Harvey Jordan Award Acceptance Speech -- 2009 Awards Convocation

The Harvey Jordan Award is given annually to the top graduating senior in the College of Engineering--the equivalent to a valedictorian for the senior class. This year's speech by Luke Edelman was very well received, and is being posted upon request of several individuals who attended the event.

Since Charles Darwin first published his theory of natural selection, biologists have been searching for the rules that describe how generations inherit traits from those before them. With the discovery of DNA, scientists thought the matter was resolved: this elegant molecule encodes all of the information that composes life; it is passed from parent to child, and sets forth the kinds of creatures we each grow into.
 
It turns out that this genetic hypothesis--that we are products of nature, and that nature is in our genes--is not fully true. In fact, biologists are discovering that equally important in determining who we become is everything outside of our genes--our environment, our culture, our behavior. Our fate is not decreed by a single unchanging molecule. Rather, we are products of a complex physical and experiential milieu, with our world in dialogue with our genes.
 
This is a powerful idea, because while we cannot change our genes, we can change our behavior. This is also powerful because never before have our institutions and our culture been more dynamic, open, and malleable. The DNA of the broader human project, its tribes and traditions, has never been through more rapid evolution. Students of the modern world are better equipped than ever to study this swiftly changing genetics of everything: science, industry, technology, culture. And with this study, more able to engineer a better planet that the generation next will inherit.
 
The student graduating college today experienced Google and YouTube and Twitter. We saw cloning and the sequencing of the human genome. Space stations and solar power and hybrid cars and I-pods. The remarkable thing is that these things are unremarkable- as children we grew up accustomed to this tempo of advancement and discovery. We have weaved this frenetic and ceaseless change into our worldview and moral framework. To us, what is familiar is the novel; what is strange is things standing still.
 
Students today welcome different people, traditions, and ideas as much as we do novel technologies. We sample experiences and ideas with little deterrence from geographic or cultural boundaries. We harbor no fear of the unknown or unfamiliar or the different. We see more of the world, more diversity of experience and thought. And this too is integrated into our understanding of the human condition: we embrace the great rugged variety of America and the Earth. We embrace friends of widely disparate backgrounds and orientations, because we believe that good and wisdom brook no demographic border. We have been conditioned by unavoidable complexity in our daily lives to thrive in a convoluted, heterogeneous world.
 
This evolutionary trajectory towards flexibility is a good and necessary adaptation. In this era of natural selection’s dark and final product, we must be prepared for tumult. Extinction is perhaps a basic precondition of an evolving world. For surely, we observe today a time of rapid and widespread extinction--of institutions, of ideas. We witness companies consumed by those larger and more powerful. Systems of economic and political thought out-competed for resources. Governments, local and national; beliefs, personal and societal, subject to evolutionary forces greater than their own. Biologists tell us that many times more species have gone extinct than inhabit the world today. We wonder how to abide this violent turnover, this unending battle that begets so many victims. We wonder whether we too might one day be victims.
 
But biologists also tell us that from extinction, new opportunities are created for growth and development. New opportunities that enable a better ecosystem, a better version of the tree of life. As we enter the quote "real" world, we should dare to recognize this, and seize the vast open potential before us. We possess the tools--technological, and academic. We hold the intellectual curiosity and personal engagement. The global and historical awareness. We will pioneer new science and technology and culture. We will improve old institutions, and we will start new ones. We will forge grand new paradigms, from engineering to biology to business. We envision a peaceful and prosperous future, driven ever forwards by technical innovation and global partnership.
 
Of course, we will all know hardship. But we will persevere. Our embrace of evolving DNA, in ourselves and in our world, invites limitless possibility.
 
Thank you.
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Writer: Lucas Edelman (BS 2009, Bioengineering). Speech is posted with his permission.