Posted in 1990s, 1999, Angela Bassett, big beat, Britain, Darwin, Fatboy Slim, music, songs, videos on Sun Jan 24th 2010| 13 Comments »
Remarks:
Having done posts lately on both Darwin and Angela Bassett this is the perfect song. It is Angela Bassett you hear saying “Right here! Right now!”, sampled from her film “Strange Days” (1995). This song reached #2 on the British charts in 1999.
Posted in 1800s, 1970s, 1973, Britain, Darwin, history, Jacob Bronowski, science, The Ascent of Man on Sat Jan 16th 2010| 45 Comments »
The following is based on part nine of Jacob Bronowski’s BBC series on the history of science and invention, “The Ascent of Man” (1973). This one is about evolution:
The theory of evolution was discovered independently by two men: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace.
Both loved the English countryside, both loved beetles and both in their twenties found a way to make a living as a naturalist. There was a ready market in England for specimens of plants and animals from parts foreign. Both went to South America to pursue their profession.
Darwin went in 1831. For five years he served as the ship’s naturalist on board the Beagle, a survey ship of the British navy.
Wallace went in 1848 to the Amazon and for four years lived among the natives gathering plants and animals rare or unknown back in Europe. He set foot in a part of the world that no white man had ever seen before. He found 40 different kinds of butterflies in 40 days. But then, on the way home, the ship caught fire and he lost everything, the 40 butterflies, all of it, except for his watch, some shirts and a few notebooks – and his life. But two years later he set out for the Malay archipelago (Indonesia) and started all over.
Darwin saw the natives in South America as beastly while Wallace could imagine himself becoming one, living the rest of his days in the Amazon where his children would be “rich without wealth, and happy without gold!”. To him they were not just a little above apes but just a little below philosophers.
Both Darwin and Wallace came back from South America persuaded that the species change: that lions and tigers, for example, were once just cats way back in time. But neither knew how the change came about.
Then one day Darwin read “Principles of Population” (1798) by Robert Malthus. Malthus said that more people are born than can possibly be fed, so some must die. That was it: only the fittest live to give birth to the next generation. That is how the species change.
In 1844, at age 35, Darwin wrote it all down in a book and told his wife to print it should he die and left it at that.
But then 14 years later, when Wallace himself was 35, lying sick on the island of Ternate in the Spice Islands, he read the same book and had the same idea. He wrote it up and sent it to Darwin for advice. Darwin’s hand was forced. He came out with his book, “Origin of Species”, a year later in 1859.
Neither Darwin nor Wallace had any idea of genetics. That came later. But in their time Louis Pasteur did prove that life is based on chemistry.
No one knows how life began but we do know that the chemistry that life is made from forms easily under the early conditions of the earth – and even, to a degree, in outer space where you can find, of all things, formaldehyde.
See also:
Abagond 