Darwinian Evolution On Internet

Technology has evolved to the point that the entire works of Charles Darwin can now be accessed online.
The writings of Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution, can now be downloaded at the click of a mouse - and even accessed in audio form and burnt onto CDs or put into iPods.
The 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images, including the seminal work On The Origin of Species, have been put online by the University of Cambridge, and means anyone with an internet connection can read his work.
Many of the articles - including extracts from his field notebook and 800 page diary when he visited the Galapagos Isles on the Beagle - have never been transcribed or published before, and others are appearing online for the first time.
The website was the brainchild of Dr John van Wyhe, whose own attempts to read Darwin's work ran into trouble at a university library in Asia.
Only able to access one book, he turned to the internet - but found the articles he retrieved were incomplete and missing important information.
Dr van Wyhe resolved to make Darwin's work accessible to all by placing it on the internet - and although the site is aimed at Darwin scholars, anyone with an interest in the scientist's work can download it for free.
Dr van Wyhe also determined to make Darwin's work available to all, and text-to-speech software was used to translate the articles into mp3 audio files. These can be put on to CDs or iPods.
"The idea is to make these important works as accessible as possible - some people can only get at Darwin that way", said Dr van Wyhe, the project's director.
"It's also a new medium and there's no reason why if you can search and read the text and look at images of the original that you shouldn't be able to download and listen to it as well."
He said he realised that information on Darwin could be hard to research when his attempts to study him in the Asian university proved fruitless.
"For a scholar it was incredibly frustrating," he said. "What we needed was a comprehensive electronic collection of Darwin's writings and I realised that since no one had done it I could create it myself."
Included amongst work appearing online for the first time are first editions of the Journal of Researches (1839), The Descent of Man (1871) and The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1838 -43). The second to fifth editions of the Origin also appear online for the first time.
Texts can be viewed as colour originals or in transcript form, and there are versions in German, Danish and Russian.
The site also includes the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest catalogue of Darwin's handwritten manuscripts.
The current site provides access to about half of the material it is hoped will be available online by 2009.

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