badgerblog - Darwin Days

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November 5th, 2009

11:26 am

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Darwin Days

One advantage of a highly flexible schedule (*ahem, and I'm trying to change that*) is getting to the amount of things that happen during the day around here. For example, yesterday I went to the John Hope Franklin Center for a talk on The Struggle to Picture Evolution: Darwin and Visual Media by Iain McCalman as a precursor to today and tomorrow's symposium Darwin Across The Disciplines marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of the Species, at Duke University.

McCalman stated that in a highly visual time that Darwin's rudimentary visual skills and poor sketching ability hampered him as a naturalist, causing him to rely on others to create compelling visual imagery to communicate his concepts. Moreover, as the others were trained artistically and scholastically in attitudes antithetical to Darwin's theories of evolution, that it was difficult to present concepts opposed to their training. Darwin was also one of the earliest adopters of the new technique of photography for visual representation in his work. An interesting talk (and I also added McCalman's bio of Count Cagliostro (earlier version) to my to-read list, and should probably add his book on Darwin to the to-read list as well).

If you are interested in the symposium, here is a link to today's schedule beginning at 4pm this afternoon, and Friday's schedule beginning at 11am tomorrow.

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Related, a couple of weeks ago I went to a lunch session of science journalists [1] here in RTP for a talk by an evolutionary anthropologist on the development of projectile weapons [2] - essentially prehistoric man's developmental timeline of spears for jabbing, spears for throwing, atlatls, and bows [3]. Interesting talk. (Mind you, when

maegwynn got home the conversation went as follows:

badger: "What'd you do today?"

maegwynn: "Work. What'd you do today?"

badger: "Went to hear an evolutionary anthropologist talk about the development of projectile weapons."

maegwynn: "You suck."

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Any post about Darwin is incomplete without a nod to

* The Queen of Wands webcomic featuring Charles Darwin's CHAINSAW OF NATURAL SELECTION (although I regret I cannot find the animated GIF LJ icon I saw someone make from this), and

* the movie The Fall, possibly my single favorite movie I saw in 2007 for its metacommentary on story and narrative and its impossibly gorgeous visuals, I'll run this at badgerhaus anytime people will hold still for it. Oh, right, context: _The Fall_ has Charles Darwin as a young explorer. With a great coat.

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NOW I should think about lunch.

[1] The link goes to the archive of podcasts of the talks, after they clean up the recording and post it and the slideshow to iTunes et al. The projectile weapons one isn't up there yet, should be there in another week or so.
[2] Talk announcement, talk recap.
[3] I spent enough years competing in archery that I consider I was competent with a bow. Never spent enough time with atlatls to get any decent accuracy with them - just enough to get functional range - the equivalent of getting a bowling ball all the way down the alley and avoiding both gutters, but no useful accuracy or power.

Tags: duke, durham, rtp, science!