Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin

Not only is it Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday this week, but 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.  So it seems this is a fitting week to cull through some of the most useful and interesting online resources relating to Charles Darwin, the Voyage of the Beagle, and his grand work of synthesis.  I hope that others will post their favorites resources so that we can add to the list.  I’ve gathered the sites described in this post as a collection of links on Diigo with the hash mark “darwin”.

We have to start our tour with the American Museum of Natural History’s Darwin exhibit.  Niles Eldredge, the exhibit’s curator, has assembled an amazing collection of Darwin’s original manuscripts, specimens, mementos, along with animals, artifacts, and videos to deliver fascinating insight into the man himself as well as the political and historical context in which he lived.  The Darwin exhibit is right now on its way to the U.K. in honor of the birthday celebration. The exhibit’s website is laden with useful teaching resources and intriguing photographs.  Well worth a visit.

The New York Times published a number of interesting articles this week.  Notable among them, Carl Zimmer’s piece on visualizing the tree of life (be sure to take a look at the tree of life graphic from David Hillis’s lab which can be downloaded).  There is also an electronic copy of the Origin with selections highlighted and personally annotated by prominent scientists on that same site.  You can find the complete papers and manuscripts of Charles Darwin on the University of Cambridge’s site – some 20,000 items and nearly 90,000 electronic images.

Here’s the link to the official Darwin Day celebration which includes some good podcasts and interviews.  There are 627 events scheduled in 42 countries for Darwin Day – February 12th – and you can find one in your area on this searchable map.  Here’s a site where people can post their own Happy Birthday message to Charles Darwin and place their marker, along with 100’s of others, on a dynamic map.

For the philatelist in you, the British Royal Mail is issuing ten new Darwin postage stamps to celebrate his life and work.

There are a number of interesting online resources to deepen your understanding of Darwin’s 1831 voyage on H.M.S. Beagle.  You could start, of course, with Google Earth and trace the voyage from Plymouth, across the Atlantic, round Cape Horn, up the west coast of South America, stop in to visit the Galapagos, continue onto Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, the Mauritius, round the Cape of Good Hope, stop into the Cape Verde Islands, and head back up to his native England.  It’s really fun to figure out the route on your own, but if you’d prefer to sit back and watch, a few clever people have created KMZ (zipped Keyhole Markup Language) files that serve as an overlay in Google Earth.  Google Earth processes KMZ files in much the same way that web browsers process HTML files.  You just download this KMZ file and, with Google Earth open in the background, open ithe downloaded file to see a pre-programmed tour of the Voyage.  You can stop where ever you’d like, zoom in for a closer look, and read the accompanying annotations.

For a different approach to the Voyage, here’s an interactive map activity, designed for high school students. that will take you through the major sites visited by Darwin and describe what interested him there.

If you’re a student of connectivism, you might find the February 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine interesting.  The issue is devoted to the connections between Darwin and Lincoln  – two great men who share much more than the same birthday.

Yet another important connection – that between Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin – is presented succinctly in a multimedia presentation on the national public radio site.  Also on that site, you’ll find a Morning Edition article and podcast by Joe Palca, featuring the evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll, who is in the UK for birthday festivities.

You can explore Darwin’s study on the English Heritage website dedicated to his long-time home, Down House, which is now an historic site.  You’ll discover some Quicktime VR footage of his study that gives you the feeling of being there.

Charlie Rose once did a fabulous interview with E.O. WIlson and James Watson about the life and work of Charles Darwin, which can still be seen here (on YouTube).  And while you’re on YouTube, take a look at this 6-minute movie on the life of Charles Darwin.

Richard Dawkins “Legacy” recently won the 2009 prize for Best Documentary by the British Broadcast awards.  The program will soon be released on DVD but you can see it in its five segments on this site.

And for a little humor, you might want to check out Richard Milner’s video.  Milner is a singing Darwinian scholar.  He looks for song cues in Darwin’s work and turns them into musical theater.  “There are fossils in the ground, prot-o-ZOA in the sea, all these unrelated facts made a monkey out of me!”  Or continuing in the humorous vein, one of my favorite Simpson’s episode is the Evolution of Homer Simpson (I know, I know…)

But I have to end this ode to Darwin with a note of the humility and unrelenting questioning for which he was known by including this essay by Carl Safina, entitled “Darwin Must Die So that Evolution May Live”.  Safina warns about the cult of Darwinism and the error of equating evolution with one man, one book, one theory.  Good to keep in mind.

And so I conclude with this, my favorite quote from Charles Darwin,

“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.”