EvoS in a crystal ball: Lessons from the EvoS 2012 Summit
EvoS Journal · 2014
On October 26, 2012, a one-day conference on the state of evolutionary studies in higher education was held at the State University of New York at New Paltz.Most of the participants had connections to the Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) Consortium that was created with the help of NSF funding during 2008-10, using programs previously established at Binghamton University and SUNY New Paltz as models (http://evostudies.org).The purpose of the EvoS Consortium is to expand evolutionary training beyond the biological sciences to include traditional human-related subjects that have not been confined to biology departments.Historically, evolutionary thought developed more or less continuously in the biological sciences but experienced a case of arrested development in relation to human affairs.A renewed effort to rethink human-related disciplines from an evolutionary perspective didn't gather steam until the late 20 th century.It is currently in full swing at the level of research and scholarship, but it is not yet reflected in the curriculum of most colleges and universities, where evolution is still taught primarily as a biological subject.An EvoS program attempts to solve this problem by creating a curriculum that can be taken by any student in parallel with his or her traditional major.In the process, faculty who are approaching their respective disciplines from an evolutionary perspective become organized into a single intellectual community, which provides a resource for faculty, especially in the human-related disciplines, who did not receive evolutionary training during their own higher education.The need for a campus-wide evolutionary studies program that reaches both students and faculty is documented by a survey of scientists who are the forefront of the human behavioral and brain sciences from an evolutionary perspective (Glass, Wilson, & Geher, 2012).Most received little formal evolutionary training and were forced to train themselves, often after they received their PhDs.They evaluated the