evolutionary biology

“We started just kind of playing around with what social and cultural processes haven’t been talked about,” eventually focusing on religion, politics and war because of their persistent yet underexamined impacts on evolutionary biology, particularly in cities, where cultural values and built environments are densely concentrated.

From here on out, it’s quite possible that parents who don’t want their kids learning about those topics could say: “Sorry, they can’t participate in this lesson on the Civil War because our religious beliefs tell us that the South should have won. They can’t learn this lesson about evolutionary biology because we think Darwin was the devil and evolution is false.”

How long will it be until a major university bans the teaching of evolutionary biology, acting in the same spirit as German universities under Hitler, which proscribed “Jewish physics”?

This is an adaptation — in evolutionary biology, a trait that arose due to natural selection.

That’s unsurprising, given its scientific pedigree: Church is a prominent geneticist, and the company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, is a renowned biologist and winner of a MacArthur “genius” award who taught evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz before moving to Colossal.