The program runs for 6 weeks in Queen’s College, Oxford. It is a mix of history of science (the development of evolutionary thinking) and of science (current thinking in evolution).  This photo comes from a previous year during a more typical English summer.  The current heatwave (yes, in England) has scorched the college lawns.

Most of the students (there are 17 in this year’s class) spend the two weeks prior to the program in London, interning at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on a history of science project dedicated to creating an online archive of the writings of Joseph Dalton Hooker, Victorian botanist, director of Kew, and Darwin confidante.  Pictured is Kew’s extraordinary Palm House (1848), commissioned by Hooker’s father, the previous director, and designed by Decimus Burton.

Hooker traveled on James Clark Ross’s Erebus & Terror expedition to Antartica (1839-43) where his skills as a botanical illustrated were challenged by the local fauna.

Hooker undertook another major expedition, to the E Himalaya (1847-51).  Here is a sample of his exquisite pen-and-water color sketches of the landscape.  Among these is numbered the first known view by a European of Mt. Everest.  http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/02/first_sketch_of_everest_credit.html

Hooker’s ticket, as pall bearer, to Darwin’s funeral, 1882.

Cambridge.  Darwin was a student here (after dropping out of his medical studies at Edinburgh University), and came back here after returning from the Beagle voyage so that he could start processing the specimens he had brought back with him.

Darwin’s undergraduate room in Christ’s College, Cambridge.  This is where he lived when he was the same age as my students.

In the archives of Christ’s College is a wealth of Darwin-related material, including illustrated letters celebrating his undergraduate beetle-hunting excitements.

Christ’s College boasts a statue of the young Charles Darwin (an attempt to re-create Darwin as he was when he was at Christ’s).  He is, as such, inevitably a selfie target.

Behind the scenes in the Cambridge Zoology Museum: bird of paradise specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in the course of his Malay Archipelago journey

The commonplace book of Erasmus Darwin, physician, inventor, poet, evolutionist, and grandfather of Charles Darwin.  Erasmus gave us the best ever synopsis of evolution (from his Temple of Nature, 1803):

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

Erasmus Darwin lived in Lichfield’s cathedral “close” (ie the community associated with the great church).  He had to be careful in the use of his evolutionary motto, E Conchis Omnia (from shells, everything), for fear of offending his ecclesiastical neighbors

Linnean Society, London, with archivist Isabelle Charmantier.  It was at a meeting here, on 1 July 1858, that the theory of evolution by natural selection was unveiled, though neither of the paper’s authors, Darwin and Wallace, was present.

The Linnean Society possesses the papers and collections of Linneaus himself, the Swedish father of taxonomy.  Here are some of his early notes as he explores ways to categorize and organize nature.

1735: the first edition of Linneaus’s great work, Systema Naturae.  Here he has already grouped humans with primates (“Simia”), though he mistakenly includes sloths (Bradypus) in the group as well.

Revising life.  In later editions of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus had blank pages bound between each printed page and used these to make revisions for subsequent editions.  In his tiny, cramped hand-writing, then we are seeing Linnaeus in the process of revising the organization of living things.

Linnaeus’s specimens.  By definition, most of Linnaeus’s specimens are type specimens — ie the key specimen from which a species was originally described.

Linnaeus’s Lapland expedition note book.  Linnaeus’s reputation was established by his journey into the northern wilds of Scandinavia.  His field note book contains of wealth of biological, geographical and anthropological observation.  His drawing skills, however, left something to be desired.  This is a charming illustration of the preferred local way of carrying canoes.

The room in which Darwin was born, 12 Feb 1809.

Shrewsbury, where Darwin was born and grew up.  The family house, The Mount, built by his father Robert Darwin on a small rise overlooking the town, is now a district tax office, but they generously allow pre-arranged visits by small groups.

(Old) Shrewsbury School.  Darwin attended the local private high school (as a boarder even though the school was less than a mile from his home).  The school has since moved out of the centre of town, and the Darwin’s school building is today the town library.  Darwin’s retrospective assessment of his experience there was not especially positive: “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler’s school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught, except a little ancient geography and history. The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.”

In the Shrewsbury School library: Presentation copy of the Origin of Species given to Darwin’s prominent opponent, Richard Owen.  Note that it is dated prior to the publication of the book (24 Nov 1859).

In Darwin’s geological footsteps.  After finishing his undergraduate degree at Cambridge, Darwin traveled to N. Wales with Adam Sedgwick, his geology professor.  Sedgwick was trying to make sense of the sequence of rocks that would later become formalized as the geological column.  In particular he was interested in finding Old Red Sandstone (from the Devonian) on his travels.  This however proved elusive. Darwin visited Cwm Idwal in Snowdonia (ie the mountainous area in the NW of Wales) twice.  First, in 1831, as part of his Sedgwick expedition.  He attempted to interpret the landscape but was defeated by the region’s complexity and his own lack of experience.  He came back after the voyage of the Beagle  when he had read Louis Agassiz’s theory of Ice Ages.  He recognized that the best place he could go to to see for himself whether or not these new fangled ideas were sound was Cwm Idwal.  He was convinced: “a house burnt down by fire does not tell its story more plainly than did this valley.”

Learning to read the landscape with our guide, Michael Roberts, geologist, historian, and vicar.

“Darwin’s Boulders” beside the lake in Cwm Idwal:

Hiking Y Garn, the mountain overlooking Cwm Idwal.

Castel Dinas Bran, above Llangollen.  Another site visited by Darwin and Sedgwick in pursuit of recognizably Devonian deposits.  The hill is crowned with the picturesque ruins of a 13th century Welsh fort.

Fossil hunting.

Oxford University Natural History Museum, June 1860: site of the famous spat between T  H Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.  The exchange is probably somewhat apocryphal, but it has entered popular consciousness as a canonical science vs. religion moment.  As recounted by historian Frank Sulloway, “Following a lengthy, pro-Darwinian paper, Samuel Wilberforce, the slickly eloquent bishop of Oxford, began a half-hour-long attack on Darwinian theory. With glib lines like “Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?,” Wilberforce’s speech met with peals of sympathetic laughter, and his rhetoric hit home. Finally he turned to Huxley, who was seated near him on the speaker’s platform, and asked him whether it was on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side that he claimed descent from an ape.”  Huxley’s supposed response: “[Asked] if I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion — I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

Natural History Museum, London, archive.  A drawing by A R Wallace of an Amazonian fish.  That this picture still exists is remarkable.  This was part of the set of materials — specimens, notes, drawings, living animals — that Wallace had with him as he headed back to the UK after four years in the Amazon.  His ship caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic, and Wallace and the crew had to abandon ship precipitously.  Wallace had time to grab one small case of materials from his desk, and this drawing was in it.  It was ten days before Wallace and the crew were rescued.

Darwin (statue) and Wallace (portrait): side by side (OK, with a big gap between them) at the Natural History Museum.

[Photo from previous year, as we have yet to go to Down House this year].  Down House, Kent, where Darwin lived for more than half of his life and where he penned the Origin of Species, the Descent of Man, and more.

[Photo from previous year, as we have yet to go to Down House this year].  Darwin’s “thinking path”, the Sand Walk, where he would stroll and ponder.  I live in hope that my students will have correspondingly significant insights as they walk along the path, but it’s yet to happen. Here they are accompanied by Janet Browne, Darwin scholar and biographer.