Word: darwinism
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Rather than a biographical re-hash - wise, for possibly only Jesus bests Lincoln in the number of published books devoted to a single person - Gopnik offers a meditation on each man's most literary qualities: Lincoln's deceptively simple legalistic language and Darwin's crystalline powers of observation. And what could have been a gimmick (a book timed to twin bicentennials is as close as historical biographies get to a home run) becomes something more, a learned treatise that worships learning. Gone is the overly twee writing of Gopnik's memoir-inflected works (Paris to the Moon, Through the Children...
What do Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, G.I. Joe and Charles Darwin have in common? They will all be coming to movie theaters this year. The only real person on that list will be played by Paul Bettany in the biopic Creation. And in true celebrity fashion, Darwin will be everywhere this year. In a convergence of anniversaries, Darwin would have turned 200 years old on Feb. 12, and his landmark book, On the Origin of Species, turns 150 on Nov. 24. There will be documentaries, lectures, conferences and museum exhibits. Darwin-themed blogs are being launched, and a cartload...
...only fitting to recognize the accomplishments of a great biologist. But there's a risk to all this Darwinmania: some people may come away with a fundamental misunderstanding about the science of evolution. Once Darwin mailed his manuscript of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life to his publisher, the science of evolution did not grind to a halt. That would be a bit like saying medicine peaked when Louis Pasteur demonstrated that germs cause diseases. (See a photo-essay on Darwin...
Today biologists are exploring evolution at a level of detail far beyond what Darwin could, and they're discovering that evolution sometimes works in ways the celebrated naturalist never imagined. "The biological problems we're dealing with are much more complex," says Massimo Pigliucci, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. "That said, it's a lot of fun. I'm not complaining...
...Darwin developed his theory by gathering as much information as he could about life. He collected it while voyaging on the Beagle, by sitting in front of a microscope back in England and by writing to a global network of correspondents. Today, however, biologists can feast on a far bigger banquet of data. The fossil record was scanty in Darwin's day, but now it has pushed the evidence of life on Earth back to at least 3.4 billion years ago. And while Darwin recognized that variation and heredity were the twin engines that made evolution possible, he didn...