People forget who Charles Darwin was and
it's particularly important to realise
what an extraordinary human being he was.
It doesn't mean perfect it means really
interesting, worth getting you know. I'm
Ned Friedman and I'm the director of the
Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University
and also the Arnold professor of
organismic and evolutionary biology at
Harvard University. And I'm a botanist
and I study the evolution of plants.
Students really loved getting to know
the personality of Charles Darwin and
sort of looking behind the science and
these glimpses that you could get from
on the Origin of Species. I think one of
the things that we got by looking at
the person is we saw, for example, how he
used his family in his experiments. How
he used the power of the mail service in
England which came a couple of times a
day to his door at Down House. And it's
important to remember that after he
returns from the Beagle and after a few
years in London, he essentially goes out
and lives the rest of his life on a very
small piece of property. It's a nice
lovely estate but he doesn't really
leave very often the village of Downe. And
so getting a sense of how his
correspondents covered the world and how
he relied on friends and also people he
didn't even know to provide him with
information gives us a sense of how he
created the science. How he queried and
how he extended his very local context
and Down to basically the entire world
was his his experimental system and the
people who inhabit it were the extension
of his mind. You also get a sense of how
incredibly inquisitive he is. It's
not just the big events in his life: the
writing of on the Origin of Species or
his book on orchids or something else.
It's every day the correspondence
hammers home that this was a person to
the day he died who continued to ask
questions about nature with an intensity
that just is almost beyond belief. You
can't get that from any other source you
have to read the letters. But then
there's a playful side of Charles Darwin.
that I think by reading the letters when
he's a young man there's the question of
how students can relate to Charles
Darwin. Our first week of class was the
first
week of the semester. So the students had
been in college all of a week and one of
the letters that we read was the letter
that Charles Darwin wrote to his sister
Caroline during his first week when he
was at Edinburgh in college at medical
school, basically the same age, in which
he complained about some of the terrible
lecturing he'd received and you know
how sort of put out he was at the
quality of some of the things. But what
the students realised very quickly was
that that old man with the beard,
this person who really seems as distant
from their lives as anyone could be, was
once their age. And while they used a
cell phone to communicate the very same
things about the classes they liked or
perhaps didn't like. Nothing had changed
basically in almost two hundred years.
From that point on I had the sense in
the class that the students really now
saw him as someone who'd been their age
and once you've opened that door they
can accept every additional letter as
having come from somebody who isn't this
iconic figure. And that's really
important so that was one of my favorite
letters because I think it was so key to
to sort of setting everything up in
terms of the interactions. The one thing
we could do beyond reading his letters
or reading biographies was actually to
do some of the things that he himself
did, to sort of walk in his shoes. Darwin
was very interested in how plants climb
and how they move and we did actually
work with hop plants that Darwin worked
with too. And the way that they actually
coil and they coil in a certain
direction that's clockwise as they climb.
We also worked with insectivorous
plants. Darwin wrote a whole book on
that and got all the fly traps to close
right in front of us. And so again we
played with the plants that Charles
Darwin did. As I reflect on the course
and whether there was a favorite
experiment or set of observations we
made. One was the first day we met. I gave
everyone a jar of salt water, packet of
garden seeds and they had to pour some seeds
into the salt water and cap it. A month later
they would bring these things back and
we washed them and planted them out.
It was a set of experiments that Darwin did
to see whether plant seeds can disperse
long distances and ocean currents. So you
could explain how closely related groups
of plants lived far away from each other.
The students were all shocked by the
fact that after a month of being totally
soaked many of the seeds germinated. And
we actually went back to Darwin's
published paper and we checked to see
whether our species matched his species
and they did very nicely. And so that one
was an experiment that worked really
well. It really showed how the simplest
set of experiments were always being
leveraged for the maximum intellectual
impact. Teaching from the letters is
actually sort of the highlight because
they set up the background to every one
of the experiments we recreated in this
course. Seeing what it was that Charles
Darwin was thinking about before these
events happened in his own life meant
that we were setting ourselves up to
potentially not just read about him but
put ourselves in his mind.
