The closest I got to a Phylum Feast yesterday was going shopping and buying some maple-cinnamon(?) covered peanuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and corn nuts. I couldn't find any pine nuts.
I should add some more:
- Eudicots - Rosids - Fabids - pumpkin
- Eudicots - Asterids - Campanulids - lettuce, sunflower
- Monocots - Poales - American corn
- Magnoliids - cinnamon
- Pinophyta - pine nuts
About Charles Darwin himself, his voyage aboard the exploration ship
HMS Beagle has gotten a lot of attention. If nothing else, it is more dramatic than staying home all day in one's home, as CD did for much of the rest of his life. In fact, may people seem to treat it as a certain myth motif, the
Hero's journey. Different students of mythology have come up with several statements of it, and here is Joseph Campbell's statement:
- Departure
- The Call to Adventure
- Refusal of the Call
- Meeting the Mentor
- Crossing the First Threshold
- Belly of the Whale
- Initiation
- The Road of Trials
- The Meeting with the Goddess
- The Woman As Temptress
- Atonement with the Father/Abyss
- Apotheosis
- The Ultimate Boon
- Return
- Refusal of the Return
- The Magic Flight
- Rescue from Without
- The Crossing of the Return Threshold
- Master of Two Worlds
- Freedom to Live
In fact, some people seem to think that CD worked out evolutionary biology in his voyage. But he only started thinking about it after he returned. Darwin's finches he only pointed out much later as an example of adaptive radiation. It is still recognized as a good example, and a much-researched example has been the cichlid fish of Lake Tanganyika in Africa.
But along the way, he wrote about Australia in his diary on 19th January 1836:
A little time before this, I had been lying on a sunny bank & was reflecting on the strange character of the Animals of this country as compared to the rest of the World. An unbeliever in everything beyond his own reason, might exclaim "Surely two distinct Creators must have been [at] work; their object however has
beer the same & certainly the end in each case is complete".