by Greg Mayer UPDATE: Bill Bailey’s Wallace programs are available on Youtube here and here (thanks to Alex and ant for the links); and George Beccaloni has stopped by in the comments to let us know that there is a campaign to buy Wallace’s house for use as a heritage and study center– so now […]
Apropos of yesterday’s post on Darwin’s private life and emotional side, reader DermotC sent me a picture of the tombstone of Darwin’s daughter Anne (“Annie”), who died in 1851 the age of 10. She was the second of Charles and Emma’s ten children, and, as many of us know, her loss was a severe blow […]
The BBC News reports that a collection of 1400 letters between Charles Darwin and his pal and colleague Joseph Hooker, many of them personal and intimate (no, not that way!), will soon be published by The Darwin Correspondence Project. This site, set up by people at Cambridge University, is a gold mine for Darwiniana: you […]
by Greg Mayer The first publication of natural selection as a general mechanism of evolutionary change was a joint paper by Darwin and Wallace read to the Linnean Society in 1858. It was not a coauthored paper, but rather the simultaneous publication under a single heading of separate works by the two authors. So why […]
by Greg Mayer As ever-alert reader Dominic has reminded us, 2013 is the centenary of Alfred Russel Wallace’s death, and it is thus an appropriate time to reflect on the many contributions of this great scientist who was, along with Charles Darwin, the co-discoverer of natural selection. Like Darwin, who was his older contemporary, Wallace’s […]
by Greg Mayer The Geological Society (London) is having a special meeting today to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Piltdown hoax. There will also be a tour of a new special exhibit at the Natural History Museum (which also has a nice Piltdown website). It was exactly 100 years ago today that Charles Dawson, […]
by Greg Mayer My friend and colleague Frank Egerton, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, is the author of a new book, Roots of Ecology: Antiquity to Haeckel, published last month by the University of California Press. With two sections on Darwin, and two others featuring Alfred Russel Wallace, the book will […]
by Matthew Cobb Over at The Guardian, Leo Hickman reminds us that 50 years ago today, Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring” was published, with an amazing first print run of 150,000 copies. Carson’s dramatic ecological warning of the effects of insecticides on bird populations played an important part in bringing the problems of population, […]
It was 154 years ago today—August, 20, 1858—that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published their joint papers on natural selection in Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Zoology (3: 46-50). The history of these papers, reflecting Darwin’s and Wallace’s simultaneous writing about the discovery of natural selection, is well known and […]
by Greg Mayer A new history of evolutionary biology before Darwin, Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott, appeared earlier this summer, and an interview with the author appeared in yesterday’s New York Times (it was posted to the Times‘ website several days earlier). I must admit that the subtitle made me […]
