Author Description

From 1831-1836, Charles Darwin traveled aboard the Beagle to South America and around the world as a gentleman's companion before returning to England. He never traveled again. Darwin began his Beagle voyage without an appreciation of the planet's age or of life's ability to evolve. These facts he embraced later on the trip and after returning home. But what if after writing The Origin of Species, Darwin had the chance to take a second oceanic voyage? - this time bringing along his wife and children and carrying molecular biology in his back pocket. What a magnificent second voyage that would be.This book gathers together lessons of evolution seen through the lens of international travel and undergraduate education during a Semester at Sea voyage. Presented in the style of an "evolutionary devotional," the author weaves together currents and continents with metaphors ranging from Russian nesting dolls to Nazi death camps, gas masks, mummies, Moroccan bedbugs, Monet's paintings, Charles Atlas, drunken students, mythological trees, menstrual blood, and Ebola virus (just to name a few); all the while celebrating one of the greatest ideas of all time: evolution by natural selection.