Yesterday I went to the John Hope Franklin Center for a talk on The Struggle to Picture Evolution: Darwin and Visual Media by Iain McCalman as a precursor to today and tomorrow's symposium Darwin Across The Disciplines at Duke University marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwins birth as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of the Species.  McCalman stated that Darwin's rudimentary visual skills and poor sketching ability in a highly visual time hampered him as a naturalist, causing him to rely on others to create compelling visual imagery to communicate his concepts. Moreover, as the others were trained artistically and scholastically in attitudes antithetical to Darwin's theories of evolution, that it was difficult for those with the visual skills Darwin lacked to present the details and concepts Darwin wanted to communicate that were opposed to their training. Darwin was also one of the earliest adopters of the new technique of photography for visual representation in his work.

If you are interested in the symposium, here is a link to today's schedule beginning at 4pm this afternoon, and Friday's schedule beginning at 11am tomorrow.

On a related note, a couple of weeks ago I went to a lunch session of science journalists [1] here in RTP for a talk on the development of projectile weapons by an evolutionary anthropologist [2] - essentially prehistoric man's developmental timeline of spears for jabbing, spears for throwing, atlatls, and bows. Interesting talk.

[1] The link goes to the archive of podcasts of the talks, after they clean up the recording and post it and the slideshow to iTunes et al. The projectile weapons one isn't up there yet, should be there in another week or so.

[2] a) Talk announcement, b) talk recap.