Owen wrote lot of anonymous poison-pen about Darwin, Huxley and Wallace, not only the Edinburgh article. What about his tutoring of Soupy-Sam Wilberforce? Analysis of a lot of anti-Darwin book reviews at the time reveals his hand. Darwin an…
Way back before you were born, in August 1989, my mate and future Friends of Charles Darwin co-founder Nigel ‘Fitz’ Longhurst (1954–2014) and I were down the pub arguing, as you do, about fish. I maintained the bream was the best fish, whil…
Life Between the Tides is very much my kind of book: a wonderful blend of science, history and nature writing set in a particular locale: a bay on the west coast of Scotland. Adam Nicolson explores the complex ecological relationships betwe…
On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects was the first book Charles Darwin published after On the Origin of Species. Conscious of criticism that, due to lack of space, he had not gone into e…
I can’t remember how we made initial contact, but the author Neil Ansell and I have been online friends for several years. In late 2019, I finally got to meet him, and we took a short walk along a section of the Rochdale Canal. During our w…
In this lively, well-illustrated book, Jenny Uglow traces a year in the life of the revered eighteenth-century country curate and naturalist Gilbert White, whose classic The Natural History of Selborne has never been out of print. Uglow’s b…
Charles Darwin was born 217 years ago today. Happy Darwin Day! The more I read of Darwin’s life and work, the more it’s brought home to me that evolution by means of natural selection is not all cheetahs versus gazelles, fish dragging thems…
Seventeen years ago today, I planted the Darwin Bicentennial Oak in my garden. I am pleased to report that it is still doing well. I have now spent seventeen years gathering material for the longest time-lapse movie ever. Or should that be
Today (16-Dec-2025) marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen. In recent years, I’ve slowly been working my way through Austen‘s back-catalogue, one novel per year. This is to honour a drunken deal made with my sister-in-law f…
In The End of Enlightenment, Richard Whatmore explores why, after considerable initial success, the Enlightenment project was seen to have failed by a number of contemporary figures, including David Hume, Shelburne, Catherine Macaulay, Edwa…
In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin likened how we might classify organic species to how we might classify human languages—by genealogical descent: It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case
On a technical note, after much faffing, I have finally upgraded the friendsofdarwin.com website to use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). For the non-technically inclined among you, all this means is: Despite the address changes, any old links fr…