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Thursday’s class discussion about our upcoming papers led me straight to my bookshelves and to a book read many years ago called The Journey of Man – A Genetic Odyssey by Spencer Wells. In it he refers many times to Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Wells writes (paraphrased) that Darwin with just a few strokes of his pen and some twenty years of dabbling with pigeons and barnacles has demoted humanity from divine creations to a product of biological tinkering. Tinkering and story-telling…one in the same?

When I commented that I wanted to look at how the Bible (another story) influenced what Darwin thought and how his thoughts were a continuation of other stories – I had no idea that in his early days his choices were either to run away on a discovery voyage aboard the Beagle or “…[the] inevitability of a staid country parsonage – the logical career choice for a Cambridge graduate of that era” (Wells, pg.4). This information puts an interesting twist in my paper research.