We’ll get together to celebrate upcoming Darwin Day 2016 (February 12) with this, our first GBH lecture of the new year, at the Humanist Hub in Cambridge (there will be NO free parking this time, sorry to say; see below for parking discount info.)
Our gathering will take place Saturday, January 30, from 12:30 – 3:30 pm at the Humanist Hub. We’ll have some snacks and drinks available as we hear a special talk by our President, Joe Gerstein, on ‘Was Darwin a Dunce?’
When Wolfgang Mozart was 7, it was clear where he was headed. Jascha Heifetz made his NYC debut at a sold-out Carnegie Hall in knee pants at the age of 12. John Stuart Mill was fluent in Greek at 5. Most Nobel Science prize winners have done their most meritorious work before age 30. Galileo was an esteemed celebrity from his earliest days…a true Renaissance Man!
Charles Darwin trained to be a physician but didn’t make the grade. He then got “gentleman’s C’s” at Cambridge and failed to proceed to his planned career in the clergy. His father, a successful physician, despaired his second son would ever amount to anything and told him so. Charles operated in the shadow of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a well-reputed intellectual. Who could have predicted the eventual outcome of this ineffectual performance?
And then he sat on his revolutionary insights for 12 years and almost got scooped by a schoolteacher from New Zealand.
What were the psychological and sociological and theological and medical issues which resulted in this bizarre procrastination of success in a man of genius? This man was sitting on top of a volcano that was about erupt into Victorian England. Perhaps he feared the controversy that would likely engulf him with the publication of his magnum opus. Actually, one of the major struts supporting his initial thesis was mistaken, but he had no way of knowing that the the time.
Joe Gerstein will review some of the issues percolating in Darwin’s life and times that might have influenced his behavior. Then let’s all speculate about the importance and pertinence of each as we approach Darwin Day, one of organized humanism’s most important tributes to science and humanity.