La Jornada: “The theory of evolution, key to understanding the world around us”: Rosaura Ruiz

In Mexico, schools should be encouraged to “teach not just that there is evolution, and not the creation of life on the planet, but how it happens,” says Dr. Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, head of the Secretary of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti), considering that understanding this process is the simplest and most enjoyable way to explain how scientific knowledge is constructed and the way in which we can understand the world.

In interview with The Daythe prominent biologist, professor-researcher, recognized for her studies in evolutionary theories, history and philosophy of science, points out that, in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Education (SEP), they are working to strengthen this field in the basic learning of children and adolescents.

“It is important that they know how science works, how it explains the world, how it works with observations, experiments and analysis. And that is the difference between science and other ways of thinking,” he says.

We are one species

He emphasizes that although it is not the only form of knowledge, since there are philosophy, art and literature, among other forms of knowledge, “science is required to have evidence. And we have evidence that there is evolution.”

–Currently, what is the impact of the theory of the evolution of species?

–What evolutionism marks is a clear example of what science is. And it is an explanation, which can be modified or even refuted in the long run, but which presents us with the explanation of natural or social phenomena.

“Today we know, as Charles Darwin himself recognized, that all human beings are a single species, that we all have equal value and are equal. Even, with the advance of genetics, it was identified that as human beings we share 60 percent of our DNA with bananas, and even 98.8 percent with chimpanzees, but that small numerical difference is very large, because culturally we are very different. And we have an enormous responsibility in the care of all of nature, by having the ability to think, to reason, to do science and generate knowledge”.

Doctor in biology, first woman to preside over the Mexican Academy of Sciences, former director of the Faculty of Sciences and pioneer in the study of evolutionism in Mexico, Ruiz Gutiérrez recognizes that the formation of living beings and the human species, as well as the discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun, generated enormous resistance in the societies of her time, when confronting religion in their conception of both the universe and life on the planet.

The first to propose an explanation of biological evolution, he points out, was the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who even faced censure from Napoleon Bonaparte and most of his contemporaries.

But it was the British naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), who attended the universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, who managed to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection, after meticulous observation work, during the legendary voyage of the HMS Beaglethe most modern ship in the British Navy, in which it will arrive, among other places, to the Galapagos Islands.

Upon his return from this prolonged expedition, which lasted five years, Ruiz Gutiérrez highlights, the British naturalist is still a fixist, that is, he maintains the belief that species were created and remained immutable.

“He accepts that there was a creation, but Darwin wants to understand how it was. Even in his diaries he expresses doubts, because if there was a creation, then why there are not certain species in the Galapagos, he questions,” adds the specialist.

When he returned to England after his trip, Darwin began to study why evolution “is not seen, but he does observe many facts that contradict this vision of creation.”

He begins to intuit things, “and he realizes that the islands were populated by organisms that came from the American continent. They did not create them, but rather they migrated and dispersed. They evolve in a separate way, and therefore, the species become differentiated.”

Darwin also carries out an exhaustive investigation of new theories in various fields of knowledge, including economics, through the thought of Thomas Malthus, who talks about how populations grow rapidly and resources are insufficient, that is, as the population is greater than the resources, there is competition between species, but above all, and this is of great interest to Darwin, there is competition within the species, which is the key to evolution, points out Ruiz Gutiérrez.

Fight for existence

And there she understands that there is a fight for existence, explains the specialist, but she also recognizes the variability that exists even within species, and these differences can generate a different adaptation. And then he gathered, around 1838, all these observations with which he would build the bases for his theory.

His fundamental work, The origin of species through natural selectionwas published in November 1859, which generated “a tremendous shock. They questioned him a lot, even his wife, Emma Darwin, who always supported his work, warned him that he would go to hell for supporting these ideas,” adds the head of Secihti.

And today, 165 years after its publication, the theory of evolution is key to understanding the world around us, and hence the importance, says Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, that girls, boys and adolescents know it and understand the process of how one of the theories is built, “not only the most important in biology, but in all of science, because it explains to us where we come from and how we evolve on the planet.”