Word: darwins
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...beginning of Creation, we're promised the movie will reveal how Charles Darwin came to write The Origin of Species. Unfortunately, we don't get to set sail on The Beagle, but in a literal sense the movie does deliver, in that we do get to see Darwin (Paul Bettany) repeatedly sit down at his desk and move a pen across paper. Eventually, we see him drop a fat parcel in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, sending his Origin manuscript off to his publisher...
...this is just as exciting as it sounds, but director Jon Amiel's main intent is to frame Darwin's authorship of one of the most important books of all time around the death of a child, Darwin's 10-year-old daughter Annie (Martha West). Between her loss and his grief, Creation is a doubleheader of misery and melancholy that serve mostly to make you look forward to the writing bits. After a bout of scarlet fever, Annie languished for weeks. She was apparently the light of Darwin's life, and the movie does not miss an opportunity...
...Creation is based on a book called Annie's Box (published in the U.S. as Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution), written by one of Darwin's descendants, Randal Keynes, and inspired by a box of keepsakes from Annie's short life, items carefully set aside by her parents, which Keynes found in the family archives. Darwin and his wife Emma (played by Jennifer Connelly, Bettany's offscreen wife) had 10 children in all. Several of them are featured in the film, though you'd be hard-pressed to identify them as anything beyond Neglected Son No. 1, Neglected...
...contrast, Darwin argued that evolution works not through the fire of effort but through cold, impartial selection. By Darwinist thinking, giraffes got their long necks over millennia because genes for long necks had, very slowly, gained advantage. Darwin, who was 84 years younger than Lamarck, was the better scientist, and he won the day. Lamarckian evolution came to be seen as a scientific blunder. Yet epigenetics is now forcing scientists to re-evaluate Lamarck's ideas. (See TIME's video on Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln...
Published in the Italian journal Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae, Pembrey's paper, now considered seminal in epigenetic theory, was contentious at the time; major journals had rejected it. Although he is a committed Darwinist, Pembrey used the paper - a review of available epigenetic science - to speculate beyond Darwin: What if the environmental pressures and social changes of the industrial age had become so powerful that evolution had begun to demand that our genes respond faster? What if our DNA now had to react not over many generations and millions of years but, as Pembrey wrote, within...