National Geographic has a cover article on Darwin for Februrary 2009(by
David Quammen):
Quote:
Darwin's First Clues — National Geographic Magazine
Darwin's First Clues
He was inspired by fossils of armadillos and sloths.
The journey of young Charles Darwin aboard His Majesty's Ship Beagle, during the years 1831-36, is one of the best known and most neatly mythologized episodes in the history of science. As the legend goes, Darwin sailed as ship's naturalist on the Beagle, visited the Galápagos archipelago in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and there beheld giant tortoises and finches. The finches, many species of them, were distinguishable by differently shaped beaks, suggesting adaptations to particular diets. The tortoises, island by island, carried differently shaped shells.
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Matt Ridley published an excellent celebration of Darwin's idea in the spectator earlier this month:
Quote:
The natural order of things | The Spectator
Matt Ridley says that Darwinian selection explains the appearance of seemingly ‘designed’ complexity throughout the world — not just in biology but in the economy, technology and the arts
Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago next month, has spent the 150 years since he published The Origin of Species fighting for the idea of common descent. Though physically dead, he is still doing battle for the notion that chimps are your cousins and cauliflowers your kin. It is a sufficiently weird concept to keep Darwin relevant, revered and resented in equal measure. But in some ways it is less radical and topical than his other, more philosophical legacy: that order can generate itself, that the living world is a ‘bottom-up’ place. On the internet, Darwinian unordained order is now ubiquitous as never before..
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Also, another Darwin article by Ridley in National Geographic:
Quote:
Modern Darwins — National Geographic Magazine
Modern Darwins
The father of evolution would be thrilled to see the science his theory has inspired.
Just two weeks before he died, Charles Darwin wrote a short paper about a tiny clam found clamped to the leg of a water beetle in a pond in the English Midlands. It was his last publication. The man who sent him the beetle was a young shoemaker and amateur naturalist named Walter Drawbridge Crick. The shoemaker eventually married and had a son named Harry, who himself had a son named Francis. In 1953, Francis Crick, together with a young American named James Watson, would make a discovery that has led inexorably to the triumphant vindication of almost everything Darwin deduced about evolution.
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And this is a must for all Darwin fans out there, Richard Dawkins'
award winning documentary miniseries, "The Genius of Charles Darwin":
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
