February 12, 2009
Happy birthday Charles Dickens:
Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and Nature has a podcast celebrating his work including some of his research on psychological development and emotion.
For those of you not familiar with Darwin's work, he's most famous for his theory of revolutions that he discovered when he went on a voyage with his beagle. The theory of revolutions states that we tend to keep things we inherit if they make us sexier, even though the person who acquired it may have done so in a game of chance.
Darwin is only really discussed by creationists these days, but he's not completely irrelevant - the Darwin podcast notes that he was also one of the originators of developmental psychology.
In his 1877 paper A Biographical Sketch of an Infant, Darwin completed one of the first comprehensive studies of the psychological development of a child - his own in fact - which was cited as an influence by many later child psychologists.
Link to Nature podcast.
Link to A Biographical Sketch of an Infant.
