Happy Bday Charles!

Another Aquarius is celebrating his b day today, between our two b days - if Charles Darwin could have make it he would have been blowing 200 candles on his birthday cake!

Tha Natural History Museum in London is hosting the largest exhibion about work of this gentalman of science (well, word 'scinetist' was rarely used in Darwin's times so he was simply described as natrualist) who went down to Galapagos on board of HMS Beagle without any expensive, complicated equipment modern scientist seem to desperately require. The Museum also recently moved his statue into a proud place of their Central Hall where the Victorian gentelman botanist as The Sunday Times Magazine called him, replaced Richard Owen, the great 19th century biologist who was main critic of Darwin's scientific idea (and also the one who coined the term 'dinosaur') .

Darwin came to Edinburgh at 16 to follow his father's and brother's steps in medicine. He lodged in Lothian Street for two years when he found the lectures dull and tedious and afterwitnessing an operation performed on a child (imagine no anaesthetics, flood of blood and inhuman screaming) he was apalled and dumped his studies in terror. In Edinburgh he befriended a black man named John Edmonstone who taught him taxidermy and strenghtened Darwin's abolitionism opinions supported by scientist's fanatically anti-slavery family. Edinburgh at the time was a home to many black people, often former slaves who followed the plantation managers to Scotland. Some of them willing to make black people another species...

However I would like to write about Darwin not only as the man who, in Richard Dawkin's words made it intellectually respectable to be an atheist but also the one who almost did not make it with his On origin of species!

Not only was he haunted by a severe anxiety and intellectual torment all his life but he also almost have not published his revolutionary work. He gathered the evidence for the book that changed people's minds 150 years ago but foolishly he did not publish it fast enough. Now his work is being searched for plagiarism by a special software to see if he picked a pocket of a certain Alfred Russel Wallace who released his essay with a very simmilar idea a year before Darwin.

I am keeping my fingers crossed for Charles - he was after all a true British gentelman.