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Philosophy at King's College London
This week, our IB Philosophers attended the Annual Education Lecture at King's College London.
This year's guest speaker was Dr Steve Jones, Head of the Biology Department at UCL and the title of his lecture was "Against Educational Illiteracy: Why Creationism is Wrong and Evolution is Right".
All the IB Philosophy students found the occasion enjoyable and the lecture immensely thought-provoking.
As Hessie Coleman, one of our boarders in Lower 6, writes:
'We all had a great time, and learnt a lot. Did you know we share 50% of our DNA with bananas?
The speaker, Steve Jones, was a very interesting man to listen to, and the subject itself was almost surprisingly thought-provoking. With a title like "Why Creationism is Wrong and Evolution is Right", I admit that I was nervous about the obvious bias. However, he presented an engaging factual argument with lots of examples which could easily be related to.
For instance, the HIV/AIDS virus epidemic is topical to us humans today, and has been for 40 years. However a very similar virus (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus - SIV) has been present in apes for much longer. This demonstrates the theory of natural selection as those apes which had the genotypes giving them protection from it survived and bred, so that now while SIV is very common in apes they aren't affected by it. Similarly, African humans are more likely to have the protective genotype than us Europeans, as the virus has been active there for longer.
I definitely feel that he brought the concept of evolution a lot closer to home."
