THE MORNING LIST
There is something for everyone. The journalists of the weekly supplement Science & Medicine have read and chosen books that will make them discover that the Internet is no longer as open as it claims to be, and delve into the private life of Charles Darwin, a man ultimately (almost) like everyone else, or even think about the problem of alcohol among adolescents with keys to talk to them about it.
Darwin’s daily life in comics.
Of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) we easily remember the image of the gray-haired patriarch with cloudy eyebrows, father of the theory of evolution, author of a monumental and intimidating work. We often forget that before reaching the pinnacle of modern science, he was a young, slender, beardless adventurer, engaged in a long world tour aboard the Beagleduring which he gathered material to feed his reflection on the origin of species. Have these five years of circumnavigation vaccinated you against travel? In any case, he then spent most of his life at his home in Down, Kent, sheltered from the hustle and bustle of London.
It is their daily life in their lair that is described. In Darwin’s slippersa delicious comic strip signed by the scientific journalist Camille Van Belle and Adrien Miqueu, also a scientific journalist and designer. The two friends relied on an exceptional corpus, some 15,000 letters exchanged by Darwin with his relatives, his colleagues and, sometimes, his enemies, digitized by the Darwin Correspondence Project, supported by the University of Cambridge. Added to this are the notebooks of the scholar and his wife, which reveal even the smallest of their daily interests and concerns.
“There is no great man, they say, for his valet.”Goethe reported. We may also wonder whether the draft classification of his farts, taken from his health diary, will contribute to Charles Darwin’s posterity. The poor man was afflicted with stomach pains and a fragile constitution all his life. Beyond the anecdote – like his famous list of the advantages and disadvantages of taking a wife –, this wind scale testifies to a scientific spirit always in action, accumulating a large amount of data of all kinds to better understand the world around us. and in him.
This spirit, which has become on its terms “a machine for crushing facts to extract general laws”The cartoon shows him as fascinated by the observation of pigeons, orchids, worms or snails as he is by the observation of his young children. Without a careful study of the latter, turning them into soulless objects. The text written after the death of his beloved Annie, at the age of 10, is particularly moving in this regard. YE
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