To celebrate both the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity and the Centenary of Captain Scott’s ill-fated journey to the South Pole, speaker Sarah Darwin, a botanist and the great-great grand daughter of Charles Darwin, will be talking about her experiences during a recent collaborative project, which retraced the Beagle’s famous voyage to the Galapagos Islands, the expedition which formed the basis of Darwin’s book The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection.
Sarah is a specialist in the evolution of Galapagos tomatoes. She has just returned from a one year trip around the world on board an 80m Tea clipper with her two children – following in the wake of Darwin’s HMS Beagle voyage. The journey has been made into a 35 part documentary series, ‘On The Future Of Species’ by the Dutch television company VPRO, with Sarah as one of the presenters.
To accompany this lecture, Professor Stephen Hughes of Egenis, University of Exeter will be exhibiting artwork which celebrates seafaring voyages of discovery including the contributions the artists of the Beagle voyage, in particular Exeter’s Conrad Martens as well as some of his own work exploring breaking symmetry in a series of ‘keel-board seascapes’.
Steve is by training a geneticist with an interest in plant breeding and its modern technologies and their place in farmer practice. He also works as a sculptor stimulated by natural processes of forming and incidental mark-making in the landscape.
This lecture is part of Cesagen’s Public Lecture series, the next of which will be on the 31st March 2011, with Professor Allen Roses, Director at Deane Drug Discovery Institute, Duke University, who led the team who identified the link between the APOE4 gene and Alzheimer’s disease.
In Darwin’s Wake by Dr Sarah Darwin
29th November 2010, 6 – 8pm
The Oriel Suite, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
Doors open at 5:30pm. Lecture at 6.00pm
Followed by reception and artwork exhibition.
