Season 1 Episode 2: Chapter I - Variation Under Domestication

 
This is episode 2 of the series and we read and discuss Chapter One from Origin of Species entitled Variation Under Domestication. We talked about the great diversity of pigeon breeds that Darwin was impressed with and used as a model to explain how selective breeding can create new varieties and forms. Scroll down on this website to see a nice slide show of Pigeon Breeds.

James made the claim that giraffe's necks are actually short compared to other herbivores in Africa and this photo shows a giraffe having to kneel to drink water where the zebras have no problem reaching the water with their long necks.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-do-giraffes-drink-water

The scientific paper that Sarah referenced concerning a current view of dog evolution can be found here.
 
Wired magazine wrote a nice summary of the cattle evolution story and it can be found here.







Interlude music within the podcast is "Vadodora Chill Mix" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Welcome to the podcast

Welcome to the web resource to the Discovering Darwin Podcast. Each podcast episode is dedicated to a discussion of Charles Darwin and his writings. This first season will focus on Darwin's most famous work - The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. If you listen to the podcast you will get to hear Josh's rendition of the complete title of the book. After the first episode, which is dedicated to "Who is Darwin and how did he come to his conclusions?", we will continue the podcast season by dedicating each episode to a chapter of the book. Within the podcast we will give a chapter summary using quotes from the text, then Sarah, Josh and James will have an informal conversation about the contents of the chapter and random aspects that intrigued us and then we will end the podcast with a contemporary scientific view of the ideas of the chapter, discussing where Darwin was right and where he may have been incorrect. 

To make it easy for you the listener to follow along with the conversation we all are using the Modern Library 6th edition of Origin of Species and make page references to that edition.Thanks for joining us and feel free to ask us questions which we will answer either through the blog or, if the topic deserves it, a secondary mini-podcast.

The cover of the hardback version of the Modern Library edition of The Origin of Species

The opening theme to Discovering Darwin is May by Jared C. Balogh. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Balogh/Revitalized_Eyes/MAY
Copyright: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Season 1 Episode 1 - Who is Darwin and why are we speaking from inside a box?

In this first episode of Discovering Darwin, Sarah, Josh and James introduce you to Charles Darwin - the man and the myth. We explore who Darwin was in his time and how he came to develop one of the most influential idea of the 19th Century.  

One of the great online resources about Darwin and his life is the Darwin Online website maintained by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. This amazing website has all of Darwin's works online as TEXT files, PDFs and, most excitingly, as IMAGES of the original books. You can peruse the digital pages of actual books and see random annotations from readers of the past. It has all of Darwin's published works, notebooks, letters, journal entries and random interesting documents like student bills, marriage note and diaries. It also has other relevant books from other authors that were in Darwin's personal library. 

During the discussion James referenced a wonderful book by Rebecca Stott called Darwin's Ghost but, unfortunately, he forgot the author's name at the time.  Darwin's Ghosts explores in detail a number of the people Darwin acknowledges in his short introduction chapter called An Historical Sketch. 

The opening theme to Discovering Darwin is "May" by Jared C. Balogh. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Balogh/Revitalized_Eyes/MAY 
Copyright: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/