What is Evolution’s Light?
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”— Theodosius Dobzhansky, The American Biology Teacher, Mar. 1973 Vol. 35, No. 3 pp. 125-129, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4444260
Theodosius Dobzhansky was a well known entomologist, geneticist, and evolutionary biologist. He was a key figure in the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis of the mid-20th Century. He published this essay in 1973, the year before I took Evolution at New Mexico State University (NMSU), is a decent overview of that synthesis. I don’t have the URL above linked because it points to a copy behind a paywall, but here it is courtesy of PBS.
Dobzhansky was an excellent scientist and a Russian Orthodox Christian. The essay explains his view that a creator started the universe, using evolution as the mechanism that produced all life, including us. Whether one shares his religious views or not, he’s correct that evolution is a fundamental unifying theory in biology.
A lot has happened since I took Evolution.
I took that first class in evolution over 50 years ago. I went on to complete a Masters in Animal Behavior at Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Entomology (the study of insects) at the University of Arizona (UA). For my dissertation, I studied the life history of Pterotermes occidentis, a large primitive species of termite native to the Sonoran Desert. I was also interested in computers, starting with a Fortran programming class I took in high school in 1969. I ended up working computing for 33 years, mostly designing, building, and managing computer networks. I considered myself an evolutionary biologist with a day job. I retired from the day job in late 2017. In early 2022, my classical taxonomist father Jim Zimmerman (also an entomologist) died. He had continued his research and publishing at UA for over 32 years after retiring from NSMU, where he had taught evolution and other subjects. After his death, I talked to his friends at the Insect Collection where he had been working until the pandemic shut UA down in 2020. Turned out they needed help with websites and other aspects of computing, unrelated to the pretty compute-intensive world of modern systematics (what taxonomy is called these days). I knew enough to help out, so I’m again affiliated with my alma mater.
What’s the purpose of this website?
Here I’ll present a picture of evolution as a field of science and its application to topics that interest me. Look at the site menu for subjects I cover. Evolution has evolved with decades of new science and technology. Websites are the easiest way for me to present information that might otherwise go into a book or a series of articles. Here are two other personal sites I currently maintain–
The Nutrition Equation. I started this in 2014 to share what I’ve been learning about the biology of human nutrition. It needs some updating to reflect some important aspects of metabolism (beta oxidation) I’ve learned about the in past year.
Lake Manly. My wife and I like to explore in and around Death Valley. We’ve take thousands of photos. This site describes some of what we’ve seen with a lot of photos. I might use it for other purposes, too…