Darwin on Shakespeare: “I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.” (The Quote Blog)
What to do for Darwin Day, and Evolution Sunday, and Darwin Week?
- Send a Darwin Day e-card to your friends, courtesy of the American Humanist Association!
- Find Darwin Day events here.
- Can you find a preacher preaching on Evolution Sunday, near you?
- Do you know a teacher who teaches evolution well? Call or write to thank them. Heaven knows they need the support.
- Join the National Center for Science Education.
- Add Panda’s Thumb to your blogroll. No blog? Well, at least bookmark the site.
- Read some Darwin. You can start here, or here, or here, with Origin of Species. I recommend buying the book — better to make notes on.
- Oh, I’m also partial to his paper on the origins of coral atolls, and his paper on the work of earthworms. Darwin was one helluva polymath.
- Ponder the significance of Darwin’s and Lincoln’s having been born on the exact same day, February 12, 1809, within a few hours of each other.
Charles Darwin has a posse, by Colin Purrington
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits, by Charles Darwin. You will need to scroll down a little to get to the text.
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[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Terry Gabis, Alltop Education. Alltop Education said: Happy Darwin Day! How to celebrate? http://bit.ly/hOHTdD […]
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“those puny whitetails”
Heh, yeah, I’d hate to run into a mulie at 60mph plus. While working in Yellowstone I did almost hit a bison once at about 45 mph, and I watched a car hit one–amazingly it only bashed the grill and dented the hood (it rolled all the way up on the windshield). It then ran off, so I never knew if it was badly injured or not.
And in California I once talked to a guy who’d hit a black bear and totaled his car.
So now I’m worried about just how big those fish are going to get…I don’t want to run into any of them on the freeway, either. And let’s hope those evolving mosquitoes stay small and slappable, because if they get big enough to slap back…
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Here in Texas the Parks and Wildlife Dept. has a “lunkers” program, for fishing. Rules used to be that fishermen were urged to throw back the little ones, ‘to give them a chance to grow.’ Serious icthyologists discovered this was selective pressure against size, and led to large populations of fish “too small to keep.”
So, now the rules require return of the really big guys, and there is a program to capture the big ones, live, for breeding purposes.
It’s working. Selective pressure really does change things, over generations.
Now, just try to convince the anti-Rachel Carson harpies of that — they claim mosquitoes are always stupid, and never evolve, in effect, despite clear research that showed in the 1950s that spraying DDT on hut walls bred large populations of mosquitoes that no longer paused on hut walls.
A wise choice on your part; I cannot count how many times I’ve stopped to assist the injured humans where an automobile met a deer — even those puny white-tails east of the Mississippi.
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One of my colleagues, a biologist, believes that the frequency of deer fatalities from being hit by cars is high enough (at least here in Michigan), that it must be creating selective pressures. So, being the kind of person I am, your question of how to celebrate Darwin Day immediately made me ponder the idea of getting in my car at dusk and seeing how many deer I could select against. Purely for the sake of evolutionary advancement, of course.
Fortunately for a few specific deer, I decided I’m concerned about my insurance payments than the evolution of their species.
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