PRESENTATION SUMMARY:

Monday, February 12, 2001, is "Darwin Day" and at http://darwin.ws/day/events/ you will find a listing of events. Ideas associated with Charles R. Darwin are as current as today's newspaper headlines, including the "Darwin Awards" at http://www.darwinawards.com/ [Official Darwin Awards] "...showing us just how uncommon common sense can be." Wendy Northcutt, 2000, The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action. Also consider, if you will, a January 31, 2001, headline in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled "No Escape From Digital Darwinism" by Thomas L. Friedman, discussing the recent world-wide economic meetings in Davos, Switzerland: "Then, there was the panel about the 21st century corporation, during which participants described digital Darwinism in chilling terms: The Key to winning in business today is adapt or die, get wired or get killed, work 24 hours a day from everywhere or be left behind (page A23)." I was not privy to the meetings and can only surmise that (#1) whoever said it was indeed aware of Darwin and (#2) did not understand Darwin. I shall explain.

In his 1859 publication entitled On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin demonstrated that while humans consciously practice domestic selection, nature practices natural selection. Natural selection means that individuals within the population that are best adapted to the environment survive; those individuals which are well-adapted can possibly transmit their DNA to the next generation. Darwin was not aware of genes and Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) and the eventual proof of Darwin's ideas came years later. I "contextualize" Darwin and "snippets" of videotapes are presented, wherein I portray Darwin. Two videotapes are available on the WWW and at http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/Darwin2000.html you will find a complete listing of my Darwin web pages to date, including the addresses of the Darwin videos; you may also take a "Self-Test" at Darwin 2000-2001 [Self]Test One. The last presentation I made for Professor McCready is at http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/DarwinSp99Presentations.html and then, as now, I point out the following important perspective on "changes" (and the importance of re-writing) in Darwin's six editions of Origin in his lifetime:

http://www.darwinfoundation.org/ [Oil Spill in The Galapagos Islands]
http://www.galapagos.org/cdf.htm [Charles Darwin Foundation, Inc.]
http://www.gruts.demon.co.uk/darwin/index.htm [The Friends of Charles Darwin Home Page]
http://www.ilkley.org/darwin/ [The Ilkley Pages: Darwin Gardens]
http://www.erasmus-darwin.org/ [The Erasmus Darwin Foundation]
http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/GalapagosIslandsoilspill.htm [Urbanowicz} 2001 words on the Oil Spill]