I hadn't thought about my time working at The Charlatan (Carleton University's student newspaper) for a long time, but I recently had to write a short bio.
Carleton has a very well-regarded journalism program, but as a student in the Faculty of Science, I felt their coverage of science (what little there was) was poor. So, I went to see the managing editor to complain about it.
She asked me if I thought I could do better and, of course, I said yes. That first year, I ironically ended up writing mostly arts and entertainment stuff, but the following year (my senior year) they made me science and health editor. I was told I was the first non-journalism student to ever hold an editor's position at the paper.
They even gave me a certificate at the end of the year.
I don't remember a lot about what I did there, but I do remember one op-ed piece I wrote about an evolutionary concept known as "punctuated equilibrium."
This theory, proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in the early 1970s was a means of bridging the gap between Charles Darwin's phyletic gradualism and the abrupt appearance of new species we see in the fossil record.
Unlike the prevailing dogma that speciation occurs by the steady and gradual transformation of lineages, the adjunct theory of punctuated equilibrium posits species appear abruptly (geologically speaking) by some poorly understood mechanism or mechanisms.
Even 20 years later, when I wrote the piece, it was quite controversial, even within the scientific community. And it was, of course, fodder for the anti-evolutionists to try to discredit evolution with the old, 'you see, scientists can't even agree among themselves' trick.
Good science often raises more questions than it answers, but that doesn't mean scientists were (or are) divided on the fact of evolution. It may not be exactly as Darwin, or Eldredge and Gould, or even the founders of the synthetic theory of evolution — which is touted as the unifying theory — envisioned, but evolution itself is not controversial except to those whose beliefs are somehow threatened by it.
The headline of my piece was: "Heresy at the alter of Darwinism." I thought it was pretty clever at the time, particularly the play on alter/altar because punctuated equilibrium altered conventional Darwinism. In retrospect, it was perhaps too clever to be clever at all.
