World Heritage Site area at Downe. |
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