Friday, February 10, 2006

Another Birthday, Mr. Darwin

Today's article in USA Today caught my eye this morning.

"In upstate Ithaca, N.Y., they're celebrating Charles Darwin's birthday (the still-controversial author of The Origin of Species would have turned 197 on Sunday) with panel discussions featuring Cornell University faculty members, Darwin-related family events at the Museum of the Earth and a screening of the 1960 evolution classic, Inherit the Wind.

One enterprising B&B, the McLallen House, even touts a package that includes a "graduate-level breakfast seminar on geology, evolution, and the Finger Lakes landscape" delivered by the owner, who has a doctorate in paleontology." See the Cornell Daily Sun for details about the event.

And if that's not enough to merit a mention here, later this morning I noticed another librarian deeply absorbed in the Darwin Conspiracy by John Darnton, a fictional account of Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, his work on Origin of Species interwoven with a contemporary mystery about what happened to the other doctor on the famed Beagle? See what PW Magazine says in its review.
Not quite up to traveling to Upstate New York in a blizzard this weekend OR plowing through a Victorian scientific treatise? Try watching Inherit the Wind, the 1960 movie about the so-called "Monkey Trial," that put the theory of evolution on trial in the courts.

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