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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on February 12th,

2019. I'm Steve Murski. It's Darwin Day. Charles Darwin was born

210 years ago today. 10 years ago, I went to a Darwin Day event here in New York City.

The program included some three hours of talks and tributes, some of which I turned into

podcasts back then. For this episode, we'll hear

just about 12 minutes from that event. We'll hear Darwin's great-great-grandson Matthew Chapman

and former Scientific American editor-in-chief John Rennie, who read excerpts from the origin of species,

but we'll start with an appearance by Darwin himself, in the person of writer and

historian Richard Milner, who performed a brief monologue from his one-man stage show about the

British naturalist.

Well, I was born a naturalist.

My father, Dr. Robert Wearing Darwin, a prosperous physician, did not consider that a marketable aptitude.

When I was a boy, he told me, you care for nothing, but hunting beetles, bird shooting, and rat catching, and will bring disgrace upon yourself and the entire family.

And so, at father's insistence, I entered Edinburgh's famous School of Medicine when I was 16 years old.

How I loved to walk the rugged volcanic cliffs.

In the Scottish countryside, they were calling me to geologize.

But Edinburgh holds dark memories too of medical training in those days before

...