ALDO LEOPOLD ON DARWIN February 24, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Aldo Leopold, Darwin.add a comment
Also Leopold wrote in 1947: “It is now a century since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of the species. We now know what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise…. Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.”
EARTHWORMS June 3, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Darwin, Interesting, Nature/Natural History.add a comment
Darwin said of EARTHWORMS: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world.”
CURIOSITY February 12, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Curiosity, Darwin.add a comment
Josiah Wedgwood considered his nephew Charles Darwin “a man of enlarged curiosity.” Talk about understatement ….
DARWIN ON HIMSELF February 12, 2005
Posted by thenaturalist in Darwin, Nature/Natural History, Work.add a comment
In his Autobiography, Darwin says several very humble and touching things about himself. Some of the passages I’ve marked include such comments as: “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit…. I am a poor critic …. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited …. My memory is extensive, yet hazy ….” But then he talks about how hard he works: “I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts…. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts ….” Later he says: “…it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that ‘I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this’….” When I myself am feeling like a drone, I like to re-read what Darwin said about himself….
