Mike Rosulek, a grad student at U. Illinois, has hit upon an excellent T-shirt design. Check em out at his zazzle site where you can buy them. Proceeds go to the National Center for Science Education. I think I’ll be a purchasin.
Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. The theory of evolution by natural selection might be the single most fertile and elegant scientific hypothesis of all time. To celebrate the bicentennial, I’ve been reading the two volume biography by Janet Browne, Voyaging and The Power of Place. Though I’m not through both of them, I can already recommend the books as among the best intellectual biographies I’ve ever read. One of the encouraging things about Darwin is that he doesn’t appear to have been one of those almost magical minds ala Newton, inventing calculus on the way to greater things. Darwin, it seems, was driven by a relentless intellectual curiousity and a keen eye for good explanations: characteristics that are a little easier to emulate than pure mathmatical aptitude. He was also, it must be said, in the right place at the right time–which is a little harder to emulate.