Sarah Catherine Darwin FLS (born 1 April 1964 [1] in London) is a British botanist.
Darwin earned a BSc in Botany from Reading University in 1999 and a PhD from University College London in 2009. Her PhD thesis was entitled The systematics and genetics of tomatoes on the Galápagos Islands. Her supervisors were Sandra Knapp, James Mallet and Ziheng Yang. [2]
Darwin first visited the Galapagos Islands in 1995 with her parents and brother Chris on holiday. She stayed behind to prepare botanical illustrations for a field guide to the Islands. She is an ambassador for the conservation charity Galapagos Conservation Trust. [3] She wrote a foreword for the 2009 book Galapagos: Preserving Darwin's Legacy by Tui de Roy.
In 2009, Darwin was reported in various media outlets as having "won" a "talking to plants competition" against ten others. In the experiment, tomato plants grew the most when subjected to Darwin reading extracts from The Origin of Species . [4] [5]
She appeared in the 2009–10 Dutch VPRO television series Beagle: In Darwin's wake [6] in which she, with her husband and children, along with others such as Redmond O'Hanlon, participated in a recreation of Charles Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle [7] on board of the sailing ship Stad Amsterdam . She attended the Science & Technology Summit at the World Forum Convention Center in The Hague on 18 November 2010, at which O'Hanlon was also a featured guest.
Darwin is the daughter of George Erasmus Darwin, a metallurgist, and his wife Shuna (née Service). She has two older brothers; Robert George Darwin (born 1959) and the conservationist Chris Darwin (born 1961). She is descended from Charles Darwin via Charles's son George Howard Darwin (1845–1912), an astronomer, his son William Robert Darwin (1894–1970), a stockbroker and brother of the physicist Charles Galton Darwin, and his wife Sarah Monica (née Slingsby) were the parents of George Erasmus Darwin (1927-2017). [8]
She has been married to German botanist Johannes Vogel, former Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum and now Director General of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, since 2003, with whom she has two sons, Leo Erasmus Darwin Vogel (born 2003) and Josiah Algy Darwin Vogel (born 2005).
In 2005 the family, along with other descendants of Charles Darwin, including George Erasmus Darwin and Chris Darwin, were involved in counting the flowers at Down House. [9]
Erasmus Robert Darwin was an English physician. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave-trade abolitionist, inventor, freemason, and poet.
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was a British botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For 20 years he served as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, succeeding his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science.
John Stevens Henslow was an English Anglican priest, botanist and geologist. He is best remembered as friend and mentor to his pupil Charles Darwin.
The Darwin–Wedgwood family are members of two connected families, each noted for particular prominent 18th-century figures: Erasmus Darwin, a physician and natural philosopher, and Josiah Wedgwood FRS, a noted potter and founder of the eponymous Josiah Wedgwood & Sons pottery company. The Darwin and Wedgwood families were on friendly terms for much of their history and members intermarried, notably Charles Darwin, who married Emma Wedgwood.
Harriet was a Galápagos tortoise who had an estimated age of 175 years at the time of her death in Australia. Harriet is one of the longest-lived known tortoises, behind Tu'i Malila, who died in 1966 at the age of 188 or 189; Jonathan, who remains alive at an age of 191, and possibly Adwaita, who died in 2006 at an estimated age of between 250 and 255 years. At the time of her death, she lived at the Australia Zoo which was owned by Steve and Terri Irwin.
Redmond O'Hanlon FRGS FRSL is an English writer and scholar.
Elizabeth Janet Browne is a British historian of science, known especially for her work on the history of 19th-century biology. She taught at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London, before returning to Harvard. She is currently Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.
Erasmus Alvey Darwin, nicknamed Eras or Ras, was the older brother of Charles Darwin, born five years earlier. They were brought up at the family home, The Mount House, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. He was the only other son besides Charles, the fourth of six children of Susannah and Robert Darwin, and the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and of Josiah Wedgwood, a family of the Unitarian church. He was a member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students.
Emma Nora Barlow, Lady Barlow, was a British botanist and geneticist. The granddaughter of the British naturalist Charles Darwin, Barlow began her academic career studying botany at Cambridge under Frederick Blackman, and continued her studies in the new field of genetics under William Bateson from 1904 to 1906. Her primary research focus when working with Bateson was the phenomenon of herostylism within the primrose family. In later life she was one of the first Darwinian scholars, and founder of the Darwin Industry of scholarly research into her grandfather's life and discoveries. She lived to 103.
Charles Cardale Babington was an English botanist, entomologist, and archaeologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851. A contemporary of Charles Darwin, he was a student of John Stevens Henslow, active in botanical circles and succeeded Henslow as professor of botany at Cambridge. Apart from the Manual of British Botany which went into several editions, he published floras of Bath and Cambridgeshire; and a monograph on the genus Rubus. In his taxonomic approach, he was considered a splitter.
Commemoration of Charles Darwin began with geographical features named after Darwin while he was still on the Beagle survey voyage, continued after his return with the naming of species he had collected, and extended further with his increasing fame. Many geographical features, species and institutions bear his name. Interest in his work has led to scholarship and publications, nicknamed the Darwin Industry, and his life is remembered in fiction, film and TV productions as well as in numerous biographies. Darwin Day has become an annual event, and in 2009 there were worldwide celebrations to mark the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.
Beagle: In het kielzog van Darwin was a Dutch-Flemish television series from 2009 and 2010 initiated by the VPRO in collaboration with Teleac and Canvas, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's ground-breaking book On the Origin of Species. The series is centred on an 8-month voyage around the world on board the clipper Stad Amsterdam, which follows the route of the five-year-long voyage of Charles Darwin on board of the ship HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836. The Stad Amsterdam departed from the English port of Plymouth on September 1, 2009.
Johannes Christian Vogel FLS FAAAS is a German botanist, who since 1 February 2012 has been Director General of the Museum für Naturkunde and Professor of Biodiversity and Public Science at Humboldt University, both in Berlin. He previously held the post of Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom from 2004 to 2012.
Christopher William Darwin is an environmentalist and nature conservationist who lives in Australia and works on his goal of halting the global mass extinction of species. He is the ambassador of the charity Bush Heritage Australia. He is the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin.
Dr Samantha George is a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Research Institute at the University of Hertfordshire. She completed a PhD at the University of York in 2004, then taught in the Department of English Literature at Sheffield University till taking up her post at Hertfordshire in 2007. She is known for her research on eighteenth century literature and science with a particular emphasis on the role of women and botany.
Maria Elizabetha Jacson was an eighteenth-century English writer, as was her sister, Frances Jacson (1754–1842), known for her books on botany at a time when there were significant obstacles to women's authorship. In some sources her name appears as Maria Jackson, Mary Jackson or Mary Elizabeth Jackson. She spent most of her life in Cheshire and Derbyshire, where she lived with her sister following her father's death.
Olga Herrera-MacBryde (1937–2007) was an Ecuadorian-American botanist and international conservationist.
Anthony Smith is a British sculptor who works in bronze. He is known for his wildlife sculptures as well as his depictions of well-known figures, including Charles Darwin, Ian Fleming, and Alfred Russel Wallace. He has been awarded major public commissions including the design of a new £2 coin for the Royal Mint, the first new statue for London's Natural History Museum in more than eighty years, and a life-sized statue of Charles Darwin for Christ's College, Cambridge. In addition, he is a wildlife photographer.
Romanticism was an intellectual movement that arose in the late eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century. The movement had roots in the arts, literature, and science. Largely conceived as a reaction towards the extreme rationalism of the Enlightenment, it championed expressing emotions through aesthetic and emphasizing the transcendent allure of the natural world.
Benjamin Bynoe (1803–1865) was surgeon on the voyages of HMS Beagle who made collections of plants and animals at the western and northern coasts of Australia.