Online Feature

Darwin at 200

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, we present here a selection of articles about him and his work.

—February 12, 2009

Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers
by Oliver Sacks
November 20, 2008
On Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

Darwin and His Doppelgänger
by Frank J. Sulloway
December 18, 2003
If ever a famous scientist was unexpectedly confronted by his intellectual double—a colleague whose independent discovery of the same revolutionary idea threatened to undermine his prospects for scientific immortality—that scientist was Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882). The man who threatened Darwin with losing his place as an original thinker was another British naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913).

In the Primordial Soup
by Tim Flannery
November 2, 2000
Charles Darwin's theory of how life evolves through natural selection was first published more than 140 years ago. It's a simple, elegant hypothesis with enormous power to explain the world we live in, yet paradoxically it remains misunderstood or ignored by many nonscientists.

Darwinian Fundamentalism
by Stephen Jay Gould
June 12, 1997
Darwin clearly loved his distinctive theory of natural selection—the powerful idea that he often identified in letters as his dear "child." But, like any good parent, he understood limits and imposed discipline. He knew that the complex and comprehensive phenomena of evolution could not be fully rendered by any single cause, even one so ubiquitous and powerful as his own brainchild.

Darwin's Revolution
by Richard C. Lewontin
June 16, 1983
Scientists are infatuated with the idea of revolution. Even before the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and with ever increasing frequency after it, would-be Lenins of the laboratory have daydreamed about overthrowing the state of their science and establishing a new intellectual order. After all, who, in a social community that places so high a value on originality, wants to be thought of as a mere epigone, carrying out "normal science" in pursuit of a conventional "paradigm"? Those very terms, introduced by Kuhn, reek of dullness and conventionality. Better, as J.B.S. Haldane used to say, to produce something that is "interesting, even if not true."