Darwin at 300: Anthropologists, Filmmakers and Historians Discuss

Darwins shoes.... from a statue of Darwin, Shrewsbury Public Library, UK.

Where do ideas come from, and how far do they travel? One hundred and fifty years ago, the astonishing year of 1859 saw not only the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but such pioneering works such as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, and Richard Wagner’s first version of Tristan and Isolde. Can we imagine the world 150 years from now, and imagine the place our ideas will have in it?

This is something that a University of Southern California event series will examine under the banner of “The Darwin Revolution, 1859-2159.” Scholars from biology, anthropology, physics, literature, history, and gender studies, as well as poets and artists, will explore these questions together this spring. Go to http://college.usc.edu/tcc for details.

Photo by Norma Desmond. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic