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A famous early example of natural selection in action was actually discovered right here in Providence by a Brown professor, Hermon Carey Bumpus. Passing by the Atheneum (just a few blocks from here on Benefit Street) after a severe blizzard in January 1898, Professor Bumpus found a flock of English house sparrows that had been knocked down by the storm. A typical scientist, he picked them all up and took them back to his lab, where some revived and some didn’t. When he measured them he discovered that the living were morphologically different from the dead. That was a case of natural selection acting in a single night!

Some of those experiments have already produced results — such as the rapid, pervasive, and dangerous evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

And a Gallup poll on Darwin’s birthday this February showed that only 39 percent of the American public overall “believes” in the theory of evolution.