Making Meaning in an Evolutionary World

This Honors FIG is built around integrating historical, philosophical, and scientific examinations of evolution – a critical topic for science and non-science students alike, and one that takes on special significance as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The FIG seminar will look at how educated people make meaning of the world in the new context of evolution after Darwin. The course will consider how scientist, philosophers, and other culture-makers in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries integrated evolution into their views of humanity: what were the consequences of evolution for understanding the sources of morality, the nature of mind, and the apprehension of beauty? In Geology 110, Evolution and Extinction, students will learn about contemporary evolutionary theory, while in Philosophy 101 students will explore issues related to the theory of knowledge as well as issues connected to ethics and philosophy of religion. Students will examine whether it makes sense to think that human beings have Free Will if their behavior is a part of the natural, causal order.