For me, the course was ultimately about the growth of human
knowledge about the universe around us.
The daily expansion of that knowledge was demonstrated by the
discussions of the discoveries by the MSL Rover on Mars. The class featured hands- on participation in
observing and describing rocks on a field trip around campus and also by the
collection of our hair samples for isotopic analysis. From that data, students were required to
create a hypothesis concerning “you are what you eat.”
Also stressed was the importance of the continued
questioning of scientific hypotheses by identifying past hypotheses that took
many years before general acceptance (such as continental drift) or a
hypothesis that was recently created (such as snowball earth) which is now
doubted by many. A possible flaw in the
most important biological hypothesis in history, evolution, was identified by
its creator, Charles Darwin. That
possible flaw was eventually resolved by technical advances in microscopes, but
Darwin had the intellectual honesty to first raise the question himself.
As someone whose last previous college course in science was
during the Lyndon Johnson administration, I sometimes looked around at the
young students and wondered what they would remember 45 years from now about
Geology 124. My bet would be that they
will remember a lot.
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