Darwin Day stuff

February 12, 2025 • 8:15 am

In lieu of readers’ wildlife today, I’ll show some drawings and photos in honor of Darwin’s Birthday.  (Note to those malcontents who think that evolution is a religion that worships Darwin as a God: no, we do not think Darwin is infallible. He made a lot of errors, and his neglect of genetics and of how species really arise are big lacunae. Nevertheless, he’ll gone down in history as perhaps the most influential biologist ever.)

This comes from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior.

Here is my own Jewish Darwin Fish, just photographed:

More from Athayde. A mockery of the Christian Fish (there are many):

A big Darwin Award for this:

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on this day in 1809 and attended Shrewsbury School as a boarder beginning at age 8. He went to the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1825, but couldn’t stand the sight of blood and preferred collecting beetles. He dropped out and attended Cambridge University until 1831, when he started on the epic five-year voyage of the Beagle.  Here is his statue is in front of Shrewsbury School:

Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Darwin was pretty well off, and became more so when he married Emma Wedgwood, heiress of the Wedgwood pottery company. He married Emma in 1839 and in 1842 they moved to Down House in Kent (visit it; it’s not far from London!).  The couple had ten children, seven of whom survived. Darwin lived at Down House the rest of his life (he died in 1882), and it was there that he wrote On the Origin of Species and all his subsequent books. Here’s his study in Down House, which is pretty much as it was when he worked there.  I understand that he wrote in the chair, using a board placed over the arms. There’s also a basin behind a screen where Darwin would go to vomit, for he was often ill with a disease that we still don’t understand.

It’s me at Down House: August 19, 2008. You can see that Darwin had a nice mansion:

My friend Andrew Berry, who went to Shrewsbury School, and Janet Browne, who wrote the definitive biography of Darwin (two volumes). It is magnificent and written beautifully: a must-read. Janet showed us around Down House, which was a rare opportunity! I understand she’s revising it into one volume, perhaps because people lack attention spans these days, but I’d read the two-volume bio.

A cat I photographed at Down House. Darwin didn’t have much truck with cats and preferred d*gs. However, there are cats there now:

Here’s a tweet that points to many caricatures of Darwin and Darwinism, carefully collected and curated by John van Wyhe on his fantastic Darwin Online website. There are caricatures of Darwin, caricatures of evolution, and drawings from the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial”. I’ll give a few of each, with permission from van Wyhe.

For #DarwinDay, John van Wyhe shares this new collection of Darwin/evolution caricatures on the Darwin Online website: darwin-online.org.uk/Caricatures….Image: "This way to daylight my sons," Darwin says to Huxley and Tyndall (holding the banner of Science) in an 1873 caricature#histsci #HPS

— Michael D. Barton (@darwinsbulldog.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T03:25:05.199Z

Caricatures of Darwin. All captions are from the website:

c.1828 Two humorous ink sketches of Darwin riding giant beetles by fellow Cambridge undergraduate Albert Way, with captions “Darwin & his hobby.” and “Go it Charlie!”. The joke in this instance being Darwin’s obsession with collecting beetles as an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. See Diana Donald’s entry on this here. See some of Darwin’s beetle captures here.
(Yale University Library & Falvey Library, Villanova University) 1871 “MR. BERGH TO THE RESCUE.” At the door of the “SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. PRES. BERGH”. Harper’s Weekly (19 August): 776.

A postmortem portrait:

1882 “THE LATE CHARLES DARWIN.” The Wasp (San Francisco) 8, no. 300 (28 April): front cover.

Caricatures of Darwinism:

1872 “London: a Pilgrimage” by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré. The gaping human visitors seen from inside the Monkey House, in the Zoological Gardens, London, appear rather monkey-like themselves. This was only a year after Darwin’s Descent of man was published.

1909 “How true! How True! | DARWIN [on cover of a magazine] | IN THE GOLDEN CHAIN OF FRIENDSHIP | REGARD ME AS A ‘MISSING’LINK!” By H. H. Tammen. “994”. USA postcard, stamped 1912.
And two from the Scopes Trial:

1925 “Tennessee’s St. Patrick”. Los Angeles Times (27 March). Bryan wields a club “Evolution must not be taught in the schools of Tennessee” against scurrying apes and monkeys.

And from Chicago (a Darwinian town) showing how banning the teaching of evolution just creates interest in it:

1925 “HOW THEY ARE TEACHING EVOLUTION IN TENNESSEE”. Chicago Tribune (27 May).

21 thoughts on “Darwin Day stuff”

  1. This is great!

    Readers interested in more should look up the connections to composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Ralph is pronounced “ray”.

      1. Yes, you know, I had a thought later, to edit that – then I started reviewing :

        Ralph Vaughan
        Ralph Finnes

        … another Ralph with an “F” sound as that first sound of the last name… that’s as far as I got.

        But that aside, an interesting quote (bold added) :

        ‘The Bible says that God made the world in six days, Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way.’

        -Ralph’s mother, to Ralph
        R.V.W.
        Ursula Vaughan Williams
        Oxford U. Press
        1964

      2. For years I only ever heard it pronounced as /rælf/, even by the music teacher at my school, and when I first heard it pronounced as /reɪf/ thought it was a weird upper class affectation, although later found that it seems to be correct in the case of Vaughan Williams and others. There seems to be a bit of a trend to use the spelling “Rafe” to make the intended pronunciation clear – eg the actor Rafe Spall.

        1. Yes, I’ve known a couple guys who use the spelling “Rafe”. In one case I think that was the actual form of his name on record, not “Ralph”.

  2. Thank you, Jerry, for such a wonderful collection of Darwin imagery and memorabilia. Interesting and delightful.
    Here are a few Darwin quotes I picked out from Steve Stewart-Williams’ newsletter: The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter:
    “The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.”
    “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and I think truer to consider him created from animals.”
    “I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice… I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”

  3. In your progression of “Darwin Fish” images, you might add one – A toothy “Islam” fish eating a Darwin fish, eating in turn, the Jesus fish. A nod to Islam’s still-violent reputation. (Grim, I know.)

  4. Caveat: the Janet Browne link goes to Amazon with Volume 1 only, a hefty volume at that. Volume 2 “A Power of Place” should be visible on the Amazon page as a separate purchase.

  5. I thoroughly endorse our host’s recommendation of Down House. We live about 40 minutes’ drive away, and visit it a couple of times a year. We never get tired of it.

    And afterwards (or even beforehand), have lunch at The Queens Head in Downe village, where Darwin himself is said to have enjoyed the odd pint (yes, it does have a Darwin bar!) They usually have Harvey’s Best plus three other ales on the handpumps.

  6. “My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, But if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known.”

    The quotation—or something much like it—has been attributed to the wife of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, but who knows? It may be apocryphal. But it’s such a good quotation that one must hope it to be authentic. (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/02/09/darwinism-hope-pray/)

  7. Terribly minor quibble which I must mention as a proud Shropshire Lad. Darwin’s statue is outside the old Shrewsbury School building which is now the local public library. The current Shrewsbury School is the other side of the river.

  9. It is a compliment to Darwin to say that his theory of nature selection is one of those deep ideas that is obviously true once you grasp it. Actually it is debatable that natural selection was original with Darwin, but he understood it better than his predecessors and expounded it with much better understanding and clarity than Wallace or anyone else.

    When I was a kid I was fascinated by “natural history” and paleontology and such. I had the typical boy phase of fascination with dinosaurs.

    At the age of nine I read “Origin of Species”. I had to get over some boyish conceptions such as “the bigger stronger tiger is better” or the faster gazelle is better”. Once I really got the idea that nature optimizes an immensely complex function, the details of which are too complex for us to grasp, but which reality would automatically optimize — once I really understood the idea, I thought to myself “This is obvious. Nature would have to work exactly that way.”

  10. I’ve read the Darwin biography by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. Have any readers read both that and the Janet Browne one, and if so, would you recommend reading both?

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