I teach a class on ecology and evolution through the Bard Prison Initiative, and on a recent exam I asked, “What is the most fundamental driver of evolution?” This question was intended to be open-ended. I told the students that I could, in theory, accept numerous answers so long as their reply was backed up by sound scientific reasoning. One student’s clever response was “time.” In essence, he argued that no element of evolution or natural selection could be understood outside of time, that change was a function of time. He spent a whole page building this argument. It was as persuasive as it
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