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2009 Sees The 200th Anniversary Of The Birth Of Charles Darwin

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Bianca
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« Reply #15 on: February 08, 2009, 12:54:30 pm »




             








                                               Darwin at 200: a family celebration



As the 200th birthday of the pioneering naturalist nears, his great-great-grandchild, the poet Ruth Padel, urges us to see her forebear as an extraordinary human being as well as the man who gave us the theory
of evolution



Friday,
12 December 2008
CARLOS JASSO
the Independent.co.uk

'I used to like to hear my father admire the beauty of a flower," wrote Charles Darwin's son Francis, who helped Charles with botany experiments that led to the discovery of the first plant hormone, auxin.


"It was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself – a personal love for its delicate form and colour. I remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in. This sounds sentimental but it was the same simple admiration a child might have. It ran through all his relation to natural things: a most keen feeling of their aliveness.!"


Why celebrate the 200th birthday of a great scientist who touched flowers like a child? I am no scientist, but I am among Charles Darwin's enormous number of great-great-grandchildren and, to me, his overwhelming feature is his humanity. In his thousands of letters, available online now on www.darwinproject.ac.uk, you see everywhere his energetic curiosity about every life form, and his wonder at all complexity, which I suspect that his granddaughter, my grandmother Nora Barlow, then transmitted both to my mother and to all of us children.


Translated into science, this wondering at complexity went straight into important new concepts still valid today. Biodiversity, for instance, is all about the complexity of relationship. Or take the co-evolution of flower and pollinator. Moths have kept evolving longer and longer tongues in order to drink orchid nectar without rubbing against the pollen. At the same time, orchids have kept evolving longer and longer nectar spurs, to make the damn moths pollinate them.


Darwin, faced with the Madagascan star orchid, which has an amazingly long nectar spur of 11in, was convinced it had developed through this competitive kind of co-evolution, and predicted that one day a moth with a 10in tongue would be found: such a pollinator was the only way this flower could possibly get itself pollinated. People laughed and thought this crazy – but 40 years later, lo and behold, a hawkmoth was discovered, and it did have 10in tongue. It was named Xanthophan morgani praedicta in honour of a prediction which came from Darwin's perception that everything in nature came out of relationship.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2009, 12:58:35 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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