Charles Darwin’s birthday (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) today! I know this because I have just listened to Sarah Darwin – a couple of greats of a grand up the ‘tree of life’ – inform me of such just now on Today. On this day then, the much lauded, often misunderstood – and sometimes maligned – ‘father of evolution’ has gifted to his extended and forever growing family, and contrary to birthday conventions, the books from his library – that inner sanctum of a every learned Victorian – at Down House, the Darwin family home in Berkshire.
Shaw’s piece has a lot of very interesting references; whether they are his own or come from Greenwalt I am not sure. For instance, Michael Crichton; I am of the generation that belatedly discovered a fascination for the Jurassic and recall being very open to the possibility of dinosaur DNA being preserved in fossilized mosquitos or the like – and was absolutely terrified of velociraptors. And I also took notice of those first reports – from not so very many years ago – that dinosaurs had, not only ‘beautiful plumage’, but colorful ones as well! Here are some nice pages at the University of Bristol, where some of the leading paleontologists in the field are stationed. And to stretch the powers of the imagination even further:
Then there are the long ago ‘fossil’ observations of one Athanasius Kircher, who I came upon during a reading of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Tyll a few years ago, and his and Steno’s struggles to reconcile there observations in the natural world with their Christian faith. (I actually have in my possession at this time an academic collection of writings about Kircher which I may be inspired to dip into.)
And, in the not so natural world, Shaw mentions another abiding interest of mine: the struggle to come to terms with a colourful past that is contrary to the long accepted white aesthetic. New to me that a landsman should be one of those.
Thank God and every other god there is
That time is an aesthete
Who strips the colours from the Parthenon.
We are left, were it not
For the play of shadow,
With the acres and square miles
Of Fuseli’s white ghost-flesh
But it beats the polychromatic
Crap out of the Disneyland
That antiquity once was.
One may think we are talking about two very different things here – science and art, if you will – but Liam Shaw in the conclusion to his article says: ‘Like sculptures, fossils need curators.’ And, seemingly echoing the sentiments of Greenwalt, that, faced with ever newer technologies, ‘Extracting new information from old fossils is a question of knowing what to look for – but it’s also a question of knowing when to stop.’
Chilly – if it were not so warm – is the latest so-called Synthesis Report just presented by the IPCC and soon to be published in full.
Simply stated; the 1.5C limit presumed to be the maximum global temperature increase beyond which damage to the earth’s environment would be irreversible is more than in jeopardy – probably unattainable. That’s the pessimistic reading, and perhaps the only reading.
Direct links below to PDFs of the press release and summary; it is said that the full report – a hefty affair, that few would seriously read I would say – will be available soon.
