2024-10-06 04:00:14
THE MORNING LIST
There is something for everyone. The journalists of the weekly supplement Science & Medicine have read and chosen books that will make you discover that the Internet is no longer as open as it claims to be, and will allow you to enter the private life of Charles Darwin, a man basically (almost) like everyone else, or even think about the problem of alcohol among teenagers with the keys to talking about it with them.
Darwin’s daily life in comics
Of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), we easily remember the image of the gray-haired and shadowy-browed patriarch, father of the theory of evolution, author of a monumental and intimidating work. We often forget that before he reached the pinnacle of modern science, he was an adventurous, slender, beardless young man, on a long world tour aboard the Beaglesduring which he collected material to fuel his reflection on the origin of species. Have these five years of circumnavigation inoculated him from the journey? In any case, he spent much of his life at his home in Down, Kent, sheltered from the bustle of London.
His daily life in his lair is described In Darwin’s slippersa delightful comic signed by the science journalist Camille Van Belle and Adrien Miqueu, also a science journalist and illustrator. The two friends made use of an exceptional corpus, around 15,000 letters exchanged by Darwin with his relatives, his colleagues and sometimes his enemies, digitized by Darwin Correspondence Projectsupported by the University of Cambridge. Added to this are the notebooks of the scholar and his wife, which betray the smallest of his interests and daily worries.
“There is no great man, they say, for his valet”reported Goethe. We may also wonder whether the draft classification of his farts, taken from his health diary, will add to Charles Darwin’s posterity. The poor man was afflicted all his life by stomach pains and a fragile constitution. Beyond the anecdote – just like his famous list on the advantages and disadvantages of getting married – this scale of twenty testifies to a scientific spirit always in action, which accumulates a wealth of data of all kinds to better understand the world, around and within himself. him.
This spirit, which has become on its own terms “a machine for crushing facts to extract general laws”the comic shows him as equally fascinated by the observation of pigeons, orchids, earthworms or snails as by that of his young children. Without careful study of the latter, transforming them into soulless objects. The text written after the death of his dear Annie at the age of 10 is particularly touching in this regard. HM
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