My first biology professor had an ‘inadequacy drawer’ full of things to remind him he wasn’t, in fact, the dumbest and laziest person to ever exist. It was mostly Darwin, notably these two bits:
‘But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.’
‘I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and today I hate them worse than everything.’
“I am at work on the second vol. of the Cirripedia, of which creatures I am wonderfully tired: I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.”
-Charles Darwin on a letter to his cousin
Charles Darwin: unexpected depression hero.
I knew about “I am very poorly and very stupid and hate everybody and everything,” but not the others.
“I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees” is A Mood.
My favorite Darwinism: “I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects”. Hits me right at the center of my hyperfixated soul.
A lion cub and a room full of children - what could possibly go wrong? This photo is from Julian Huxley’s 1937 Christmas Lectures ‘Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life’
Julian Huxley was born on this day in 1887. A passion for evolutionary biology clearly ran in the family - he was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, AKA ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his staunch and loyal support of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
In celebration of #DarwinDay we went into our archives and dug out these pages from ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’.
This was Charles Darwin’s third major work on evolutionary theory and laid out his early ideas about behavioural genetics.
It explored emotions in animals and humans and attempted to work out their evolutionary origins, like why we raise our eyebrows when we are surprised.
This page below is often referred to as ‘Screaming infants’, for obvious reasons.
The bottom photo on the page below is from a study by Darwin’s contemporary, neurologist Guillaume Duchenne (who’s work gave rise to the term ‘Duchenne smile’).
The book was quite revolutionary in using biological illustrations and paved the way for future works.
Though by the end of working on the book, Darwin wrote that he was 'sick of the subject and myself, and the world’.
The world ain’t sick of you, Darwin - Happy Birthday!
Pictures from the Royal Institution Archival Collection. The book was published on Albemarle Street in London, where the Royal Institution also finds its home.
We were really excited to get a chance to talk with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch! Dr. Fitch is an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist who received his PhD from Brown University, and is now a professor in the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. He’s published extensively on the evolution of speech, language, and music, and is the author of the 2010 book The Evolution of Language.
In our interview, we discussed the following topics: - his recent research on whether it’s anatomy or neurology holding back monkeys from speech - his thoughts on Darwin’s hypotheses about how language may have evolved - how to come up with good hypotheses about how language evolved, given that it doesn’t leave fossils - what he believes is different about humans that led to the development of language
… and more! Thanks to Dr. Fitch for talking with us. Looking forward to hearing what people have to say!
Sir William Lawrence (1783-1867) first published his work Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man in 1819. This book, which expressed pre-Darwinian ideas on the evolution of man, was quickly suppressed by Lawrence as he was being threatened with prosecution for blasphemy. However further pirated editions were printed - and left seemingly unexpurgated.
The pamphlet shown here, Cursory Observations on the Lectures is a response to Lawrence’s work, also published in 1819. Its author, Edward William Grinfield (1785-1864) a biblical scholar and former Lincoln College Oxford student, pleads with Lawrence to refrain from contradicting the Scriptures, and urges Lawrence’s pupils to discount his ideas on theology.
In this pamphlet we discovered these 1958 letters between C. D. Darlington (1903-1981) who at the time was the Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, and Professor Robb-Smith (1908-2000) a distinguished Oxford pathologist. In these letters Darlington and Robb-Smith the compare the 1819 edition of Lawrence’s book with a later, most-likely pirated, 1823 version.
Darlington mentions that he is of the opinion Huxley based his title Man’s Place in Nature, on Lawrence’s Natural History of Man, and that he thinks Lawrence was a far better writer than Huxley and Darwin!
A year after this exchange, Darlington had his work Darwin’s Place in History published. In this book Darlington draws attention to the suppression of Lawrence’s work as well claiming, rather controversially, it was helpful in forming Darwin’s perspectives years later.
Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809. In 2009, to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, The Bodleian Libraries and Google made The Origin of Species available digitally for the first time. It’s still there, and still wonderful.
Three copies of The Origin of Species are held in the University of Oxford, including the Bodleian Library’s copy.
Meanwhile, plant specimens from Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle are kept in the University of Oxford Herbaria. It remains a mystery how and why they actually ended up there.
Three facts about this whalebone walking stick with skull pommel:
1. It has green glass eyes.
2. It was owned by Charles Darwin.
3. Darwin called it his “morituri”: a type of memento mori (objects that remind their owners of the shortness of human life and the inevitability of death).
See this object for yourself in our #MedicineMan gallery.
aaaah, this is so cool! Darwin’s skull-topped walking stick. I am dying.
“We all have the same 24 hours that Beyoncé has” and its various iterations took the web by storm in late 2013 as the megastar became the figurehead of not only having it all, but being able to somehow do it all too.
How do creatives – composers, painters, writers, scientists, philosophers – find the time to produce their opus? Mason Currey investigated the rigid Daily Rituals that hundreds of creatives practiced in order to carve out time, every day, to work their craft. Some kept to the same disciplined regimen for decades while others locked in patterns only while working on specific works.
