Charles Darwin’s birthday is February 12 (This is also Lincoln’s birthday … and thus close to “Presidents’ Day … which might mean that you get a day off from work for Darwin Day!). There are a number of events planned in celebration of Darwin’s bicentennial birthday, in 2009, so there is an effort to get Darwin Day on the sociocultural “map” starting now. I’m going post, almost every day, something about Darwin beginning now and running through his birthday. I previously suggested that for this week of Darwin Celebrations people consider reading some Darwin every day. Below I provide links to some online sources where you can find hours of such reading.

Also, I want to point out that Darwin Day has a web site (here)

Darwin On Line:

There are several places where Darwin’s works can be found on line. The most comprehensive, as far as I can tell, is “The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.” This gives you the option of seeing either a transcription of the work or a scan of the actual pages, or both side by side. Literature.org and Infidels.org both have a smaller subset of texts, but you may (or may not) find them more readable depending on your style. Finally, the Darwin Correspondence Online Database deals more directly with his correspondence, obviously, organized in a way that makes this material particularly accessible.

I’m going to post a variety of different thoughts, analyses, and attempts to contextualize selections of Darwin’s writings. I am not a Darwin Scholar, but I have tried to read some of his work and writings about this work, partly because it is very interesting and partly because I think it is hard to call oneself an evolutionary biologist without doing so. For now, however, I’m simply going to reproduce for you (from the Complete Work web site) the famous “Tangled Bank” quote, from The Origin, 5th Edition.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. 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 grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator 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.

Darwin, C. R. 1869. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray. 5th edition, page 579.

This is part of the following series of posts:

Charles Darwin Bicentennial
Charles Darwin Bicentennial - A Tangled Bank
Charles Darwin Bicentennial- Beagle and The Voyage
Charles Darwin Bicentennial - Coral Reefs
Charles Darwin Bicentennial - Finches
Charles Darwin Bicentennial - Gauchos
Charles Darwin Bicentennial - Iguanas, a “most disgusting, clumsy lizard…
Charles Darwin Bicentennial - Notebooks