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Charles Darwin

  • SOURCE: Boston Globe
    4/16/2022

    Darwin's Enduring Hold on Our Imaginations

    by Tom Chaffin

    The excitement that greeted the return of missing notebooks by the British naturalist reflect the fact that his work, while foundational, remains both controversial and poorly understood. 

  • SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
    9/22/2021

    The Curious Task of Preserving Darwin's Beans and Butterflies

    Although his voyage to the Galapagos is famous, much of Darwin's work on natural selection was based on correspondence with horticulturalists and naturalists who sent him samples from around the world. Cambridge University's libraries are at work to preserve that correspondence.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    2-4-13

    Darwin’s birds get new look

    In 1855, Charles Darwin took up a new hobby. He started raising pigeons....Pigeon breeding, Darwin argued, was an analogy for what happened in the wild. Nature played the part of the fancier, selecting which individuals would be able to reproduce. Natural selection might work more slowly than human breeders, but it had far more time to produce the diversity of life around us.Yet to later generations of biologists, pigeons were of little more interest than they are to, say, New Yorkers. Attention shifted to other species, like fruit flies and E. coli.Now Michael D. Shapiro, a biologist at the University of Utah, is returning pigeons to the spotlight....