KEY POINTS:
On the first day of her university classes, Professor Chris Simon asks her students to list the five most serious problems facing the world today. Disease, war and climate change tend to pop up.
Whatever the issue, Dr Simon will demonstrate how the teachings of a man born
200 years ago can be used today to fight those problems.
"Everything that we do can be improved by understanding evolutionary biology," says the leading science educator from the University of Connecticut.
"The application of evolution to medicine is just one example. Understanding how diseases evolve, how different strains of virus come up. We have had several talks about how HIV evolves and we can now study that and predict what is going to happen in the future with these diseases.
"Evolutionary trees are being used to follow the evolution of influenza virus and to predict what vaccines are going to be needed in the future - because you have to make a vaccine this year that is going to be used next year."
If students raise the issues of racism and intolerance, Simon will demonstrate how "there's more genetic variation within races than (between) races".
It is designed to show her students how much influence Charles Robert Darwin's ideas have on their everyday lives. And it is why Simon and about 180 other noted researchers and educators, including many of the world's most influential minds, have gathered in Christchurch for the BioEd09 symposium, reflecting on the legacy of the great English scientist.
Thursday marked the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, while 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of Darwin publishing his landmark book On the Origin of Species. The symposium in Christchurch is the first of several around the world this year to celebrate Darwin's profound influence on human thinking.
In fact, Darwin "laid out the whole programme" of biology for the next 150 years and beyond without the benefit of today's technology, Simon says.
"What we are doing is just filling in a lot of the little details.
"And we're looking at the genetics, because he couldn't. But from just studying the variability that he could observe, he sort of foreshadowed pretty much everything we are doing."
Professor Peter Lockhart, convenor of the symposium and a leading researcher, says one of the most important things Darwin did was reject "typological thinking".
"We tend to see things in black and white. But he was aware of the amount of variation that exists in nature. Things are not just black and white."
He was misrepresented as a racist over his theories of natural selection "but in fact this is so ridiculous. He abhorred slavery. He was really quite a radical thinker in his time. He was a very humane individual."
Certainly things are not black and white today when it comes to the ongoing debate between evolution and creationism. But it seems advocates of evolution are finding more and more common ground with those who believe God created the Earth and everything on it. Many evolutionary biologists are also Christians. Simon says more understanding would "make people realise there is a lot less disagreement...than has been whipped up by the fundamentalists".
"We talk about how religion is a belief and evolution is science, and how most religions accept evolution."
New Zealand scientist Alan Cooper studies ancient DNA from a base at the University of Adelaide in order to trace the process of evolution through the centuries, and what it means for the future. One of his subjects is New Zealand's moa, which though extinct has left enough "moa poo" around to extract DNA from.
He has found the moa is genetically quite different to other flightless birds like the ostrich and the emu, and may be most closely related to the tinamou, a flying bird found in South America.
"That kind of suggests that all of the birds originally could fly, and that most of them have lost the ability since," Cooper says.
"Basically we are trying to understand how things are going to respond to change. And if you don't understand how the system worked originally, before humans turned up and altered it all, you have got not too much hope in being accurate in trying to work out what the responses will be."
Cooper has also found that much of New Zealand was covered in water about 20 million years ago "and during this period of time we lost an enormous amount of diversity".
"Some people are now trying to say the whole country went under and everything we have only turned up in the last 20 million years. But most of us don't believe that. There's too many odd things in New Zealand that couldn't have recolonised after that point - things like the tuatara, and the amazing frogs, and kauri."
New Zealand's geographic isolation and host of endemic species make it an ideal spot for uncovering secrets of the past. It's what drew Chris Simon from the US to study our cicadas as her method of learning how species formed and spread around the world. She has found more than 50 different species of cicada in New Zealand, which developed over the past 10 million years.
"What we discover about the DNA of cicadas and how it evolved is exactly the same as in every other organism.
"When we looked back over time using the DNA we found that ... there was a big burst of evolution about five million years ago when a lot of geological change was going on in New Zealand.
"And since that time there has been more or less a constant production of species. But we found the threshold for becoming a new species seems to be about two million years."
Cicada populations spread across different areas of New Zealand will eventually become species of their own, Simon says.
Scientific discovery based on all forms of life continues to develop human understanding. So if Darwin was still around today, what would he think of how far his theories have taken science?
"He would be overjoyed I think," Simon says. "There's just so much more information. We have studied a lot more organisms, we have studied them in more depth and he would be so pleased to understand the genetics and to learn all that we have learned in the past 150 years."
Cooper thinks Darwin would probably also be relieved.
"He certainly expressed a lot of doubt and concern about the radical nature of his ideas. He was basically changing everything that everybody thought."
"I suspect it turned out to be more influential and more significant than he might have ever expected."
