All posts tagged: Darwin

Charles Darwin: Evolutionary Writings – an audio guide

Published by podmeister

On topics ranging from intelligent design and climate change to the politics of gender and race, the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin occupy a pivotal position in contemporary public debate. This volume brings together the key chapters of his most important and accessible books, including the Journal of Researches on the Beagle voyage (1845), The Origin of Species (1859), and The Descent of Man (1871), along with the full text of his delightful autobiography. They are accompanied by generous selections of responses from Darwin’s nineteenth-century readers from across the world. More than anything, they give a keen sense of the controversial nature of Darwin’s ideas, and his position within Victorian debates about man’s place in nature. In this audio guide, the editor of the anthology, James A. Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, introduces the reader to Darwin’s life and work – and its enduring impact two hundred years after his birth. From beginnings to The Voyage of the Beagle 1. Charles Darwin was a far from outstanding schoolboy and his father worried about …

9. Talking about animals

Published by podmeister

‘As soon as humans make images, they make them about humans and they make them about animals and the relationship between them.’ My guest on this week’s programme is Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford, whose latest book, The Human Animal is a rich and thought-provoking study of the relationship between the human and the animal worlds as reflected in art and science. It is one of those books which make you look at the world in a different way after you close it. It is full of examples of how throughout history we have drawn (often unflattering) comparisons between humans and animals, and it makes you realize that anthropomorphized animals are still all around us – in adverts, political cartoons, children’s literature – and the language of animal comparisons still infuses our everyday speech (from politicians crying ‘crocodile tears’, to a child’s taunt of ‘scaredy cat’ to the media branding a thug an ‘animal’ or a ‘beast’). When we reach for animal comparisons, we seem to be asking what it …