It has been over 170 years since a young British country gentleman name Charles Darwin set off on his five-year voyage on the and the world is still digesting the results. The which had been commissioned by the British Admiralty to explore and chart the coast of South America, employed Darwin as its onboard naturalist. He took to his five year job with gusto, collecting and cataloguing thousands of plant, animal, fossil and rock specimens for the British Museum, and incidentally devising his theory of evolution and natural selection along the way.
Charles Darwin's life and work are the subject of It's a one-man musical show written and performed by Richard Milner.
Mr. Milner is a historian of science, the author of the and anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Mr. Milner performs at universities, arts festivals, museums and other venues.
"You might wonder what qualifies me to tell the story of Charles Darwin and evolution. Well I was trained as an anthropologist. In fact you might say I am the very model of a modern anthropologist!" he says.
"Tell me a little about yourself and your interest in Darwin how you came to do a musical about what we normally think of as a dry historical figure of science."
"Well, I set out a few years ago to find Darwin, the man, because the science is fascinating but very dry in terms of human contact. The Darwin I found was a police court magistrate in his spare time and the father of ten children."
"Darwin came from a family of prosperous countryside English physicians, and he was expected to be doctor like father and his grandfather. But he couldn't stand the sight of blood [and] ran out of medical school during an operation"
And then his father suggested he try the next best profession for a country gentleman of that time the clergy. Charles Darwin went to Cambridge University to study theology.
"He thought he'd be a country vicar, which would give him time to save souls and beetles, which was his passion," explains Mr. Milner. "He could talk to people in the countryside and at the same time collect birds and rocks and fossils all around the county."
"But when he was 22 years old, he got a letter from one of his old professors recommending him as ship naturalist for a voyage around the world on the and he went down to meet the captain Fitzroy. His job was to collect all the plants and the animals and rocks which were new to science in Europe and try to make sense out of all he had seen? sea creatures, giant sloths. He said that was the beginning of his real education!"
After five years on the Darwin returned to his home in the quiet English countryside, and got married. "And then he sat down to do something very ambitious. He wrote in his notebook he wanted to discover the 'laws of life.' Little by little he began to see his data point to the conclusion that all living things were related by common descent, that they had been modified from common ancestors, and that we human beings were related by blood to everything that lives," says Mr. Milner. "Every plant, every animal on the earth is part of one great Tree of Life."
"A lot of the ideas that we take for granted today as modern ideas, the idea that we are stewards of the planet, the idea that time is immense and stretches back millions of years, the idea that we are literally related to the other creatures of the earth, those all came to us through Darwin and his circle."
Richard Milner notes that it was Darwin's firm intention to write a big book on all this.
"But he procrastinated. He was nervous," explains Richard Milner. "His wife didn't like the idea that he was giving ideas that might be contrary to the Bible. She was very religious. And so he messed around for twenty years, until all of a sudden he learned that another naturalist called Alfred Russell Wallace, fourteen years his junior, working in Malaysia, independently, had come up with exactly the same theory of natural selection! And I've dramatized how Darwin must have felt when he got that letter from Alfred Wallace."
Richard Milner explains what Darwin's fundamental insight was. What did his revolutionary book, elaborately titled actually propose?
"In Darwin's day, everyone including his captain on believed the bible stories literally that all the animals and plants were created instantaneously and within the space of a few days. And Darwin showed us that there was an immense amount of geological time during which all species were related and descended from common ancestors."
"Tell me in a nutshell what natural selection is, the idea of survival of the fittest."