Last Monday, the College of Science and the School of Economics of the University of the Philippines held a cross-disciplinary symposium titled “Darwin’s Impact on Science and Society” to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s ground breaking and world shaking book On the Origin of Species.

It was a well-attended lecture by students and faculty alike and featured four speakers from different disciplines that gave a taste of the far-ranging impact of Darwin’s book.

Dr. Perry Ong, the current chairman of the Institute of Biology in the UP, discussed the impact of Darwin in evolutionary biology. He stressed that Darwin’s assertions held up to the test of inquiry and evidence.

Evolution can be observed happening at human time scales even for the same type finches Darwin studied in the Galapagos. Together with Alfred Wallace in 1859, Darwin not only explained the biodiversity that we have right now for organisms but also the mechanism—natural selection—in which this proceeds.

For this it is best to quote from Darwin himself, from the concluding paragraph of his book originally titled as “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”—

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled 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 . . .

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

This breathtaking conclusion and its implication is sadly left out or distorted in our history books, as the second speaker from the Department of History, Dr. Maris Diokno, pointed out. References used in third year public high school have erringly ignored the scientific basis and evidence for Darwin’s theory, painting it instead as a dubious “theory” that is not to be believed in. Together with this downgrading of scientific fact is the upgrading of certain religious biases of the textbook writer which paints his/her opinion and interpretation of the Bible as equivalent or even supreme over established scientific norms. Several remarks later in the symposium raised the concern that there is not much review embedded in the writing and production of these textbooks and they do not consult with experts nor check the facts that we teach our students in high school and elementary.

Darwin’s impact is not just on science but as well as other fields like Economics. Dr. Raul Fabella of the School of Economics discussed Darwin in the context of the economic crisis and the failure of mathe-matized/physicized models of economic systems. Failure of game theoretical predictions when compared with field observations led him to yearn for deeper understanding of economics within the context of Darwin’s assertions. It is interesting that Darwin and Wallace partly based their conclusions from economic observations of Malthus and were influenced by Smith’s hidden hand idea.

They observed that although populations of organisms have the tendency to exponentially grow, we are not overwhelmed by any of these organisms. Asking on what factors would limit this growth and yield the observational data that they had (from the Voyage of the Beagle of Darwin and in Borneo for Wallace), both men ended up with convergent ideas of evolution through natural selection.

Rounding up the discussion was Dr. Michael Tan from the Department of Anthropology who discussed the evolution of cultures and ideas that framed the public’s reception of Darwin’s ideas. He delved into how institutions like the Church changed its view—evolving into a more open and embracing thought that the initial reactions of Darwin’s time. The public’s understanding of Darwin will surely evolve as well as we discuss the implication of his work not only to biology but also to other fields as well.

This year is the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth (February 12) as well as the 150th year of his ground-breaking On the Origin of the Species. It is timely to read Darwin in the time where the biodiversity that he saw and explained is being seriously threatened by economic and climate induced impacts throughout the world. We should see that this biodiversity is something that we have evolved into and if lost—could also spell disaster in the never ending struggle for existence for life in the world.