Happy Birthday, Charles

Today is Charles Darwin's 207th birthday. TPP gave a lecture on evolutionary thinking last Sunday to a bunch of Unitarians who seemed to have liked it. It's also Abe Lincoln's birthday, a significant fact here in Lincolnland, but now lot's of people forget because Abe has been homogenized into President's Day, and it's also TPP's kid sister's birthday.  Happy Birthday, Sis; she's 39 if remembered correctly. Here's a really good essay about Darwin and his life if you don't know much about him and his life. TPP's Darwin lecture focuses on how biologists thought about things and how different this is from most people, and so evolution is greatly misunderstood. Darwin would be astonished to learn that he is remembered and commemorated still. Most of us don't expect our work to last very long because it gets supplanted by newer studies, by newer techniques, but Darwin provided a new way of thinking about biology, something with the potential to last a long time.