Happy Birthday, Origin of Species

This has been a banner year for Charles Darwin: the 200th anniversary of his birth, and today the 150th anniversary of the book that changed the world.

I've been posting about Darwin and his work all year, but couldn't let the day go by without saluting (and later raising a glass to) the best literary/scientific book I've ever read.

Thanks, Mr. Darwin. And may the fruits of your labor continue to inspire scientists and lay folk alike.

Photo credit: HMS Beagle in the seaways of Tierra del Fuego, painted by Conrad Martens during the voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836), via Wikimedia Commons. I've already posted pictures of the book itself, and I love this painting, so thought it would be a fitting image for a birthday greeting.

Art and Evolution: More Darwiniana

Beloved Spouse was on his way to work today, listening to XM radio (my gift to him when he bought his "Galapagos Green" Element a few years back), when he heard Margaret Wertheim's TED lecture on hyperbolic geometry and her Crocheted Coral Reef project. He sent me the link, and I spent the next few minutes getting inspired to pick up my crochet hooks again.

The project itself is fantastic, and since she mentioned Darwin's bicentennial, I decided that the Cabinet needed a post on some of the art Darwin has inspired over the years, either directly or indirectly. The opening illustration is from Wertheim's photostream on Flickr, and I hope it's okay to use it. I posted here on Darwin back in February, in honor of his birthday, but I keep happening on things related to him and thought it time for another visit with Darwin in Cyberspace--so Wertheim's amazing project offered an excuse to return to the topic.

Another notable, if not nearly so ambitious, project is Jessica Polka's wonderful Voyage of the Beagle finger puppets. She also crochets natural objects, and when I saw the TED video on the Coral Reef effort, I immediately thought of her blog, and her recent contribution to the world of Darwiniana.

Last spring I started reading Robert Charles Wilson's 1998 novel, Darwinia, but had to stop because it was a bit too intense for someone on the threshold of heart surgery. I finally finished it this summer (and went on to read The Harvest and Mysterium) and recommend it enthusiastically. It combines some of my favorite elements of speculative fiction: true alienness and good science. His stories frequently involve dei ex machina that spark the fictional equivalent of punctuated equilibrium, forcing characters to adapt precipitously to new situations.

While I was looking for a link to Wilson's book, I came across a game by the same name, which might be interesting if you're a video gamer. This one looks mildly entertaining (at least as much fun as shooting down snaking lines of scarabs, which is what I do in my off moments), although only marginally involved with Darwinian processes; it does, however, seem to resemble Wilson's scenarios in the sense of requiring a kind of evolve-on-a-dime-or-die situation.

Yet another contribution to the cabinet of Darwinian curiosities, combining media arts, science, and literature, is the amazing new addition to English Heritage's website devoted to Down House, Darwin's home: "Explore the manuscripts" includes entire virtual copies of four of Darwin's field notebooks, plus highlights from the Beagle voyage notes. I posted about the software that makes this possible yesterday on the Owl of Athena, but wanted to mention the site here, because the ability to view these notebooks in as much detail as the "Turning the Pages" application allows is just priceless for Darwin devotees.

If I haven't already mentioned this, I'm remiss--but the Darwin Online site provides the texts of everything he published, plus a list of supplementary works that include Emma Darwin's Recipe Book (with the recipe for boiling rice in her husband's hand). The technology isn't as sexy as Turning the Pages, but it still makes it possible to read exactly what Darwin wrote.

Finally, I'd like to mention a treat I bought myself when I had a 40% off one item coupon at Borders: The Beagle Letters, edited by Frederick Burkhardt--a marvellous volume illustrated with watercolor sketches and pencil drawings by Conrad Martens, who was for a time Darwin's fellow passenger. The book's publication is a product of the Darwin Correspondence Project, another noteworthy effort to get Darwin's works online--this one focusing on the full texts of more than 5000 letters.

Although I'm not a great fan of biographies, I love to read other people's mail, at least when the correspondence is as lively and as interesting as Darwin's. One gets a better sense of the person in a letter, and since nobody much writes them anymore, epistolary insights into the characters of great writers and scientists may be fewer in the future.

Before the year is out I expect I'll come across more to add to this list, but I do have to get back to work. As the rain drips off of every surface outside my window, though, sifting through the web for things Darwinian provides a nice respite from gloom and chill.

Image credit: Hyperbolic crochet corals and anemones with sea slug by Marianne Midelburg. Photo © The Institute For Figuring (by Alyssa Gorelick). Downloaded from Margaret Wertheim's Photostream on Flickr.

A Celebration of Darwiniana

Charles Darwin was a kind of human glacier, moving slowly through human scientific life, raising lateral moraines alongside the flow, scooping up ideas along the way and pushing them ahead, leaving the occasional drumlin. I could go on with this silly metaphor (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see this page on glacial terminology), but I'm a fan of Pleistocene geology and once had to memorize all this stuff. It is kind of apt, though, even though it's not biological.

In the accumulation zone, the cirque, lies Darwin's birth in Shropshire, England, on 12 February 1809. It includes the Beagle and Edinburgh University and Cambridge and Down House, where Darwin did most of his work. The glacier itself, flowing forth over the intellectual landscape, incorporating some ideas, grinding others down, consists of everything that's happened since. It includes all the controversies, the affirmations, and the ancillary work by more-or-less contemporaries like Gregor Mendel and Ernst Haeckel, and modern biologists like E. O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, and Stephen Jay Gould. He influenced more theologically oriented thinkers like the philosopher Henri Bergson and priest-paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, and has remained a controversial figure among other religious folks less capable of reconciling doctrine with scientific evidence.

What's really astonishing about Darwin is how well his original ideas hold up, despite the fact that there was, at the time, no inkling of biology to come: RNA, DNA, the double helix, gene transfer, punctuated equilibrium. Everything that gets done in modern biology starts in Darwin's cirque and flows outward. The beauty of science is that it changes, builds--evolves--and grows as people explore ideas. Theory is about good answers based on good evidence: the best picture we can draw from what we know at the moment. But the power of Darwin's model, even though challenged over and over again, has stood its ground and provided us with a basis on which to enlarge our picture of the world. Even recent news about the shape of Darwin's tree isn't a negation; it's an affirmation that the guy had it fundamentally right, two hundred years ago.

This post, to celebrate this momentous birthday, is a wunderkammer of cool stuff related to Darwin and available on the web. I only have a couple of hours to work on this today, so I can't pore through the vast amount of information that exists. But here are some good links to blogs and websites to begin your celebration, followed by my choices of favorite images of Darwiniana:

Scientific American's Darwin Day Special podcast

David Leff's all-encompassing Darwin information page

Larry Moran's blog, Sandwalk: Strolling with a Skeptical Biochemist. Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto.

The Biologista's tribute to Darwin

Pharyngula's Happy Darwin Day post. P.Z. Myers is a biologist and an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris

Darwin's Canopy: Art Inspired by Evolution, from the New Scientist online. The site also has a feature on Darwin's impact: Darwin 200. The site's blog, Short Sharp Science, even includes a post by Australasian Editor, Rachel Nowak, called Eating my way through four billion years of evolution.

And now for some pictures:

Darwin's Thinking Path, also known as the Sand Walk--where he would walk and muse; would that we all had such a place to do our thinking.

Darwin's first "tree of life." It's a testament to scientific uncertainty (and its lack of belief in religious terms) that he writes "I think" at the top. That's just it: scientists think.

Ernst Haeckel's "Pedigree of Man" based on Darwin's description in The Origin of Species. The Opening pages of the 1859 first edition of Origin appear below (the link above is to the 6th edition, which corrects mistakes from earlier ones):


Darwin's finches, discovered on various of the Galapagos Islands, each with beaks and other anatomical features adapted to its peculiar circumstances, helped his ideas coalesce into coherent theory:

Here's a plan and cross-section of the ship, HMS Beagle, on which Darwin sailed into history:

There are more pictures where these came from, and myriad editions of the book. Read it if you haven't already; there's even an illustrated version with nice pictures--and the readability of the text still amazes me. The good thing about not having a huge pre-existing vocabulary from which to draw is that Darwin had to write in language everyone could understand. We no longer commonly have as many words in our everyday vocabulary--but at least you won't need a scientific dictionary.

Happy birthday, Mr. Darwin. And thanks for all the fish.

Image credits: all images on the page are from the Wikipedia article on Darwin, the Beagle, on Darwin's Tree of Life, or from Wikimedia Commons.