Educating Risa

Today is the 201st anniversary of Darwin’s birth, so to mark the occasion I read the boys a poem I found online. It’s from an out-of-print book called Hocus Pocus Diplodocus: The Entire History of the Universe in 21 Poems, by Tom Stanier (published 1980). It also goes well to the tune of Yankee Doddle Dandy, which is how the boys preferred it.

Mister Darwin wrote a book
(The Origin of Species).
Let us look at life, he said,
In all its bits and pieces.

Life is a survival course,
Life’s a competition.
Species who do not adapt
Are faced with abolition.

Every tiny little change
Can take a million years;
But if such changes don’t occur,
The species disappears.

Changes that improve the species –
That’s the key connection.
And I hereby name this process
Natural Selection.

We talked about the inaccuracies in the poem (it’s simply not true that “if such changes to not occur, the species disappears”, as there are several species that have been around for millions of years with little to no change), and about alternate views of the origin of life. The children found the Aristotelian theory of spontaneous generation (Hey! If you leave food garbage lying around, you’ll eventually find mice and flies and such just ‘pop’ into existence from the garbage!) pretty funny. We also read Laurie Kreb’s book We’re Sailing to the Galapagos, and watched some related youtube videos. Our favourite was this one:

though the Simpson’s version of Homer’s evolution ran a close second: