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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, 01:14:29 pm »









But let's go back to the human. Darwin had a wonderful sense of complexity in human relations too. He and his wife, his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, both came from very large families; they had 10 children and at least five of these had large families (hence the numbers of great-great-grandchildren). He also had a huge capacity for affection, an endearing modesty, a naivety people often called childlike, a great anxiety not to give other people trouble, a lively interest in their doings, and a keen enjoyment of tiny things. I think we should do something better in 2009 than just celebrate Darwin. He did not believe in an afterlife and needs no pats from us.


"There was something wonderfully exhilarating in his company", said his daughter Henrietta. "He was so vivid, had such joyousness of nature, and his laugh was delightful to hear. His courtesy, tact and ready sympathy made him a perfect listener."


This year is an opportunity to know him better, to spend more time in the exhilarating company of a man who gave us the basis of modern biology and expanded other sciences.


"Even if he'd never written On the Origin of Species, geologists would still know him through his work on coral reefs," the geologist Richard Fortey told me this autumn, when I was making a series of Radio 4 programmes as part of the forthcoming BBC season on Darwin.


"His great book on coral reefs was the first to provide a rational explanation for the formation of reefs. It is still valid today. It was the first example of Darwinian method: testing hypotheses in the field against observations."


Then there's psychology. The only moment in On the Origin of Species when Darwin gets near the question of "Man" is to say, "psychology will now be based on a new foundation: the acquirement of each necessary power."


Thirteen years later he developed that in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one of the first books to use the new invention of photography. Since 1838 he had posited an organic basis between our feelings and facial muscles, and wondered if this provided the link between apes and human beings. In 1838, no one else dreamed of going down that path.


The first ape seen in London Zoo, in 1835, was Tommy, a chimpanzee – which, I am sorry to say, the zoo dressed in a Guernsey frock and sailor hat. Jenny the orang-utan then went on show, also in a frock, in November 1837. But, despite the apes' clothes, despite seeing them using spoons and even drinking tea, everyone ridiculed the suggestion of a shared ancestry; even most naturalists.


Queen Victoria called Jenny "painfully and disagreeably human" but no one questioned the moral and mental uniqueness of human beings.


"In nothing does it trench upon the moral or mental provinces of man," declared a newspaper leader. But Darwin saw in Jenny's face our own same facial muscle movements. If there were the same muscle movements, why not the feelings, too?
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Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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