- Science
- The Loom
Creating Young Darwins
Charles Darwin was a DIY biologist. He was not a professor at a university; he was not a researcher at a government lab. As a young gentleman, he had the right connections to tag along on the voyage of HMS Beagle as an unofficial, unpaid naturalist. Once he came home, he spent most of his time at his country estate, where he ran decades of experiments on orchids and rabbits. He played a bassoon to earthworms to see if they sense low noises. He made painstaking observations on other species. He spent years peering through his personal microscope at barnacles. He spent afternoon following ants around his lawn. To add to his personal discoveries, he wrote to a global