Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
In 1860 Charles Darwin began to put together a list of predecessors, the men who had held evolutionary ideas before him. But, he lamented to his friends, he was a poor scholar of history and he struggled to find more than ghostly presences and vestiges of their lives. In this talk, based on the ten-year research she undertook for new book Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists, novelist and historian of science Rebecca Stott takes us back in time to examine the lives and work of those earlier thinkers who had eluded Darwin. She rediscovers Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da Vinci searching for fossils in the mine-shafts of the Tuscan hills; Diderot, in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin de Plantes finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. She unravels the long history of evolution as a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, as well as the history of a profoundly dangerous idea.
Professor Rebecca Stott is a novelist, non-fiction writer, broadcaster and academic who works across several different disciplines including history, art history, literature and history of science.
She studied English and Art History at the University of York, going on to teach there after completing her PhD. She subsequently taught at the University of Leeds and Anglia Ruskin University, before being appointed to a chair at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Stott now teaches half of the year at the University of East Anglia and works the other as a freelance writer. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
The Madingley Lectures take place at Madingley Hall, home of the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education (ICE). This lecture series, given by eminent speakers across a wide range of subjects, is an important part of ICE's commitment to public engagement.
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