February 12th, 2007
Darwin Day – 198 years
This is my Darwin Day tribute to Charles Robert Darwin, born Feb. 12, 1809. Originally, I set out to create something rather different, but changed my plans when I realized that they were far too ambitious. In the end, I’ve put together a selection of photos from the Kingdom Animalia. Once I got started, I realized just how many photos I’ve taken of different creatures – and that’s just the digital stuff from the past 4 years. If I had dipped into the older film stuff, I could have added whales and numerous other creatures. Anyhow, here’s what I’ve put together over the past day. There’s no particular system to their arrangement or selection. My only real “rule” was to try not use more than one member of a Family, or stick with Orders, but it all became a little messy, so in the end, there’s a little of everything. I should add that this collection was determined by time (or lack of time) rather than by what I had available to work with from my photo collections. I’ve missed quite a lot of what I could have included (Oh well!). If you’re interested in taking a look through more of my nature photos, just visit my online photo galleries which currently contain approximately 4,400 images (still just a fraction of what’s stored in my hard drives!).
Tags: Darwin Day, Charles Robert Darwin
February 12th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
I love celebrating Darwin Day! The pictures are beautiful, bev.
February 12th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
That’s quite a collection, Bev. I hope you’ve backed all those photographs up! :-)
The composite is a great tribute. Today I’m thinking, back in Darwin’s day, at least in the Western World, the word “biology” had just barely been thought of. It was “natural history”, or “medicinal plants”, or “animal husbandry”, and there were certainly other disparate fields, but the concept of “biology” did not unite them. It was natural to think of all these things as separate and unconnected.
So here we are today, two centuries later, and the concept of “biology” unifies all of it. More to the point is the concept that every bacterium, worm, annelid, and primate are all related.
February 12th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
robin – Thanks! It was fun trying to come up with something that would work on a blog format!
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Wayne – Thanks — and yes, I have *every* photo backed up onto at least one auxiliary drive (some even on two), AND, I keep a full set of CDs and DVDs stored at my Mom’s place in case anything were ever to happen to our house. I lost about 6 weeks of my summer 2003 photos back in Sept. 2003 (I ran out of CDs and didn’t get around to buying more right away and then my computer crashed and burned) — and that taught me a lesson I won’t soon forget! (-:
You’re so right about how we thought (or didn’t really think) of biology even as recently as a century or two ago. When I was working on my graduate degree in English LIt, I became very interested in naturalists’ writings. It’s interesting to see how they were trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, especially in the late 19th C. after Darwin. It sort of turned things upside down for many naturalists!
February 12th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
http://pinicola.ca/darwind2.htm expounds our history of Phylum Feasts on Darwin’s birthday: a tradition we transferred to the Eastern Ontario Biodiversity Museum, and which we’re waiting for the formal end of the museum before publicly reviving. But on Friday Seburns and Matt Keevil and Jennie & Aleta held a less-intense celebration before going out to Mudpuppy Night (what seems to have proven to be a dental malaise prevented my participation). I’d be accused of religious fanaticism, of course, if I insisted that it’s everybody’s responsibility to always keep in mind our relatedness to all species that we interact with, as food or in any other capacity, and to acknowledge the “Triumph of the Darwinian Method” by refraining from statements that aren’t vulnerable to falsification… (see http://store.doverpublications.com/0486432742.html or http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Darwinian-Biology-Psychology-Medicine/dp/0486432742 ).
February 12th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Fred – Thanks for dropping by and posting links to the Phylum Feast page and also to the texts. I wondered what was happening with the Phylum Feast these days, but see that it has survived, even if in a “less-intense” state.
February 12th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Wonderful collection–and a fitting tribute: amazing what a handful of single-celled critters have become. Happy Darwin Day!
February 13th, 2007 at 2:51 am
As I perused your photos I keep thinking of the hours of joy you’ve experienced as nature sifted beauty and mystery through your light-collecting devices.
February 13th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Pamela – Thanks – Yes, I always think that too!
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Cathy – Very true. Whenever I look at one of my photos, I can always remember the exact moment and what it was like and what I was thinking while looking at each creature. Lots of great memories tied to all of these photos.