News You Can Bruise for 2009 September 30

I mentioned earlier that every museum in Cambridge had a Darwin exhibit for the bicentennial. Exhibits vary in impressiveness, of course. The Whipple Museum of the History of Science had "Darwin's Microscope", which was... a microscope. The Fitzwilliam Museum had the awesome exhibit I mentioned earlier, but photography was prohibited. The Zoology Museum had a few specimens collected by Darwin, including a jar of octopods and a beetle collection. Fun fact: on the Beagle voyage, Darwin was really excited because he thought he'd discovered the octopus's color-changing ability, and he was pissed off when he got a letter back from England saying that they knew about it already.

I haven't posted for a couple days because each of the things I was going to post required putting up a picture gallery from my Cambridge trip, and I didn't want to make a bunch of galleries. So I've just put up one gallery, and I'll mine it for a while, even though you can see all the pictures now.

But you don't need to go to Cambridge museums to enjoy Darwinmania. It's also occuring on the web. Here are some of the links on Darwin and/or evolution I've encountered in the past few days:

• A video lecture on "The World Before Darwin", seemingly to be joined by further lectures, on The Darwin 150 Project (the "150" is 150 years after publishing On the Origin of Species, which I guess is a more scientifically hardass milestone than the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth).
• Cartooning Evolution includes a lot of the silly 19th-century Punchesque Darwin caricatures that were featured in the Fitzwilliam. (But not the excellent 21st-century watercolors by Quentin Blake, which I couldn't find a good picture of online, though here's a video slideshow.)
• A roundtable discussion moderated by Douglas Adams, featuring Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and Jared Diamond. Supposedly from 1998.