This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
O Darwin, sage whose mild sagacity
Has set at naught the blank opacity
Of Nature, there to place instead
Ideas of which it must be said
Have changed the world: the day
Is yours. Let no-one say,
However, that your claims were bold,
Or grand, or complex. Simply told,
The evolutionary recipe requires
Environmental change, the fact that sires
Reproduce profusely and pass on
Their genes to each new generation.
What strikes me most about your sheltered life
At Down, with loads of children, loving wife,
And railway shares – your modesty.
Your careful reticence. No-one could see
But you the storms ahead,
That as you lay abed
How deep the sea of faith was stirred:
How evolution dimmed the Word.
Nor how that one day you’d be made a prophet
With tablets, fiery chariot: ‘Come off it!’
You’d have said, and after, turned away,
To pass another contemplative day.
All that aside, come see the world you’ve made!
A world in which your kind and gentle shade
Is found on T-shirts, bumper stickers
And even lines of saucy knickers
Evolutionary lingerie. Yesterday
Your view of changing life
Is culturally rife.
One should take a longer view.
Your stamp is in the morning dew,
The shaping of the eye, the thrust of worms,
The mightiest of whales, the smallest germs.
And how they are, as one and all, involved:
Those wondrous things that have, with time, evolved.
Last updated: Wednesday, 11 Feb 2009 - 11:36 UTC
© 2009 Nature Publishing Group
I’d forgotten the railway shares, but another Charlie D clearly hadn’t. What form of thing’s life was he threatening with his railway share and what was he charming with smiles and soap. Always handy for striking a light though.
Chris – I have absolutely no idea what you’re on about.
This may jog that memory then:
“He remarked to me then,” said that mildest of men,
“’If your _ _ _ _ _ be a _ _ _ _ _, that is right:
Fetch it home by all means—you may serve it with greens,
And it’s handy for striking a light.
“‘You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;
You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway-share;
You may charm it with smiles and soap—’”
Nope. Still nothing. Sorry.
Oh never mind. It wasn’t that amusing in the first place, and even less relevant. I wish I hadn’t mentioned it now.
Google to the rescue – and no, I can’t see the relevance either.
Oh I don’t know. Sea Voyages. Incomplete Maps. Unexplored Islands. Protocol Obsessed Captains. Exotic Fauna (Linnean classification of the JubJub anyone?). And that’s before I get to parallels between an Intelligent Designer and a Boojum.
Has set at naught the blank opacity
Of Nature,
Perhaps a transparent version of your august magazine is in order?
(Jokes aside – lovely ode, Henry.)
Charlie on what passed for the railway in Boston (about a century anachronistic, but y’all reminded me of this).
@ Heather – Charlie and the MTA have come up repeatedly on NN recently – quite a persistent meme. I still remember listening to this on an old Kingston Trio record my parents had (note for younger readers – The Kingston Trio was a popular music group considered radical and hip around 1960 – I am amazed to learn that they’re still at it.) What always frustrated me was that Charlie’s wife didn’t put that extra nikel in his sandwiches.
@ Jenny – thank you.
Perhaps a transparent version of your august magazine is in order?
Har har har. Goodness knows, we try our best, but it’s those damned scientists and their refusal to write in The King’s Englisc (the King being Alfred, of course). When Philip Campbell joined as Editor in Chief he commissioned me to do an ‘acessibility survey’. I chose in a semi-random way twelve recent papers from the physical and biological sciences and broked down the first paragraphs to see why they were so inaccessible.
Physical sciences papers usually are written in fairly good English, but fall down on the failure to define oncepts sufficiently well at first use.
Biological sciences are full of unsightly acronyms, which is bad enough, but their inaccessibility was a product of sentence structure – complex sentences full of nested concepts, relative clauses and streams of double-negatives. Things like ‘the failure to abrogate the inhibition of the repressor’ (I hust made that up).
I’ve just seen Google’s homepage picture.
Isn’t it simply vile?
I thought it rather pleasant.
It’s colourful enough, but not very accessible. It is barely legible as text and (so according to our web manager) the allusion to Darwin is not obvious to a non-scientist.
It has finhes though. And a sort of tangled bank. Maybe.
On second thoughts, it is vile.
Nice ode, dude.
Darwin says remarkably little about his “loads of children, loving wife” in his autobiography. It’s full of other interesting things, though.
Oh buggery, it’s THIS post.
Thanks Richard. You had me puzzled for a sec – I akways thought that Darwin invented the Christmas pudding, not integrated circuits.