ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
THE MONUMENT OF DARWIN
NUMEROUS PUBLICATIONS
ON-GOING CONCLUSIONS
EPILOGUE
SPECIFIC DARWIN WEB SOURCES LOCATED AT CSU, CHICO
VISUALS FROM VARIOUS LOCATIONS

ABSTRACT

Does Urbanowicz have any other interests and does he ever write anything new? Summarizing this paper in a single phrase: I attempt to "humanize" Charles R. Darwin and I try to incorporate as much "new" materials as possible in every paper. The paper deals with (#1) some of the scientific research of Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882), specifically his monumental 1859 publication entitled On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the paper also attempts to demonstrate (#2) some of the "multimedia" attempts I have made, working with others on campus, to portray Darwin as an intelligent human being; from left to right: Martha Acuña, Charles Urbanowicz, Karen Adlman, Clark Brandstatt, and Donna Crowe.

Darwin has been presented in the "first person" on this campus since October 1990 and one 17 minute videotape (finished in July 1997) has been completed; editing is being done on the second tape and a two additional tapes are planned, as well as a Darwin CD-ROM (please see Chantal Lamers, 1998, "Darwin's Insight Evolves To CD-ROM" in The Orion, Vol. 40, Issue 2, February 4, page 1 and page 8). The tapes have been used extensively in classes and also shown at professional meetings (http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/Darwin_Folklore.html). This current web paper contains Darwin illustrations from various locations and numerous "Darwin" items are listed in the "Web Sources" for this paper; other sources are also interspersed throughout the body of the text.

INTRODUCTION

"Our hunger for history, our obsession with it, is exacerbated by the lack of meaning in our own personal experience created by the historical attitude." (Paul Shepard, 1998, Coming Home To The Pleistocene, page 11)

While these words of Shepard (who died in 1996 and was Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology at Pitzer College and the Claremont Graduate School) may be a bit harsh, they do provide some food for thought: while I feel I do have meaning in my own personal experiences/life, I do have a "hunger for history" or the placing of ideas, behavior, words, and things into the context of the times. The rationale for creating instructional videotapes dealing with Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882) is an attempt to convey not only the content of Darwin's work, but also the context and the impact of his ideas. I hope to get people to appreciate and understand that impact. In many respects it is an attempt through the use of multimedia to convey what Freeman Dyson wrote about Albert Einstein: "This book shows him as he was--not a superhuman genius but a human genius, and all the greater for being a human being" (as cited in Alice Calaprice, 1996, The Quotable Einstein, page xiii).

"Some geniuses have been widely acknowledged to be exceptionally able well before reaching adulthood. But there have also been geniuses such as Charles Darwin, who were never considered to be exceptional during their childhood ... As a child, he was considered reasonably intelligent but by no means unusual, and at school he never came close to winning prizes or distinguishing himself in any way. Darwin was a keen collector from his earliest years, and much of his collecting activity was related to natural history. ... Darwin's transition from naive child collector to enthusiastic teenage naturalist and competent young scientist was a steady progress, in which his knowledge and skills gradually increased as his horizons broadened [stress added]." (Michael J. Howe, 1998, "Early Lives: Prodigies And Non-Prodigies" in Genius and The Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament, edited by Andrew Steptoe, pages 97-109, pages 97 and 103)

Darwin's theory of "natural selection" is hopefully well known but how did the culture of his times influence his ideas and the development and acceptance of his theory? What happened before Darwin published Origin and what came after this (and his numerous other publications)? Charles Darwin was an important individual for a variety of reasons: the data he collected, the experiments he conducted, and the theory he proposed influenced a variety of disciplines, from anthropology to zoology as well as ecology, geology, and the general social sciences. His influence continues to be condemned, supported, and debated after almost 150 years.

"The [1937] Hungarian Nobel Prize winner [in Physiology/Medicine], Szent-Geörgyi [von Nagyrapolt], once said that a scientist should see what everybody else has seen and then think what nobody has thought. Nobody did this better than Charles Darwin, who first realized that the evolution of life took place by Natural Selection. Darwin taught us all to see more clearly what everyone had seen, and Darwin also taught us to think, along with him, what no one else had thought. No branch of science is more dominated by a single theory, by a single great idea, than is the whole of biology by the idea of evolution by Natural Selection [stress added]." (J. Livingston and L. Sinclair, 1967, Darwin and the Galapagos, n.p.)

Charles Darwin wrote as a scientist of his times and he indeed did "see" what everyone else had seen and then thought what almost nobody else in his times had thought. He wrote in the scientific terminology of his day, and was unaware of the scientific efforts of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), but he also wrote in metaphors and perhaps the best summary statement of Darwin's effort comes from Denise Shekerjian:

"Leaving aside the intuitive, tender, poetic beauty of a metaphor (if beauty can ever be dismissed so lightly), what is useful about this sort of wordsmithing is that by comparing dissimilar things we are able to comprehend the unfamiliar in familiar terms. There, precisely, lies the creative power of metaphor: it uses something we know well to explain what has eluded us. This is easily appreciated in the sciences. Darwin's most fertile metaphor in his efforts to comprehend evolution, for example, was the branching tree [stress added]." (Denise Shekerjian, 1990, Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born, page 102.)

 

BACKGROUND

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, 160 miles northwest of London on the 12th of February 1809, the same day that Abraham Lincoln (16th President of the USA) was born in Kentucky. On the 12th of February 1882, Darwin wrote to a friend that "my course is nearly run." Within two months, on 19 April 1882, he had a fatal heart attack and died. His remains are in Westminster Abbey, in London. In 1876, at the age of sixty-eight, Darwin wrote in his Autobiography that the five-year voyage on HMS Beagle (1831-1836) was "by far the most important event of my life and has determined my whole career" and it influenced numerous other individuals; other eminent Victorians were also exploring and gathering information about the world about them and the zeitgesit was an expanding one!

"The Victorians' fascination with the past was thus the product of an age obsessed with change, desperately hoping that history itself might supply the reassurance that could no longer be derived from ancient beliefs. ... The Victorians' obsession with history was fueled by an immense extension of the range of past events open to their investigations." (Peter J. Bowler, 1989, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past, page 3)

 

THE MONUMENT OF DARWIN

"No one has championed the aesthetic, formal aspects of science better than the founder of modern biology, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). Buffon's Historie Naturelle [published in 36 volumes from 1749-1788] was to biology what Diderot's Encyclopédie was to the general knowledge of the time." (Gerald Weissmann, 1998, Darwin's Audubon: Science And The Liberal Imagination, page 3)

Monumental publications abound when one has a sense of history and knows where to look for them. Charles R. Darwin was certainly not the first individual to write about evolution, since his grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) had published Zoonomia in 1794: Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life, which built upon the works of Buffon.

Charles Darwin built painstakingly on the previous works of numerous other individuals and, in my opinion, change is apparent where Darwin is concerned. Darwin's most important (and monumental) work was his 1859 publication of On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Origin went through five additional editions in his own lifetime (in addition to his numerous other publications). On "change being a constant in Darwin's work" (my phrase), please consider the following changes which took place over the six editions of Origin (from M. Peckham, Editor, 1959, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press):

In the 1869 edition Darwin used the famous phrase "Survival of the Fittest" (borrowed from Herbert Spencer [1820-1903]) and by the 1872 edition, "On" was dropped from the title. In 1859 Darwin originally only wrote the following about human beings: "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" and by the 6th edition of 1872, Darwin wrote as follows:

"In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history [stress added]." (Chapter 15: "Recapitulation and Conclusions")

Darwin was not an atheist but he was an agnostic, a term coined in 1869 by his good friend, Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). An agnostic is defined as "a person who believes that the human mind cannot know whether there is a God or an ultimate cause, or anything beyond material phenomena" and Darwin's philosophy was a problem for his wife Emma, who maintained a deep orthodox religious conviction throughout her life. Darwin's beliefs did make Emma "sad" and uneasy yet Darwin was not lacking in faith; but the faith that he held was that of a scientist. Perhaps we should consider the words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) who stated it well in this century: "Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control." Darwin was well-aware of the impact that the publication of his ideas would have on his contemporaries (and the general public of his day) and he knew what he was doing: in 1858 Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) had joint papers presented at the meeting of the The Linnean Society and then Darwin proceeded with the 1859 publication of On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

The author of this web-paper is interested in numerous things, including the "gaming industry", and I look for certain "key phrases" that summarize a multitude of ideas into a single phrase (much as Darwin did with the term "natural selection") and a few years ago I came across the following: "...like all successful gamblers he thought things over before he moved his chips. Wherever his body went, his mind had already gone" (Tom Clancy, 1987, Patriot Games, page 150). Darwin was well aware of the context of his time and knew what he was doing when he published Origin and the world was better for his decision: he gambled on public and scientific acceptance (and controversy and debate) and he won!

Charles R. Darwin was not an atheist who rejected all religious beliefs and who denied the existence of a supreme being; Darwin was, however, unwilling to accept supernatural explanations for the world he observed all around him. Perhaps he should have quoted the words of his contemporary, the Scottish historian and essayist, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881): "I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am . . . People ought to be modester" or Darwin could have chosen a philosophy from elsewhere in the world, for it is written that a Shinto saying is "belief is for mortals, proof is for the Gods." Please note that in the second edition of 1860 Darwin included the following words in closing his book:

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator [stress added] into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

This was not the first mention that Darwin had made of a "creator" in his publications for please note that in his 1839 publication entitled The Voyage Of The Beagle Darwin had the following towards the end of the book:

"Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature:--no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body" [stress added] (Charles R. Darwin, 1839, The Voyage Of The Beagle )

Considering Darwin's passing reference to Homo sapiens in Origin, it is somewhat ludicrous to read Edward Said, writing in his influential 1993 publication entitled Culture And Imperialism, invoking Darwin's name to support the following phrase: "All of these [individuals] developed and accentuated the essentialist positions in European culture proclaiming that Europeans should rule, non-Europeans be ruled" (page 100). This was not correct for Darwin; neither is Said correct when he uses Darwin to justify a colonial "scheme of peoples guaranteed scientifically by scholars and scientists" into "superior" and inferior" human beings (page 140). James Ryan wrote an intriguing book entitled Picturing Empire: Photography And The Visualization of the British Empire (1998) and while he is quite correct in stating that "the British Empire was constructed in the Victorian imagination through a variety of cultural texts" (page 20), it is clear that Origin was not one of those cultural texts; please remember that all Darwin wrote in 1859 was "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." In a similar vein, Michael Ruse has written intriguingly that "To say that evolutionary theory--Darwinian evolutionary theory in particular--comes saddled with a bad reputation among feminists is akin to saying that Hitler had a thing about the Jews" (Michael Ruse, 1998, "Is Darwin Sexist? (And If It Is, So What?)" in A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science, edited by Noretta Koertge, pages 119-129, page 119). Ruse accurately points out that we must read Darwin and form our own opinions:

"We have a veritable Hegelian contradiction. Darwinism is sexist. Darwinism is feminist. How can this be? The obvious answer is that, in some sense, Darwinism is simply a clotheshorse on which people will hang any ideology that they find comforting. You are a sexist? Darwinism will accommodate you. You are a feminist? Darwinism will accommodate you, too." (Michael Ruse, 1998, "Is Darwin Sexist? (And If It Is, So What?)" in A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science, edited by Noretta Koertge, page 121)

Please read Darwin and form your own opinions (but you will have to do quite a bit of reading to form a "true" opinion of Darwin's point of view and changes in ideas through time). Martin Gardner, writing in The Sacred Beetle And Other Great Essays in Science (1984) includes Darwin's "Recapitulation and Conclusions" chapter from Origin in the collection of essays and has the following:

"Darwin himself, as a young biologist aboard H.M.S. Beagle, was so thoroughly orthodox that the ship's officers laughed at his propensity for quoting Scripture. Then 'disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate,' he recalled, 'but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.' The phrase 'by the creator,' in the final sentence of the selection chosen here, did not appear in the first edition of Origin of Species. It was added to the second edition to conciliate angry clerics. Darwin later wrote, 'I have long since regretted that I truckled to public opinion and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process.'" (Martin Gardner, 1984, The Sacred Beetle And Other Great Essays in Science, page 5)

 

NUMEROUS PUBLICATIONS

"Some people called him an evil genius. Others just said he was a genius. Still, they unanimously saluted his brainpower. No other thinker shook Victorian England as deeply as Charles Darwin with his theory of evolution by natural selection." (Janet Browne, 1995, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, page ix.)

Charles Darwin published "seventeen works in twenty one volumes, or fifteen if the three volumes of geology of the Beagle are treated as one" (R.B. Freeman, 1978, Charles Darwin: A Companion, page 77). His non-imperialistic and non-colonial "cultural texts" of the 19th century include The Zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle...during the years 1832 to 1836 (5 parts, 1838-1842), A Monograph of the fossil Lepadidae, or pedunculated cirripedes, of Great Britain. A Monograph of the fossil Balanidae and Verrucidae of Great Britain (two volumes, 1851 and 1854), A Monograph of the sub-class Cirripedia, with figures of all the species (two volumes, 1851 and 1854), On The Various Contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing (1862), On the movements and habits of climbing plants, and The power of movement in plants (1880). These are only a few publications, in addition to his monumental 1871 publication of The Descent of Man, And Selection in Relation to Sex (where human beings and an African origin of mankind was hypothesized) and his 1872 publication, truly cross-cultural and cross-species, entitled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

A second edition of Expressions was published by Charles Darwin's son in 1889 (seven years after Darwin's death) and most recently (1998) Paul Ekman has published a third edition. Robert Wright (The Moral Animal, 1994) draws upon Darwin's work and William Ickes has edited a 1998 volume entitled Empathic Accuracy which uses Darwin's 1872 as a "base line" in discussing "communicative genes and the evolution of empathy." Darwin's ideas have an impact to this day and we have seen recent publications invoking Darwin's name such as Daniel C. Dennett's 1995 publication entitled Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution And The Meaning Of Life, Michael J. Behe's 1996 publication entitled Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge To Evolution, and John Hoberman's 1997 publication entitled Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America And Preserved The Myth of Race, as well as Michael Sims' 1997 volume Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac Of Nature In History And The Arts. Clearly, Darwin lives at the end of the 20th Century and in April 1998 Scientific American had an article by L.A. Dugatkin and J-G. Godin entitled "How Females Choose Their Mates" (pages 56-61) and they clearly point out: "Charles Darwin was the first to propose that competition for mates plays an important role in reproductive success--a process he dubbed sexual selection" (page 56). Darwin clearly had a timeless writing style and certain words applied to the Comte de Buffon are clearly applicable to the writings of Charles Darwin:

"Bien écrire, c´est tout à la fois bien pensée, bien sentir et biend rendre. C´est avoir en même temps de´esprit, de´lâme et du gout. [In translation: "To write well is at once to think, feel and express oneself well; simultaneously to possess wit, soul and taste."] (Gerald Weissmann, 1998, Darwin's Audubon: Science And The Liberal Imagination, page 4)

This is why, perhaps, Buffon and Darwin may both be remembered by the following: Le style c'est l'homme même or, "The style is the man himself" Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1753, Discourse (on his admission to the French Academy).

Interestingly enough, perhaps the "timeless" measure of an individual's writing style is measured not only by how many publications are read by how many individuals over how many years, but also (perhaps) by what people do with that information and also what they purchase that information for: the November 9, 1998 edition of Time magazine (page 29) reported on an auction of some manuscripts the previous week and while the specific Darwin item was not listed, it was expected that some $25,000-to-$35,000 would be bid for the Darwin manuscript: the Darwin item was sold for $79,500.

Janet Browne, cited at the beginning of this section, published a truly monumental in 1995 entitled Charles Darwin: Voyaging (and future volumes are forthcoming); she has also provided an interesting chapter in a 1998 volume entitled Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (edited by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin) entitled "I Could Have Retched All Night: Charles Darwin And His Body" (pages 240-287) wherein she summarizes some of the ideas concerning Darwin's ill-health for most of his life after the HMS Beagle voyage. The chapter is called to your attention not only for the statements concerning Darwin's health, but also for some of the excellent black and white photographs (carte di visite) which are included in the volume: well-worth looking at and reading.

ON-GOING CONCLUSIONS

"In complex environments, individuals are not fully able to analyze the situation and calculate their optimal strategy. Instead they can be expected to adapt their strategy over time based on what has been effective and what has not. One useful analogy to the adaptation process is biological evolution. In evolution, strategies that have been relatively effective in a population become more widespread, and strategies that have been less effective become less common in the population." (Robert Axelrod, 1997, The Complexities of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration, page 14)

Robert Axelrod, University of Michigan Distinguished University Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and author of the 1984 publication entitled The Evolution of Cooperation, takes us almost full-circle: from the context of Darwin's time to evolution and biology and back to social policy and the 20th century! Darwin does have an influence, for in his 1984 publication Axelrod wrote:

"In this chapter Darwin's emphasis on individual advantage has been formalized in terms of game theory. This formulation establishes conditions under which cooperation in biological systems based on reciprocity can evolve even without foresight by the participants." (Robert Axelrod, 1984, The Evolution of Cooperation, page 105)

Elsewhere in 1984 Axelrod wrote:

"The evolutionary approach is based on a simple principle: whatever is successful is likely to appear more often in the future. The mechanism can vary. In classical Darwinian evolution, the mechanism is natural selection based upon differential survival and reproduction. In Congress, the mechanism can be an increased chance of reelection for those members who are effective in delivering legislation and services for their constituency. In the business world, the mechanism can be the avoidance of bankruptcy by a profitable company. But the evolutionary mechanism need not be a question of life and death. With intelligent players, a successful strategy can appear more often in the future because other players convert to it. The conversion can be based on more or less blind imitation of the successful players, or it can be based on a more or less informed process of learning [stress added]." (Robert Axelrod, 1984, The Evolution of Cooperation, pages 169-170).

Learning how to adapt to the ever-changing environment is the key for Homo sapiens and Robert Wright wrote in his 1994 publication entitled The Moral Animal:

"All the theory of natural selection says is the following. If within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, than those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population. The result (obviously) is that the species' aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes. And there you have it." (Robert Wright, 1994, The Moral Animal, Page 23)

One should read Darwin in the original and form your own opinion and not necessarily accept the opinion of others. Elsewhere in the same volume, Wright wrote: "TIT FOR TAT's strategy--do unto others as they've done unto you--gives it much in common with the average human being" (Robert Wright, 1994, The Moral Animal, Page 197). Darwin was an average human being, "not a superhuman genius but a human genius, and all the greater for being a human being." Finally, I honestly believe that Darwin utilized a "creative problem-solving technique" which we all may utilize: PQRSTU:

Figure 1: PQRSTU Paradigm

Darwin was faced with various Problems throughout his life: he asked Questions and conducted Research in an attempt to find Solutions and Temporary Understanding. The "problems" ranged from what to study in school? How to get permission to go on the voyage of HMS Beagle? How did those finches adapt to the environment of the Galápagos? And...? Darwin was simply a human being, just as the author and reader of this web paper are of the species Homo sapiens and he did some amazing things!

EPILOGUE

"In this book [Origin] the great proponent of evolution aimed to show the probability that every species is a development from previous species, and that all life is part of a continuous pattern. His objects of investigation were domestic animals and plants, which vary from generation to generation. All life, plant and animal alike, is engaged in a fierce competition or 'struggle for existence.' In this conflict an animal or plant which inherits an unfavorable variation will be less likely to survive and have offspring; and, conversely, an animal inheriting a favorable variation will be more likely to survive and have offspring. The severe conditions of life accordingly tend to kill off individuals with unfavorable variations and to favor 'the survival of the fittest,' the strongest, the most adaptable. From all this Darwin concludes that there exists a 'natural selection' of favorable variation which produces new varieties." Hiram Haydn and Edmund Fuller [Editors], 1949, Thesaurus of Book Digests (NY: Crown), pages 545-546.

The ideas that Darwin advocated in the last century continue to influence us in this century and will certainly take us into the 21st century. Darwin was an extremely important individual for a variety of reasons: the data he collected, the experiments he conducted, the books he wrote (more than twenty), and the theories and ideas he proposed influenced a variety of disciplines, from anthropology to zoology as well as biology, ecology, geology, and the general social sciences. Most recently (November 26, 1998), one could read an Associated Press report commenting on a forthcoming issue of the British journal Nature the following: "In the 19th century, Charles Darwin described evolution as a gradual, orderly march by a species toward self-improvement [stress added]" (Anon.,Scientists Find Genes Respond To Fast-Forward Evolution. The San Francisco Chronicle, November 26, 1998, page A3). Alas, should one read Darwin himself, you would read (at least) the following:

"Every one who believes in slow and gradual evolution, will of course admit that specific changes may have been as abrupt and as great as any single variation which we meet with under nature, or even under domestication. But as species are more variable when domesticated or cultivated than under their natural conditions, it is not probable that such great and abrupt variations have often occurred under nature, as are known occasionally to arise under domestication [stress added]" (Charles Darwin, 1872, Origin, 6th edition, Chapter 7: "Miscellaneous Objections To The Theory of Natural Selection" page 239 in the 1962 Collier Books paperback edition, with a "Foreward" by George Gaylord Simpson, page 239)

So was Darwin a "gradualist" or perhaps even an early advocate of what has been termed "punctuated equilibrium"? Was he this or was he that? To repeat an earlier quotation:

"We have a veritable Hegelian contradiction. Darwinism is sexist. Darwinism is feminist. How can this be? The obvious answer is that, in some sense, Darwinism is simply a clotheshorse on which people will hang any ideology that they find comforting. You are a sexist? Darwinism will accommodate you. You are a feminist? Darwinism will accommodate you, too." (Michael Ruse, 1998, "Is Darwin Sexist? (And If It Is, So What?)" in A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science, edited by Noretta Koertge, page 121)

Once again, one should read Darwin in the original (just as one should read as many original works as possible) and form your own opinion and not necessarily accept the opinion of others.

"His works are masterpieces of scientific exposition, written in a clear, logical, and eminently readable prose. His ideas not only touched off controversies which reverberated through almost all literature of the later 19th century; they became a part of the basic thought of man and his way of experiencing his [or our!] universe." Calvin S. Brown [Editor], 1956, The Reader's Companion To World Literature (NY: Mentor), page 116

And the "reverberations" struck at many places: although I have yet to read it, Stephen J. Pyne's recent publication entitled How The Canyon Became Grand apparently calls upon Darwin in explaining how the "Big Canyon" in North America eventually became known as the Grand Canyon:

"It took 19th century preoccupations like geology and Western romanticism to turn things around. Pyne writes. Charles Darwin's 'On The Origin of the Species,' published in 1860, popularized the idea among intellectuals that the earth was millions of years old, and scientists came to see the canyon as a spectacular geological record." Tim Molloy, 1998, Grand Canyon Was First Seen As Big Worthless Hole. Chico Enterprise-Record/Mercury-Register, November 27, page 6C.

In his 1876 Autobiography, Darwin wrote that at the time of Origin he could be viewed as a theist, or one who had the conviction of the existence of God. Perspectives change over time and in 1876 Darwin stated: "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic." (in Nora Barlow, Editor, 1958, The Autobiography Of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, page 94). Darwin had his final and fatal heart attack on the 19th of April 1882. He made no deathbed statement as to his faith, but had he been asked the question: "Darwin, have you made peace with God?" perhaps he would have chosen to respond with the words attributed to Thoreau (1817-1862) on his deathbed, who is said to have responded to that question with: "I didn't know we had quarreled."

SPECIFIC DARWIN WEB SOURCES LOCATED AT CSU, CHICO.

http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/ANTH300.html [1998a, "Charles F. Urbanowicz on Charles R. Darwin" for ANTH 300, October 6, CSU, Chico]

http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/DarwinArt197.html [1998b, "Darwin and Modernism" for ART 197, September 30, CSU, Chico]

http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/Darwin_Folklore.html [1998c, "Folklore Concerning Charles R. Darwin" for the Southwestern Anthropological Society Meetings]

Darwin Continues To Evolve: Urbanowicz On Darwin (Again!). (1997, For the CSU, Chico Anthropology Forum on September 11.)

http://www.csuchico.edu/anth/CASP/1996.html (1996, The Chico Anthropological Society Papers, Number 16, Special Edition on Darwin)

http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/Forum/Nov7-96.html (1996, For the CSU, Chico Anthropology Forum on November 7)

http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/Forum/darwin.mov (1996, Quick Time move: 14 seconds)

http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/Darwin/DarwinSem-S95.html (1995 Seminar Paper for ANTH 303)