Quiche Moraine

One look at the November 20th, 2008 cover of “Nature” will remind you that 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. To celebrate, The Bell Museum of Natural History has planned a big, fun, evolutionary birthday party with cake, drinks and presentations by University of Minnesota faculty.

Quiche Moraine is intended to be a place where the best parts of blogging get a little easier for everyone. Readers will have new voices brought to them. Existing bloggers can present themselves to a broader audience and stretch beyond the comforts of their own usual styles and topics. People who have important and interesting things to say but not the time and attention to maintain and promote a blog can have a home for their occasional writing and the help of experienced writers and editors to shape their writing for an audience.

Anyway, my purpose here and now is to make a few recommendations to you as to what you should read from the Charles Darwin canon. This is not from the perspective of True Darwin Scholarship. Technically, I’m not a Darwin scholar, so I would not know how to recommend the more erudite approach to this literature, and if you are a Darwin scholar, then you certainly don’t need my advice. I’m not suggesting this from the perspective of an educator in the life sciences, either. Rather, I’m suggesting specific readings (in a specific order) because I believe that this approach will captivate you and provide the most meaningful sampling of Darwin’s work with the least effort on your part.

It does seem absurd to think that nature can do what man was unable to do until the invention of the camera: to interpret changes in light in ways that provide meaningful data to the beholder. The above passage from Darwin has been used in quotemines to cry triumphant defeat of evolution, admitted to by the scientist most closely associated with natural processes of biological evolution. Darwin admitted no such thing, and it is important to understand his method of presentation.

Miriam does a carnival in verse for the Carnival of the Blue #21:

O muse! Tell me of the many wonders
Cradled in this sea-tossed carnival.
Of sharks and squirts and of the cuttlefish
Impaled upon the dolphin’s beak.
And death spreading ever outward
From too much carbon in the sky.

“People are so stupid to believe the stories that were told about the king’s court in that book he wrote,” commented Sileshi.

“Yea, I know,” I chimed in. “Like that story about couples deciding to have sex in the middle of dinner so servants would come by and hold up a blanket to give them a modicum of privacy.”

“No, they did that. That’s not what I’m talking about.”