The Dispersal of Darwin
On Charles Darwin, Evolution, and the History of ScienceToronto film festival picks Darwin drama Creation as opener
From CBC:
The world premiere of Creation, a drama about evolution theorist Charles Darwin starring married actors Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, has nabbed the opening night slot at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Organizers announced their selection of the British film on Tuesday morning, as well as 22 more additions to its gala and special presentations lineups.
“We have traditionally opened with a Canadian film, but this year we chose to go a different route. We fell in love with this movie and this is the one, we felt, really sets the tone for the kinds of conversations we hope will happen around the films at the festival,” TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey told reporters on Tuesday.
He added that the “tension between faith and reason” seen in Jon Amiel’s film Creation — which follows Darwin as he struggles with the views of his deeply religious wife and his world-changing theories — is also emerging in other films programmers have selected.
“This theme of that eternal conflict between faith and reason does seem to be emerging from different parts of the world, in different kinds of films: documentaries, fiction films, big films, small films,” Bailey said.
Michael Barton’s first pint
At the Eagle Pub (of Watson & Crick fame) in Cambridge, England
DoD in Cambridge
I arrived in Cambridge, England today. Saturday and Sunday will see me at the Darwin in the Field conference at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. Today, I walked around, saw Darwin posters/ads everywhere, met up with Karen from The HMS Beagle Project (she was in town for the festival) and checked out a Darwin-art exhibit, as well as the very nice Young Darwin sculpture at Christ’s College. Long day, I am tired, and I have a little work to do on my paper in the morning (I present on Sunday).
Oh, Karen and I met Daniel Dennett! We were walking around King’s College and there he was! A picture with Dennett and many more to come, probably Sunday night or Monday night.
And on Monday I get the pleasure of exploring Cambridge and many Darwin exhibits with Richard Carter, the chap part responsible for Darwin being on UK currency.
One more thing: this evening I saw, and thoroughly enjoyed, the play Re:Design. Learn more about it here.
ARTICLE: “Evolution Blogging” by Adam M. Goldstein
From the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach is an article by Adam M. Goldstein about blogs that discuss evolution [PDF]. The abstract:
A weblog (“blog”) is an publication on the WorldWideWeb in which brief entries are displayed in date order, much like a diary or journal. I describe the general characteristics of blogs, contrasting blogs with other of WWW formats for self-publishing. I describe four categories for blogs about evolutionary biology: “professional,” “amateur,” “apostolic,” and “imaginative.” I also discuss blog networks. I identify paradigms of each category. Throughout, I aim to illuminate blogs about evolutionary biology from the point of view of a user looking for information about the topic. I conclude that blogs are not the best type of source for systematic and authoritative information about evolution, and that they are best used by the information-seeker as a way of identifying what issues are of interest in the community of evolutionists and for generating research leads or fresh insights on one’s own work.
Goldstein lists/describes many evolution blogs and separates them in the following categories: professional, instructive amateur, organization and project, apostolic, imaginative, and networks. Included are some blogs with which I am familiar (Pharyngula, The Loom, The Flying Trilobite, the Beagle Project blog), and others not so much. But the list is missing The Dispersal of Darwin! Oh well.
Seeking a PDF
PDF rec’d – thanks Ryan!
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I need to get this article today!
http://www.eupjournals.com/doi/abs/10.3366/anh.2003.30.1.118
If anyone can help, send it to darwinsbulldog AT gmail DOT com. Thanks!
Dinosaur Playground, Bozeman, Montana
More pics here. Oh, and Happy Fourth of July! Looks like a storm is coming here in Bozeman…
LECTURE: Darwin complicit in manipulating photos
From BSHS:
Darwin complicit in manipulating photos
02 July 2009 — 02 July 2009 British Society for the History of ScienceLocation: Stamford Hall
Venue: University of Leicester
Opening hours: 13.30-15.00When Darwin came to publish The Expression of the Emotions in 1872, he employed images made by five photographers to illustrate the wide variation in human facial expressions. A new study of the way that two of these photographers operated reveals the extent to which Darwin’s photographs were manipulated.
The photographic image can be seen both as a mirror of reality and a construction of reality. But in the nineteenth century, few people appreciated the subtle ways in which the photographer, the subject and the camera itself could interfere with the representation of reality.
For scientists like Charles Darwin, the photographic image promised unprecedented objectivity, apparently removing the subjectivity of the photographer from the equation altogether. And when it came to preparing his book on The Expression of the Emotions, published in 1872, Darwin yielded to this promise.
The two photographers analyzed here had rather different backgrounds: French physician and physiologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne and Swedish-born artistic photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander. But both of them manipulated the construction of the images to give Darwin what he needed for his theorizations, says Tatiana C. Gonçalves of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London and the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil.
In spite of his scientific training, Duchenne got his subjects to pull facial movements that did not necessarily correspond to real expressions, says Gonçalves. And in order to capture the quick movements that Darwin wanted, Rejlander had to fake situations to photograph, she says. Gonçalves will present her full argument on Thursday 2 July at the annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester, UK.
“The images made by these two photographers offers an excellent case-study for investigating the general assumptions, intrinsic characteristics and particularities of the photographic medium as it was used in late nineteenth-century science,” concludes Gonçalves.
