Darwin's Children Drew All Over the “On The Origin of Species” Manuscript

http://theappendix.net/blog/2014/2/darwins-children-drew-vegetable-battles-on-the-origin-of-species

by wallflower • 12 years ago

110 43 12 years ago

monsterix• 12 years ago

"Origin of species, daddy? Oh, oh look at how my king eggplant slashed those horrible red carrots out of the land daddy!"

This was the best news of the day. :)

petepete2• 12 years ago

* aubergine

err4nt2• 12 years ago

technically they are called aubergines and eggplants, but saying 'aubergine' gives blanks stares anywhere I've been in North America. As a designer I love fancying up eggplant dishes on restaurant menus with 'aubergine' in the name if they'll let me, and then still include the word 'eggplant' in the description of the dish for those who aren't aware of the meaning.

erichurkman• 12 years ago

I wonder if carrot horses and blueberry camels are more ecologically friendly than their contemporary counterparts. They are most certainly more delicious.

ethana• 12 years ago

To be honest, those drawings are pretty good and very creative.

jgrahamc• 12 years ago

If you visit Darwin's home in the UK you'll also see that he had a slide made that fits on the staircase so his kids could slide down it. And there's a section about the effect the death of his daughter had on him. Clearly, a guy who loved his kids.

err4nt2• 12 years ago

Say what you want about Darwin's ideas and how they have been used and abused by others, but everything I hear about this guy endears me to him.

I'd like to think if I were in alive his time and lived in his neighbourhood that he's the kind of man who could tell a fantastic story, dazzle you with his knowledge and various ideas, but above all be humble enough to treat you with the same respect.

I wish I could say the same for scientists today, so many I've run into are so focused on their own area of research that they have lost the ability to relate that learning and wonder they see to anybody who isn't just like themselves.

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

I hope he flogged these little creationists bastards ! ;-)

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

At least 2 creationists under-appreciate my attempt at humor :-)

scott_s• 12 years ago

You're relatively new, so you may not know yet that HN generally doesn't like comments that are just jokes. The moderation system exists to promote the signal over the noise, and one-liners are mostly noise.

sputknick• 12 years ago

The "news" takeaway from this is for those of us who are fathers to young children, we can still involve our children in our work, be actively involved in their lives, and still be incredibly successful. I know I'm guilty of sometimes thinking my kids "get in the way" of my career. This is an excellent post for setting us straight, thank you for this. I need to be reminded of this once in a while!

lutusp6• 12 years ago

My ideal, beautiful children have never interfered with my work in the slightest, and my ravishing wife has never complained that (as was alleged about Richard Feynman) I never annoyed her by being lost in thoughts about Calculus. My children turned out perfectly, and my wife always looks like Ellen Page on her best day (http://www.nerdacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ellen_page...).

The reason? I never married. I never had children. Life is complicated enough without looking for trouble.

sentenza• 12 years ago

Do you also play computer games on easy mode?

But joking aside, I personally must say that the chaos that having children brought to my life is a positive aspect of the whole experience. It keeps me from becoming complacent and has forced me to develop some intrisical organizational habits and discipline.

smoyer3• 12 years ago

My ideal, beautiful children have never interfered with my work in the slightest as my work is an interruption of my interaction with them (and my wife). My ravishing wife has never wrongfully complained that I annoyed her for be lost in thoughts. When my family is around, why should I be "zoned out".

Married (and childrened) people often try to convince those who do without that they too should indulge - "you don't know what you're missing". If you came to the decision that a family isn't important to you, then you'd also be horrible at it (resentment can be a big issue). When an "unfamilied" person declares how pristine their life is, why can't they stop there? Your "without looking for trouble" phrase turns your personal choice into a religious battle ... there was no need.

As for how your comment ties into the post shared here? It doesn't. My kids have defaced my papers (and sometimes the walls of our house) ... they're now cherished keepsakes!

aurelius3• 12 years ago

As a father of three, with #4 on the way, I can get on board with that last sentence. But there's nothing like being married, having kids, and living the constant struggle to be a good husband and a good dad. Having a family will make it painfully obvious what your faults are, and how they affect other people. You will have to face up to those faults, and deal with them. If you don't, it's a disaster.

Life certainly is complicated, but the good stuff never comes easy (or cheap). You can stay single, be happy, and hide from yourself. Marriage and kids drags you out of bed and forces you see the light of day.

diminish• 12 years ago

indeed in earlier societies children were joining the parents in the "serious" part of life earlier than it's the case nowadays. My little 1.5 years old is doing his best to prove he can use a smartphone, tablet, and notebook the way his father uses, alas he can't join me to do the real work i'm doing on emacs. if we were hunter/gatherers i could show him the grown-up life earlier :)

thegreategatsby• 12 years ago

isnt it great: interested browsers can also check out the Darwin Manuscripts Project, a collaborative initiative based at the American Museum of Natural History.

nicky0• 12 years ago

"Much flatulence. Had an egg & toast this morning."

aurelius3• 12 years ago

I saw that too, and LOL'd.

jtheory• 12 years ago

That caught my eye as well! No mention in the article, but on the scribbled out page of Emma Darwin's diary, she's describing how she's been ill, and what she's been eating (interestingly, I suspect she was trying to see if what she ate helped/harmed how she felt).

Starting on Sunday, it says:

Sick from half-past 12 to 5. 9 or 10 __ ___ copiously ___ ...

Took only ____ 2 raw eggs ...

Eliza __.. afternoon

slept tolerably but much flatulence.

had an egg + toast this morning.

feels [sic?] pretty well.

madaxe_again• 12 years ago

25th April, 1840, Emma Darwin's diary - "Babbage".

Charles Babbage. Neat.

smoyer3• 12 years ago

I noticed that too ... perhaps Darwin and Babbage were going to collaborate on a book (tentatively titled "Computation of the Species by Natural Selection") which dealt with the probability of traits being passed on?

shubhamjain• 12 years ago

Can anyone help me understand why the writings of great authors, theorists of past are barely legible. More examples like, War and Peace[1], or Lord of the Rings[2]. I can barely comprehend a word, let alone the whole text.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Tolstoy_-...

[2] http://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/tolkien-manus...

tinco• 12 years ago

I think it's because they write mostly for themselves and mostly as fast as they were thinking of things. It's better to have to interpret something for your publicist, then to lose a thought you had while focusing on writing.

There's some notable exceptions by the way, you can't have a post on academic handwriting without mentioning Dijkstra:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF

Funny, I hadn't recently read the article I linked before posting it, and in the first paragraph he actually explains why he writes so prettily. Although the context is programming notation:

"[..] the underlying idea of which is that, even if you have only 60 readers, it pays to spend an hour if by doing so you can save your average reader a minute."

RamiK• 12 years ago

Because those writers you've mentioned drafted on paper with the purpose of releasing to print.

lucozade• 12 years ago

It's an established fact that all highly intelligent people have bad handwriting. I made a note of the reference for this but, unfortunately, I can't read what it says.

arnsholt• 12 years ago

An important factor is simply time. Handwriting styles change over time, and the cursive styles used in the past are especially hard to read for modern readers, since as we write less and less by hand, cursive writing (which is optimised for speed of writing) is rapidly falling out of use. And since we're not used to them, they're hard to read.

gus_massa• 12 years ago

Is there any hint that the children understood part of the topics or the drawings are totally unrelated? (I prefer to use "hint" instead of "proof", because it's easy to cherrypick some drawings and find whatever meaning you want.)

I have a daughter and when she asks what I'm working in, I try to explain it. (Usually Maths or Physic. Apparently, I always start the explanation with "It's complicated. ..." because she mocks me.)

For example, I think that the topic of artificial selection is easy enough to explain to a child, and it's not difficult to make a drawing about it.

analog31• 12 years ago

I find, if I can't explain the nitty gritty details, I can still talk about why the work is interesting to myself and to other people, what it's like to work on it, and why it's fun!

awda• 12 years ago

Ah, and here I thought the title was linkbait for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Children .

diydsp• 12 years ago

Famous Fact: the second half of the title of the famous book is:

"or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."

Darwin's Children Drew All Over the “On The Origin of Species” Manuscript

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