Want a stand-up Darwin for your classroom, laboratory, or geeky party? Just contact me and I’ll send you a link to the Photoshop file. You just print him, mount the sheet onto something like Gatorboard, then cut him out with an X-ACTO knife or equivalent. You can usually pay the print shop to do all of this if you’re lazy.
Backstory
When I was organizing a 200th birthday party for Charles Darwin at Swarthmore College, I desperately wanted a life-size cut out that people could pose with. If done right, I hope, even non-scientists would want their photograph taken and then they’d share their photographs on social media, spreading acceptance of evolution in their social circles. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a life-size Darwin anywhere on the planet so I reached out to Carl Buell, an illustrator, who was nice enough to make one for me (I’m below).
Carl, being a great guy in addition to a great illustrator, lets me share the digital file with individuals who will put a portable Charles Darwin to good use. If set up in a nice area, a portable Charles provides an irresistible photo op. Great for museums, Darwin Day parties, lounges in biology buildings, etc. I’d estimate that there are now 75 life-sized Darwins on the planet.
My futile, long-term goal is to encourage the use of Charles Darwin as an icon for science, not just evolution and natural selection. Currently when the media needs an image for science, it opts for Einstein. Darwin would be better because he did thousands of creative experiments (see Darwin’s Backyard, e.g.) and wrote about them for the general public. If you need a person to represent the scientific process and a creative mind, Darwin’s the guy.
By the way, the background in the above photograph is an illustration by Borgny Bay (Landergren). She was a geochemist. The original is at the Scientific Institute of Oslo, but there was a copy on a wall in Swarthmore College’s biology building (there’s also a version at Carleton College). I took six photographs of the mural, stitched those together in Photoshop, then used a poster printer to make a large backdrop composed of multiple panels joined by tape on the back and supported with a grid of 8′ bamboo poles. It was a huge pain.
Here’s me.
