Young Darwins in February: Bora 1, Greg 0

Unless you've been living in a hole in the ground (or Florida), you can't have failed to notice that Darwin's 199th birthday is coming up quick. Yes, Darwin Day will be marked worldwide on the 12th of February. I'm planning to celebrate on two consecutive days in February, and some have decided that it's impossible to pack all of their festivities into one or even two days and have thus deemed February "Darwin Month".

Both A Blog Around the Clock and Greg Laden's Blog are out of the gates early, each with a post to mark the first day of Darwin month. As an advocate of celebrating Darwin as a young man on a physical and intellectual adventure, I am delighted to see Bora using the painting of the 31-year old Darwin for his post, but somewhat disappointed that Greg chose an image of the rather inaccessible bearded septuagenarian.

So, I urge you, my fellow science bloggers, Darwin's bulldogs/flying lemurs, Wallace's rottweilers and other champions of science and reason to please use this Darwin Day as an opportunity to pour on more images of Darwin the young man. After all, it is the stories of Darwin's youth that enthuse young people today. Unfortunately, there aren't that many pictures available (if you know of more please do let us know!) but there are a few to be had...




Clockwise from top left: Darwin at 45 51 years old, 31 years old, 25 years old as drawn by Conrad Martens during the Beagle voyage (this is, I admit, an egregiously poor quality digital photo that I took of the colour plate in my own copy of Fossils, Finches and Fuegians by Richard Keynes; the original is supposedly at the National Maritime Museum but unfortunately the image is not available on their website) and 9 years old (clutching plants no less!).

Update! Michael Barton has answered the call by linking to two more pictures in comments:


...plus some fantastically manly line-drawings of Darwin the Beagle voyager on his blog Dispersal of Darwin: