Darwin Day

Master Charles Robert Darwin.

February twelfth is the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in 1809. He shares his birth day and year with Abraham Lincoln.

Beginning with the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle in 1859 he developed what has become the central unifying theory of the biological sciences: the common descent of all species modified by natural selection.

His last published work was The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. Stephen Jay Gould observed how these books were of a piece: both are built up from the simple fact that small actions can accumulate over enough time to create large and fundamental changes. This is the power of what in Darwin's words were "small agencies and their accumulated effects." He was very much influenced by his contemporary Charles Lyell, whose theory of geology argued that slow forces accumulated over millenia gave rise to presently-observed features.

Both Darwin and Lyell founded science that provided a workable alternative to the creationism and catastrophism found in the book of Genesis.

Darwin is entombed at Westminster Abbey along side Charles Lyell, Ernest Rutherford, and Isaac Newton.


Links:

Charles Darwin at Wikipedia.

Charles Lyell at Wikipedia.

[ Update, February twelfth: That plant is a potted Lachenalia, from South Africa. I couldn't help but chase it down.

I sort of wanted it to be a Mimbulus mimbletonia. ]

Link