Darwin: His Life, Family,
Friends, and Critics
College for Seniors course,
Fall 2008
Laurent Hodges (LHodges @
iastate.edu; www.AmesIowa.US)
Here
are links to the eight PowerPoint presentations (all of them large files,
naturally) that were used in class.
You can open them and then save them to your own computer.
PPT
- 1 - Brief biography of Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)
PPT - 2 -
Biologists before Darwin
PPT - 3 -
Geologists before Darwin
PPT
- 4 - Darwin before the voyage of the Beagle
PPT -
5 - The voyage of the Beagle
PPT
- 7 - Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'
This course, which will prepare participants for all
the Darwin activities scheduled for 2009 – the 200th anniversary of
the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the
publication of On the Origin of Life – will be taught on Wednesday
afternoons from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. on September 17 and 24; October 1, 8, and 29,
and November 5. This is not a course on
evolutionary biology, although Darwin’s main ideas will be discussed in some
detail, but rather will focus on people: Darwin himself, his wife and children
and relatives (including many famous ones); his predecessors (Linnaeus, Buffon,
Lamarck, Buckland, etc.); his close colleagues (notably Joseph Hooker, Charles
Lyell, Asa Gray, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Alfred Russel Wallace); his critics
(Adam Sedwick, Richard Owen, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, Admiral Robert FitzRoy
(Darwin’s captain on the HMS Beagle), Louis Agassiz, and the great
physicist William Thompson, Lord Kelvin), and many others.
PowerPoint presentations will be used in class. There are no assigned readings, but
participants are encouraged to read books by and about Darwin and the others
discussed in this course.
There is a web site for this course, most quickly
found by going to www.AmesIowa.US.
Darwin On-Line
Complete works and much other material relating to
Darwin and his contemporaries can be found at the British Darwin On-Line site (darwin-online.org.uk). These include (or will include, when
finished) all his books, articles, letters, dairies and other private papers,
obituaries, reviews, photos, etc. For example, all six editions of On the
Origin of Species are online. Most
items are available either in text form or image form (actual scans of the
original books or papers), even in a side-by-side version showing both the text
and the images, plus there are also audio versions of many items.
Project Gutenberg
A general web site of interest is the Project Gutenberg site, which contains
texts of many books and other written works, organized by author and by
title. For example, many of the works
of Darwin, Huxley and Wallace are found there.
General Bibliography
William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians
(1955). A wonderful, always-fascinating
study of the lives of Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley and how they
intersected and affected Victorian England.
Edward J. Larson, Evolution:
The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (2004) is a fine history of
evolutionary ideas, including a chapter on Darwin.
Darwin, Charles (1809 – 1882)
The best biography of Darwin is generally considered
to be Janet Browne’s two-volume biography: Charles Darwin: Voyaging
(2002) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002).
Other well-known biographies exist, such as the
older one, Charles Darwin and His World (1965) by Julian Huxley and H.
B. D. Kettlewell which is particularly charming because of its many photographs
and heavy use of quotations directly from Darwin’s publications and
letters. There is also the 1991
biography, Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.
Darwin’s great-great-grandson Randal Keynes wrote
the touching Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin,
His Daughter and Human Evolution (2001).
A good, short, recent biography is David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006).
There are also more specialized works on parts of
Darwin’s life, particularly about his voyage on the HMS Beagle.-
Darwin, Erasmus (1731 – 1802)
Paternal grandfather of
Charles Darwin; a physician and poet.
His major biological works are:
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825 – 1895)
Adrian Desmond: Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to
Evolution’s High Priest (Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1994,
1997). 820 pages; originally published
as two separate volumes.
Lyell, Sir Charles (1797 – 1875)
This famous geologist’s
best-known work is the 3-volume Principles of Geology (1830 – 1833),
which he continually revised during his lifetime; its second volume dealt with
organic life on earth. He also wrote Geological
Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), as well as two books on travels
in North America.
Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823 – 1913)
Michael Shermer’s biography of Wallace is called In
Darwin’s Shadow (2002); it was available free as a pdf file from www.wowio.com, which
is currently being redone, and may be available again in the future.
Wallace also wrote an autobiography, My Life.
Darwin’s works
The complete works of Darwin on line can be found at
Darwin On-Line. Here are some of the best ones to read:
Autobiography (published posthumously):
On-line
version from Darwin On-Line Text version from Project Gutenberg
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Regard to Sex (1871)
On-line version from Darwin
On-Line Text version from Project Gutenberg
The Origin of Species (first edition, 1859)
On-line version from Darwin
On-Line Text version from Project Gutenberg
On-line version from Darwin
On-Line Text version from Project Gutenberg
Ernst Mayr’s One Long
Argument (1991) is an excellent introduction to Darwin’s arguments about
evolution and the formulation of his ideas.
Ernst Mayr’s What
Evolution Is (2001) is an excellent short introduction to evolutionary
biology with lots of historical information, especially about Darwin’s ideas.
Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) is a fine and thought-provoking work by a philosopher with a good scientific background.