The world is always changing. The things that change with it, that flexibly adapt to its new demands, are the things most likely to survive and flourish. Charles Darwin’s take on this theme has profoundly influenced our understanding of the natural history of the living world. In Harry Karlinsky’s The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857–1879) we learn that Darwin’s eleventh and youngest child extended and applied his father’s work to the domain of man-made artifacts, such as eating utensils. How do different types of forks, for example, “evolve” to acquire specialized features and characteristics that distinguish them from other types of forks? How did the left-outermost tine on a pastry fork come to be wider than its other tines?
We also learn that there is an intriguing connection to Canada in all of this. It seems that Thomas spent the final weeks of his relatively short life detained in an insane asylum in...
Mark Fenske, a neuroscientist and former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Guelph. He is the co-author of the best-selling The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success (Da Capo, 2010).
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