As I am sure you can tell, I had the opportunity to visit Darwin’s home and laboratory for forty years, Down House, while I was in London. See more pictures here. The weather was to be rainy that day, but luckily the clouds broke and sunshine spilled forth. Did I enjoy the visit? What do you think?
I finally saw Creation, on Wednesday evening in London. I really enjoyed the flick, and certain aspects stuck out to me as great. Other parts did not, but I am going to sit on it a while before writing a full review. I want to wait until I can see it again, probably at home in December. But I urge you, don’t wait for my thoughts, go see it yourself when you are able.
I am in London right now, on a research trip to the Royal Institution (I posted about this on Transcribing Tyndall yesterday). The Linnean Society is just around the corner from the RI, so on my lunch break today I popped in for my daily dose of Darwin. The Linnean Society is, of course, where Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers on natural selection were presented on July 1, 1858. The current location of the Linnean Society is not where it stood in 1858. It used to be in the part of Burlington House that now houses the Royal Academy of Arts. So, in the meeting room of the current location there are portraits of Darwin, Wallace, and other important naturalists, and in the Academy of Arts you can go to the room that used to be the meeting room, know what happened there, and check out a commemorative plaque. Pictures of both locations can be had here.
A very cool scuplture of Linneaus by Anthony Smith (who did the young Darwin statue in Cambridge):
Award-winning cultural historian Iain McCalman tells the stories of Charles Darwin and his most vocal supporters and colleagues: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Beginning with the somber morning of April 26, 1882—the day of Darwin’s funeral—Darwin’s Armada steps back in time and recounts the lives and scientific discoveries of each of these explorers. The four amateur naturalists voyaged separately from Britain to the southern hemisphere in search of adventure and scientific fame. From Darwin’s inaugural trip on the Beagle in 1835 through Wallace’s exploits in the Amazon and, later, Malaysia in the 1840s and 1850s, each man independently made discoveries that led him to embrace Darwin’s groundbreaking theory of evolution. This book reveals the untold story of Darwin’s greatest supporters who, during his life, campaigned passionately in the war of ideas over evolution and who lived on to extend and advance the scope of his work.
Strange as it may seem, the long wake of the tiny HMS Beagle stretches from the nineteenth century into the future of our globe. Charles Darwin spent only three months in Australia, but Australasia and the Pacific contributed to his evolutionary thinking in a variety of ways. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of On the Origin of Species the internationally acclaimed authors of In the Wake of the Beagle provide new insights into the world of collecting, surveying and cross-cultural exchange in the antipodes in the age of Darwin. They explore the groundbreaking work of Darwin and his contemporaries Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Wallace, examine the complex trading relationships of the region’s daring voyagers, and take a very modern look at today’s cutting-edge scientific research, at a time when global warming has raised the stakes to an unprecedented level.
A 3 x 1hour drama-documentary TV series about how the Southern Hemisphere gave birth to the most controversial idea in science: evolution by means of natural selection. Interweaving dramatic reconstruction with documentary actuality and moving between the 19th century and the 21st, this series is the story of how Charles Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’ developed during his epic voyage through South America, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and how that idea forever transformed society and science. A series to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’.
The film premieres at the University of British Columbia later this month, and airs on Australia’s ABC1 November 8th (ep. 1: Origins), 15th (ep. 2: Evolutions), and 22nd (ep. 3: Publish and Be Damned). An extended trailer:
Notice in the trailer a few historians or philosophers of science (Jim Moore, Michael Ruse, and Janet Browne), Richard Dawkins, and David Suzuki.
"Nature, like a careful gardener, thus takes her seeds from a bed of a particular nature, and drops them in another equally fitted for them."
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
![Darwin and Wallace at the [old] Linnean Society](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2432/4050410779_13f823ba1a_m.jpg "Darwin and Wallace at the [old] Linnean Society")
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