Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities

Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.

The Story of Evolution / The Evolution of Stories - Spring, 2004
Paul Grobstein

Is There Life on Mars?
A Story About ...
A Contemporary Chapter of a Story in Progress

Early chapters

Pluralism (atomism, Leucippus, Democritus (470-400 B.C.), Epicurus, Lucretius):
Principles of Mediocrity, of Uniformity, of Plenitude

Anti-Pluralism


  • Stories start in experience
  • Stories can be about about things one doesn't know, haven't experienced
  • Different stories about same thing
  • Stories relate to/influenced by other stories

Middle chapters

Begins with Aristotle but ... Geocentric to heliocentric world view reflecting in part new kinds of experiences

  • The ability to make new kinds of observations may (or may not) lead to entirely new stories.
  • New kinds of observations at a minimum require new versions of older stories ... and make predictions that may become testable by new observations.
  • There is some "inertia" to story types.

Contemporary and In Progress Chapters

  • Stories can motivate new ways of observing that make the previously unobservable observable
  • New observations suggest new stories
  • Story telling is a never-ending process?

Mars: The Story in Microcosm

Percival Lowell, Mars, 1895 Viking I Orbiter, 1980
Mariner 4,6,7,9 (1965-1971) orbiters

Viking 1,2 (1976) orbiters and landers

Global Surveyor (1996)

Pathfinder (1997) lander and rover


Mars Exploration Rover (2004, current and 24 January, 9 pm)

  • "Smaller" stories are influenced by and influence "bigger stories"
  • Stories always derive from observations as well as from other stories, and contain elements of the as yet to be observed?
  • Stories both influence and are constrained by observations?
  • Stories both influence and are constrained by other stories?
  • There are always multiple possible stories?
  • Stories evolve?

Life on Mars ... elsewhere in the universe ... does it matter?


For Further Exploring/Story-Telling

William Sheehan, The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery, University of Arizona Press, 1996
Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Steven J. Dick, The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Michael J. Crowe, "A History of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate." Zygon 1997, 32: 147-162

The Plurality of Worlds, from the Norton Anthology of English Literature
SETI's Serendip
Mars: Life Pinned on Viking Horns?, from Astrobiology Magazine
Mars, from NASA
Mars Links, from Oklahoma Baptist University




| Course Home Page | Forum | Science in Culture | Serendip Home |

Send us your comments at Serendip

© by Serendip 1994- - Last Modified: Wednesday, 02-May-2018 10:51:49 CDT