THE MORNING LIST
There is something for everyone. The journalists from the weekly Science & Medicine supplement have read and chosen books that will make you discover that the Internet is no longer as open as it claims to be, and enter into the private life of Charles Darwin, a man ultimately (almost) like everyone, or even think about the problem of alcohol among teenagers with keys to talking to them about it.
Darwin’s daily life in comics
Of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), we readily remember the image of the hoary patriarch with shady eyebrows, father of the theory of evolution, author of a monumental and intimidating work. We often forget that before reaching the pinnacle of modern science, he was an adventurous young man, slender and beardless, engaged in a long world tour aboard the Beagleduring which he gathered material to fuel his reflection on the origin of species. Have these five years of circumnavigation inoculated him from travel? In any case, he then spent most of his life in his house in Down, Kent, sheltered from the hustle and bustle of London.
It is his daily life in his lair that is described In Darwin’s slippersa delightful comic strip signed by science journalist Camille Van Belle and Adrien Miqueu, also science journalist and designer. The two friends relied on an exceptional corpus, some 15,000 letters exchanged by Darwin with his relatives, his colleagues and sometimes his enemies, digitized by the Darwin Correspondence Project, supported 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 concerns.
“There is no great man, they say, for his valet”reported Goethe. We can also wonder if the draft classification of his farts, taken from his health diary, will add to the posterity of Charles Darwin. The poor man was afflicted all his life with stomach aches and a fragile constitution. Beyond the anecdote – just like his famous list on the advantages and disadvantages of taking a wife – this wind scale testifies to a scientific spirit always in action, amassing a wealth of data of all kinds in order to better understand the world, around and in him.
This spirit, which has become according to its terms “a machine for crushing facts to extract general laws”the comic strip shows him just as fascinated by the observation of pigeons, orchids, earthworms or snails as by that of his young children. Without careful study of the latter turning them into soulless objects. The text written after the death of his dear Annie, at the age of 10, is particularly poignant in this regard. H. M.
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