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Join us for the 2025 Darwin Day Lecture: Darwin and the Art of Botany with Jim Costa, executive director of the Highlands Biological Station.Wednesday, February 12
7 p.m.
In-person and on Zoom
Free!
Register: https://reg.learningstream.com/reg/event_page.aspx?ek=0005-0014-ab4c6840c64b4850890e23c35c2b9854
Charles Darwin is best known for his work on the evolution of animals, but in fact a large part of his contribution to the natural sciences is focused on plants. His observations are crucial to our modern understanding of so much about plant biology, from the amazing pollination process of orchids to plant carnivory to the way that vines climb. Darwin scholar Jim Costa teamed up with botanical artist Bobbi Angell to explore Darwin's fascination with the plant world in their new book Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the Curious World of Plants.
A celebration of Darwin's often overlooked botanical interests, the book spotlights 45 fascinating plants studied by Darwin, each illustrated with beautiful botanical art selected from the Library at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Join us for this talk and come away with a new appreciation of Darwin's creative botanical investigations, the plants he studied, and the ways in which he helped shape our understanding of the world around us.
Attend in-person or on Zoom; the in-person lecture will be followed by a reception in the Pegg Exhibit Hall, sponsored by the Carolina Biodiversity Collaborative.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. James (Jim) Costa is executive director and professor of biology at the Highlands Biological Station of Western Carolina University (highlandsbiological.org), where he teaches biogeography, Darwin's Origin of Species, and, with WildSumaco Biological Station in Ecuador, a comparative temperate-tropical ecology/biogeography field course. An evolutionary biologist and Darwin and Wallace scholar, Jim has authored numerous papers and 10 books, most recently Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (Princeton, 2023) — Winner of the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in the History of Science, Medicine, & Technology — and, with Bobbi Angell, Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the Curious World of Plants (Timber, 2023). Jim has been a Trustee of the Charles Darwin Trust since 2016, and has been awarded research fellowships at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the NY Botanical Garden, the University of Toulouse, and the DFG-Centre for Advanced Study at the University of Hamburg. His honors include the Alfred Russel Wallace Medal and the Stephen Jay Gould Prize of the Society for the Study of Evolution.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
100 Old Mason Farm Rd, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, North Carolina 27517
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