Darwin Celebrations Highlight Brain Evolution

Darwin celebrations begin

A meeting in London at the beginning of the month kicked off the double celebration next year of Darwin's birth 200 hundred years ago and the first publication of the Origin of Species 50 years later. A number of events are planned which include a major television series and exhibitions in London, Cambridge and Washington. The celebration at the Linnean Society marked the original low-key start...

Darwin television celebrations begin

The double anniversary next year, which marks the 150th anniversary of the first publication of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and the bicentenary of his birth, has provided the media with a welcome peg to celebrate the naturalist's enormous contribution to modern biology. While the BBC is planning several programmes, beginning later this year, Channel 4, a commercial British televisio...

Darwin 200: special feature on brain evolution.

Receiv Accept This year (2009) commemorates both Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of On the origin of species (Darwin 1859). To celebrate these events, Biology Letters is publishing a number of special features on topics related to evolution. This first special feature focuses on brain evolution. At first glance, this is a strange...

On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution

Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical ...

Darwin and the evolution of flowers.