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.

Happy Birthday Charles

Today February 12th is Charles Darwin's birthday, and my dear little Sister's birthday too (A card is in the mail, Sis.); she's just a tad more than 1/4th as old, which sounds much worse than it is as this is Darwin's 206th birthday. In years past TPP would have cake and get out his Darwin library (10 of his books) for his students to peruse, but this year not. So here's your tiny dose of Darwin: "We now come to the nyctitropic or sleep movements of leaves." (The Power of Movement in Plants, 1880) The image shown is a species of Oxalis, a wood sorrel, which have leaves with three sort of heart-shaped leaflets. Darwin devoted several pages of this book to describing their sleep movements.  Sleep movements of leaves occur in many plants characterized by a drooping of the leaf and a folding of the leaflets such that half as much surface area is exposed. Reading his books leaves you impressed by Darwin's powers of observation.

Alfred Russel Wallace online

Each year for Darwin's Birthday party, TPP puts out his Darwin library for students to peruse, and Alfred Russel Wallace's Malay Archipelago is put out too.  The Malay Archipelago is Wallace's "Origin" and it is a worthwhile read.  Wallace is a curiosity to my students, and most of them have never heard of Wallace showing just how badly the historical aspects of science are being neglected these days.  Well, good news, everyone!  All of Wallace's publications are now online and available for free.  Such a deal! 

Darwin Day Planning

Every year the Phactor hosts a little birthday party for Charles Darwin, but this year Feb. 12th falls on a Sunday.  Since my Mondays and Tuesdays are just impossible, and Wednesdays are for catching up things ignored the previous two days, the celebration will have to be on Thursday Feb. 16th.  Charles probably won't mind.  All the majors and anyone else who happens by can get some birthday cake and have a look at Darwin's publications, at least the 10 books from my library.  Last year a local supermarket employee in the bakery didn't want to decorate a Darwin cake, an unusual source for censorship it seemed.  While not necessarily more open-minded, the store manager wasn't about to turn away business, and a regular customer, over a birthday cake.  Maybe this year the celebration will get picketed by a campus religious group to  really help draw attention and get more visitors than ever.  The Phactor will offer them all cake, but they may have to be careful because of biological transubstantiation!  Yes, if it works for them, then it can work for us.  Eating Darwin cake will enhance your scientific thinking, especially the big frosting flowers.

Plant developmental morphology and Darwin

Two of the Phactors favorite people happen to be botanists who study plant development and evolution and who happen to be a couple. Having known them since they were in graduate school, it's been great to watch the careers of such talented people and to associate with them, that is when they let me hang around. One of the interesting things about them is that they have an interest in the history of science, and soon to be published in The Plant Cell is an very nice historical article on the history of plant developmental morphology (not sure if the article is free or not since our institution does subscribe). Plants are very different from the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" type of embryology, and some of the early observations were pre-Darwin and quite impressive. Working on a manuscript with images rather like some of these illustrations right now. Talked about this article with the authors last year at meetings, but HT to the AOB Blog for tipping me to the online pre-pub version.

Darwin Day Nature Photography Contest

To celebrate Darwin, the Horniman Museum (& Gardens!), the Grant Museum of Zoology, and the Society for Biology held a nature photography contest and the winners can be viewed here. Wow, that picture of lichen is fantastic, oh, and there's a frog sitting on top. Even in their own blurb the Horniman Museum left out the & Gardens part, and of course, the photographs are largely animals. But nice enough, but hardly representative of Darwin's work. He would have been in the & Gardens part. At least Darwin has been voted the 3d most important Brit ever. Let's see, is that after Elton John and Monty Python?

Darwin Bicentennial Special Edition

In honor of the bicentennial of Darwin's Origin of Species the Botanical Society of America is publishing a special issue of the American Journal of Botany, and you can get a FREE historial article entitled "The meaning of Darwin's "abominable mystery". Everyone usually interprets this to mean the evolutionay ancestry of flowering plants was a mystery with respect to their ancestry, and other than it being clear flowering plants had a common ancestry with gymnosperms, it must be admitted that this remains an area of active hypothesis formation. But this was not Darwin's concern.

Ned Friedman clarifies that Darwin was referring to the sudden appearance of considerable flowering plant diversity in the fossil record. Darwin would have been seen this as less of a problem if the fossil record were as well known 150 years ago as it is today, but that's why we do research, to learn things. The clarification is based in part upon Darwin's own explanation of the problem in a letter Joseph Hooker written in 1879 (facsimile included).

So treat yourself to a scientific present! And maybe commit yourself to a new year's resolution to reduce your plant blindness, a common scientific affliction.