It's Charles Darwin's 200th birthday today. An email from my friend Rob reminded me and brought me a link to a website made by a mutual friend, Dan Johnson, to celebrate the occasion. Dan sits in the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Grassland Ecosystems at the University of Lethbridge. He is the grasshopper biologist I write about in a chapter of Grass, Sky, Song. Check out his site and learn a little about Charles. Amazing to consider he was only 22 when he made that trip in the Beagle. Meanwhile, Darwin's Galapagos Islands are in trouble. Here is an article on the Galapagos 200 years after Darwin, from today's CBCnews.ca website.
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Trevor,
ReplyDeleteI first read 'Voyage of the Beagle' in later high school while on one of those summer vacations in which my father would drive from morning-til-night for days on end with no potty breaks. I think of that experience as a metaphore for much of how I first came to (not) experience life in general. Darwin's experiences prevailed...and I evolved!
Another interesting piece on Darwin appears in the Feb 2009 National Geographic.
ReplyDeletehttp://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/02/darwin-legacy/ridley-text
I particularly enjoyed the information about the Galapagos finches and how scientists now recognize their ability to rapidly but subtly evolve (i.e. over a 20-30 year period) to face new conditions.