The Darwin 2009 Festival

Darwin imagining others: observation and language. Professor Dame Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge, UK). Summary: Darwin was a famously attentive observer, responding to movement, gesture, and the invisible thrust of desires in an array of life forms from oysters and climbing plants to human beings of many cultures. This talk will draw on materials from the whole course of Darwin's life and writing. It will demonstrate how speculation in his early private notebooks fuels his much later arguments and it will investigate how Darwin explores the awkward fit between 'expression' and 'emotions'. Being human, in his understanding, implies the effort to recognize, and perhaps to enter, other forms of consciousness. Language, as a particularly human tool, is itself caught up in the evolutionary process - 'half-art and half-instinct', as he observed. How does it help - and hamper - the investigation of different species? And what can be learnt about being human by mimicry and empathy with other sentient beings? These are questions that stretch Darwin's capacities and whose challenges he meets. The talk will investigate the degree to which his arguments still trouble our understanding.

How could Charles Darwin have all these impacts? Dr Jon Hodge (University of Leeds, UK) Summary: Were Darwin the English parson naturalist of legend, his vast impact would be paradoxical. See the young Darwin, not as failed Anglican cleric, but successful Scottish (and French and German) man of science and philosophy, an international intellectual indeed (more Edinburgh than Cambridge) and the paradox is lost.

The Impact of Images of Darwin Professor Ludmilla Jordanova (Department of History, King's College London) Summary: Millions of people can recognize the figure of Charles Darwin. My brief presentation examines some portraits of him, and considers their impact. I am particularly interested in his connections with John Collier, Huxley's son-in-law, who produced one of the most memorable images of him, and with Marion, Collier's wife, who sketched him informally.

Darwin's five bridges. Professor Richard Dawkins (University of Oxford, UK) Summary: Was Darwin the most revolutionary scientist ever? If, by revolutionary, we mean the scientist whose discovery initiated the most seismic overturning of pre-existing science, the honour would at least be contested by Newton, Einstein and the architects of quantum theory. Those same physicists might have outclassed Darwin in sheer intellectual fire power. But Darwin probably did revolutionize the world view of people outside science more comprehensively than any other scientist. I want to recognize four 'bridges to evolutionary understanding'. The first bridge is to natural selection as a force for weeding out the unfit. The second bridge is the recognition that natural selection can drive evolutionary change. Bridge number three leads to the imaginative grasp of the importance of natural selection in explaining all of life, in all its speciose richness. Bridge number four is the bridge to public understanding and appreciation. Darwin crossed it alone, in 1859, by writing On the Origin of Species. The fifth bridge, which Darwin himself never crossed was neo-Darwinism or what I shall rename 'digital Darwinism' because the essence of Mendelian genetics is that it is digital. As crests get longer, or eyes rounder, or tails gaudier, what is really being carved by natural selection is the gene pool. As mutation and sexual recombination enrich the gene pool, the chisels of natural selection carve it into shape, working away through geological time. It is an image that might have seemed strange to Darwin. But I think he would have come to love it.

Philosophical implications of Darwin's theory of evolution Professor Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) Summary: What are the philosophical implications of Darwin's theory of evolution? Do they show that there is no God, that materialism is true, and that ethics is a matter of opinion, not fact? Here I think we need to remember what the biochemist Jacques Monod said in another context: 'any confusion between the ideas suggested by science and science itself must be carefully avoided'. In this connection, I'll discuss Darwin's theory and its relation to what is now called methodological naturalism.