Take a video camera and a copy of On the Origin of Species to a famous landmark or scene of spectacular natural beauty, clear your throat and start reading out loud ...
A project called Darwin Aloud is calling on people around the world to send in videos of themselves reading in their native tongue from the final chapter of On the Origin of Species. The twist is that the backdrop should be a famous landmark, spectacular scenery or a site of scientific importance.
The required passage starts about three quarters of the way through the chapter and ends with Darwin's inspirational concluding sentence, which this year has become perhaps one of the best known in all literature:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.The project is run by those nice humanists at the Center for Inquiry in the US, a not-for-profit think tank that publishes the Skeptical Inquirer. They will splice together film from as many different readers as possible, aiming for a rich variety of people, locations and languages in the final cut, which will be posted online.
Details about where, what and how to read, together with advice about film and sound quality, can be found on the Darwin Aloud website. The deadline for submissions is 1 June.
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