Two Pound Coin

Today I found this coin in my change.

(I've noticed before that the special issue coins from one year don't start to appear in circulation until late the following year.)

The Evolutionary Approach to Ethics

This BBC radio program almost passed by without me noticing.  I put this down to its unpromising title: Thought Experiments.  In it, Oxford philosopher, Janet Radcliffe Richards explains how experiments inspired by evolutionary thinking are shedding light on moral attitudes and how people make moral decisions.  The program should be available for listening to until Sunday 5th July, but there is a program transcript here, which should be available permanently. I feel the need to do some reading in this area now.

In Darwin's Garden

I spent most of this evening watching two BBC television programs about Darwin.  The first, Jimmy Doherty in Darwin's Garden was excellent.  To quote from the program's web page:

When Charles Darwin set about proving his theory of evolution, he had none of the advantages of modern genetics or DNA analysis so he came up with some ingenious experiments of his own. In this series, Jimmy Doherty recreates many of these investigations.

Jimmy takes a hands-on approach as he digs up a patch of turf in Darwin's own garden in Kent to illustrate the struggle for existence; he ropes down a chalk cliff to explore the age of the Earth; and he lets seeds soak in salt water for a month. The smelly results from this experiment prove that plants have the potential to cross oceans.

These and other investigations gave Darwin the evidence he needed to publish his theory in 1859. By replicating them Jimmy uncovers a dynamic Darwin, and through them reveals the secrets of evolution.

This program will be available to watch here for the next 21 days.  You can also find there a link to the web page for the next episode in the series which is to be broadcast next week.

The second program that I watched this evening was Andrew Marr's Darwin's Dangerous Idea which I thought was rather pompous and over-blown.  For all the far-reaching consequences of his ideas, Darwin was very down-to-earth and his ideas were backed up with masses of detailed observations and simple experiments.  Doherty got this across much better than Marr did.

Darwin's Strange Inversion of Reasoning

The great inversion of Darwin, what McKenzie calls his strange inversion of reasoning, was when Darwin realized that you have a bottom-up theory of creativity, that all the wonderful design that we see in the biosphere could be the products, direct or indirect of a mindless, purposeless process, and this simply inverts an idea that I think is as old as our species, maybe older in a certain sense, and that is what you might call the top-down theory of creativity: it takes a big fancy thing to make a less fancy thing. Potters make pots. You never see a pot making a potter. You never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith. It is always big fancy, wise, wonderful things making lesser things. And so, here we are, we are pretty wonderful: we must be made by something more wonderful still and it's got to be like us, it's got to be the intelligent artificer. It's very scarey for people to give that up, and to begin to think about how our importance doesn't depend on the importance of something still more important. That is, not of that sort. I mean on the one hand I think that a good bumper-sticker recipe for happiness is find something more important than yourself to think about and worry about. There are many such things that we can find to replace the one big important thing which many people think they have, which is God.

Daniel Dennet in this interview by Susan Blackmore  (via The Guardian).

Darwiniana on BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio is starting the new year with several programs marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (and also the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species).  The first full week of 2009 sees the following:

Darwin: In Our Time.  Melvyn Bragg discusses Darwin's life and work with various guests.  Four 45 minute episodes broadcast at 9:00am UT each day from Monday 5th to Thursday 8th January.

Dear Darwin.  Various academics (Craig Ventner, Jonathan Miller, Jerry Coyne, Peter Bentley, and Baruch Blumberg) read out personal letters they have written to Darwin.  Five 15 minute episodes broadcast at 15:45 UT each day from Monday 5th to Friday 9th January.

Hunting the Beagle.  Maritime historian Robert Prescott tracks down the final resting place of the ship that took Darwin round the world.  A 60 minute program (actually a revised repeat of one broadcast previously) to be broadcast at 21:00 UT on Friday 9th January.

In addition, the following is scheduled for broadcast in February:

Darwin, My Ancestor.  Ruth Padel, writer and great great grand-daughter of Darwin, talks with various experts and tries to find out what he was like as a person.

BBC radio programs such as these are normally available for listening to over the web for up to a week following their broadcast (sometimes even longer).