Penn Museum celebrates Darwin Day with student lecture

Guarding the entrance to the newly installed “Human Evolution: The First 200 Million Years” exhibit in the Penn Museum is the Morganucodon, a tiny, rodent-sized creature who happens to be one of the first human ancestors.

In honor of Charles Darwin’s 203rd birthday, a group of about 15 Philadelphia area school teachers gathered into the Penn Museum new educational classroom Saturday. The teachers came for College junior Paul Mitchell’s expertise on human evolution.

Mitchell led a lecture explaining how to teach human evolution in the classroom.

“It’s important to put in the forefront of students’ minds that human history is only a tiny sliver of the earth’s history,” Mitchell said.

More historic evidence like the human fossil record displayed in the exhibit help scientists explore the human past.

“Think of the fossil record as a family photo album,” Mitchell said. “It does not show every change in a family over time, but it gives us a good idea of the natural progression.”

Mitchell had his first experience with Darwin at age 16. He read On the Origin of the Species after his conservative Christian community had condemned the book. “If they tell me not to read it, I probably should,” Mitchell said to laughs in the audience.

At Penn, Mitchell does research alongside Philosophy professor Michael Weisberg and works as an assistant to the keeper at the Museum’s Skeletal Collection.

“We’re very impressed with Paul’s content knowledge,” Jennifer Reifsteck, Program Manager at the Museum’s Education Department, said. “We use him for many school groups and teacher’s workshops. He’s a great resource.”

Direct results of human evolution can be seen today, Mitchell said. For example, humans should actually be lactose intolerant by nature. After a child is done nursing, he or she is supposed to lose lactose tolerance.

With the progress of agriculture and domesticating milk-producing animals, however, humans have built up a lactose tolerance.

In places like Asia, where animals like goats and cows aren’t common though, humans do not have the same tolerance for dairy products.

The human spine is another indicator of evolution, Mitchell said. Almost all humans experience lower back pain because in order for humans to have a straight posture, the bottom of the spine must be curved. The pressure that puts on the lower spine is what creates the pain, he explained.

Ironically enough, Darwin himself was not primarily focused on human evolution, devoting only a few lines towards the end of his On the Origin of the Species to the topic. “He didn’t touch human evolution because [the topic] was so politically charged,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell agrees that human evolution is a topic that “gets people riled up.”

“When it’s about us, we care,” he said. “When it’s about fruit flies,” like the animals that Darwin so carefully studied, “it’s whatever.”

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