Today I’m in Cambridge, Mass., to take part in the Cambridge Science Festival. I’ll be speaking with Ed Yong and Hillary Rosner about how blogs, Twitter, and social media are changing science writing. I’ll play the part of the old fogey who remembers the days when modems screeched.The event will be live-streamed here, starting around 7:30 pm. Hope you can join us, virtually!

Originally published May 3, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

Charles Darwin was the original crowd-sourced scientist. He may have a reputation as a recluse who hid away on his country estate, but he actually turned Down House into the headquarters for a massive letter-writing campaign that lasted for decades. In her magisterial biography of Darwin, Janet Browne observes that he sometimes wrote over 1500 letters in a single year. Darwin was gathering biological intelligence, amassing the data he would eventually marshall in his arguments for evolution. In the letters he wrote to naturalists around the world, Darwin asked for details about all manner of natural history, from the color of horses in Jamaica to the blush that shame brought to people’s cheeks.

Continue reading “Darwin meets the citizen scientists”