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FACULTY | OUTSIDE THE BOX

Darwin’s Bulldog
Lifelong evolutionist and Biology Professor Anne Houde takes a surprising stand on teaching intelligent design.

By Lindsay Beller

Associate Professor of Biology Anne Houde, who studies the evolution of guppies, plans to discuss intelligent design in her First-Year Studies class next fall. (Photo by Lindsay Beller)

While recovering from a horse riding accident during her childhood, Associate Professor of Biology Anne Houde received a gift from her mother that would set her career as an evolutionary biologist in motion. The present was a field guide to birds, and although Houde was already interested in the creatures that flew outside her family’s summer Vermont home, she now had a way to identify them. She particularly liked the colorful plumages of warblers which brought the pictures of the migrating songbird in her book to life.

So when, as a high school student, she read E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, the groundbreaking text that launched the field of behavioral ecology by positing that animal and human behavior evolves, the self-proclaimed “serious math geek” found the ideal way to combine a love for mathematics and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which hypothesized that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor and has evolved through natural selection and random mutation. She delighted in using math to figure out, for example, how many eggs a bird should lay to ensure evolutionary success.

Like Darwin, she began to form hypotheses and run tests to determine their validity. Her focus on evolution and birds continued as a PhD student until disease wiped out the entire colony of terns under her observation. She decided that guppies, with their shorter life span, were an easier organism to examine, completed her PhD on these fish, and joined Lake Forest College in 1993.

Her 1997 book Sex, Color, and Mate Choice in Guppies, along with numerous published articles, has looked at how mate choice by females plays a role in evolution and added to understanding about why some animals are colorful. In June, Houde was a co-author on a study published in Nature, one of the premiere science journals, which found evolution of guppy colors resulted from specific ways in which rare types of guppies are favored over common types.

Despite a personal and academic life spent devoted to evolution, Houde plans to teach first-year students in the fall about intelligent design, a controversial theory that claims Darwin got it all wrong, in a First-Year Studies course called Evolution, Adaptation, and the Origin of Species next fall. Intelligent design argues that life on Earth is so complex that an intelligent being must have created it.

Amid a recent nationwide debate over whether a discussion of intelligent design belongs in the classroom—national attention to the issue was spurred by a recent court case and subsequent decision by a federal judge who ruled that mandating intelligent design in a science curriculum violates the constitutional separation of church and state—Houde  believes it does belong in her classroom. 

While others argue that it doesn’t deserve a moment of class time, Houde feels it is an effective way to educate students on the different ways people come by their beliefs. “I think it’s important to talk about intelligent design and talk about its standing as a belief,” says Houde from her office, where her friendly Portuguese waterdog, Willie, is a fixture on the couch. “It’s a belief not based in science. It’s a belief in religion. Talking about it will help students understand what science is.”

She hopes the move will not only improve the students’ critical thinking skills as they explore their own and others’ belief systems, but leave them with the conclusion that intelligent design has no factual basis. 

Decrying the greater “lack of public understanding” of the issue, Houde is taking her pro-evolution message beyond the classroom. In addition to her students, she wants the public to know more. “A lot of people have strong opinions but very little knowledge about evolution,” she says. “Even people who feel like they have no religious beliefs can’t stand up and argue why evolution is right.”

One way she has worked to change public opinion is through a local listserv called “Darwin’s Bulldogs,” a group of like-minded teachers and scientists who write letters to newspapers in response to articles about the debate. The group’s name refers to the moniker bestowed on Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientist who championed the theory of evolution when Darwin himself shied away from the controversy sparked after his book The Origin of Species came out in 1859. So far, Houde has seen one of her letters published in the Daily Herald, a daily newspaper that serves Chicago’s north suburbs, while other members have been published in the Chicago Tribune.

While Houde believes all of these efforts and the November court decision have helped promote understanding of evolution, she will continue to ask questions about the evolution of guppies and test her hypotheses as scientists have done since before Darwin’s time. She hopes to begin work on a second book during a sabbatical next spring that will tackle how sexual behavior and mate choice can lead to the evolution of a new species. But while her research continues to focus on the fish, Houde still loves to take out a pair of binoculars, particularly once classes are over in May, and look for warblers who rest in the tree tops on their way to Canada.

Lindsay Beller is the editor of Spectrum.