In 1953 Watson and Crick figured out the structure of DNA, showing how genes work

• Larson leaves out the story of Rosalind Franklin
  
• could all of biology be reduced to DNA?
• molecular biology becomes the prestigious field, not people who actually study animals
• people were excited by the new tools
• biology can become more like physics and therefore higher prestige
• some scientists were eager to find mechanistic explanations--we can make science so complete we don't need God to explain things
  
• DNA research showed how closely related different species were: humans and chimpanzees share 98% of their DNA
  

• they explained the evolution of altruism by looking at evolution from the point of view of the gene, not from the point of view of the individual
• this was important because altruism was seen as something that makes us human that can't be explained by genetics
  
• Richard Dawkins stressed how random evolution is, there is no purpose or direction.  He liked this because he took a mechanistic view and wanted to discredit the idea that God works through evolution.
  
• Sociobiology--the theory that the specifics of social behavior are controlled by genetics--upset social scientists and feminists, and others who emphasized how society could be improved and how individuals could benefit from better environments
• they saw it as increasing the danger of our human biases creeping into science--females are seen as passive because of the biases of the experimenter
  
• p. 278 "Wilson described religion as 'an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.'"

other controversies in evolution also got public attention--there were so many social implications that a range of interpretations was possible even after the success of the modern synthesis

• Steven J. Gould as a paleontologist revived the theory of punctuated equilibrium (when conditions change evolution can move quickly)
• also wrote popular essays critical of genetic determinism
  
• more than a third of scientists gave God some role in evolution
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Evolution:

• change over time
• common descent
• natural selection of small variations
• Mendelian genetics is necessary for this to work

Genetics provides evidence for evolution but also shows it as more complicated

Review--themes of this book

• the debate about science and religion has changed very much over time
• evolution is not one thing, but quite different theories.  Evolution by what mechanism?
• yet evolution relates to political ideas about stability and change and so it keeps taking on larger social meanings (though those shift over time)
  
• scientists are often inspired or motivated by weird political beliefs (creativity is an odd thing) but the process of working out the details of a new idea over time works well to make scientific ideas more reliable--science is self-correcting
  
• popular acceptance of scientific ideas is very influenced by other aspects of culture (how was acceptance of Darwin's ideas over time different for scientists and for the general public?)
• among scientists--rise and fall and rise again of Darwinian evolution
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