Seated in the Galloway Theatre on 7 April 2025:
My mind vibrates with an ongoing evolutionary biology, from The Origin of Species to The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.
"Sir Alexander McCall Smith’s Darwin, A Curious Mind carries a depth far surpassing his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which I once passed on to a geologist—an oddly fitting recipient—shortly before immersing myself in the more contemplative pleasures of his Sunday Philosophy Club novels.
"This is no mere stage production—it’s a crucible of interdisciplinary synthesis, fusing texts and books read across science, philosophy, and culture into a single, blazing insight. As the only woman of color in a predominantly Caucasian audience, I confront more than Darwin’s brilliance, my unwarranted feelings of imposter syndrome-a deep dive for another time.
I engage with the uncomfortable shadows of his legacy—where evolutionary theory was once co-opted for eugenics, social engineering, and scientific colonialism-the uncomfortable frameworks still mirrored in the theatre.
When the actor—embodying a youthful Darwin—proclaims, “Indigenous peoples more likely to stab than greet,” I meet his gaze unflinchingly. In that moment, I am not just a spectator; I am a cultural counterpoint, a living rebuttal to historical bias. The stage becomes my forge—where science, ethics, and identity collide.
Probing the Galapagos Caldera
The Galapagos Islands rise like geological scripture, formed from a Pacific plume that pulses with raw evolutionary force. Here, Darwin’s 1835 observations of finch adaptations laid the strata for The Origin of Species (1859), unraveling the illusion of human exceptionalism. The finches' beaks, shaped by scarcity and abundance, became nature’s argument for adaptation—a truth that still unsettles theological certainties and empowers today’s conservation biology. I recall a podcast I listened to years ago about Project Isabela (1997–2006), a $6 million ecological restoration effort to remove 80,000 invasive goats and protect endemic biodiversity. Critics labeled it brutal. Yet, as an evolutionary ethicist, I see it as a high-stakes intervention—an act of bioethical stewardship. Onstage, the volcanic pulse of the Galapagos erupts through the narrative, reminding me that survival is neither soft nor sentimental; it is calibrated, like tectonics under pressure.
Excavating Truth’s Fault Lines & The Reluctant Self Reflection in Darwin's Texts
On stage, the actor portraying Darwin wrestles with intellectual responsibility.
I think about his 20-year delay before publishing On the Origin of Species, drawn from The Reluctant Mr. Darwin and Creation, mirrors the existential pause many thinkers experience when truth threatens stability. His hesitation is mine: the choice to speak, to publish, to fear. Darwin’s ideas ripple across disciplines—from evolutionary psychology to medical genetics, from environmental ethics to bioinformatics. In his internal rift, I recognise the frictional creative tension that births new knowledge. Each scene becomes a seismic event, shaking the sediment of comfort and forcing a recalibration of worldview. As the narrative accelerates, I am no longer decoding Darwin—I am decoding myself, through the sediment of inherited assumptions.
Deciphering Genomic Strata in Human's to Finch
As an ex runner, I reached a point in my training where my body did the work allowing my mind to bird watch. When human interfaces draw out base frameworks, I am reminded by this young actor that doing the work without integrating it into our lived culture creates divisive power dynamics.
Suddenly, the finch becomes genome. The leap from 1835 to 2025 is not mere metaphor—it’s a stratigraphic shift from phenotypic observation to genomic mapping. Darwin, A Curious Mind becomes a living cladogram, a bio historical tableau, where CRISPR, personalised medicine, and synthetic biology extend Darwin’s sketches into tomorrow’s operating systems. Through this evolutionary continuum, I track beside me genetic lineages as Darwin did, beak shape, but by mitochondrial strands and epigenetic markers. Evolution, once a theory, now pulses in cladograms, gene editing protocols, and ecological restoration models. The theatre dissolves into a genome lab. I realise: I am no longer a reader of Darwin. I am a strategic interpreter of genomic futures.
Weaving an Interconnected Matrix
As the final act fades, there is no curtain call—only a quiet that resonates like deep time. I carry with me a synthesis: the canonical Darwin texts—Voyage of the Beagle, Creation, The Origin—reconfigured into a unified lattice of identity, ethics, and evolutionary understanding. For the cultural archaeologist, this is a palimpsest. For the geologist, a tectonic record. For the zoologist, a web of descent. But for me, a scholar-practitioner at the intersection of science and society, it is a living lattice of accountability. I am not merely a person of color or a woman in STEAM. I am a node in life’s adaptive tapestry, a custodian of its ethical trajectory.
The Ethical Forge: Science, Stewardship, and the Post-Darwinian Conscience
Darwin’s legacy is more than origin—it is obligation. Darwin, A Curious Mind doesn't just celebrate discovery; it compels responsibility. In a world reshaped by gene editing, ecological collapse, and synthetic life, the question is no longer Can we evolve? How should we? Darwin gave us the tools. We must now build the ethical architectures. The Galapagos restoration exemplifies this: hard choices, ecological trade-offs, and long-term thinking.
This is the new theatre—not of drama, but of evolutionary governance. And I am no longer just watching. I am writing the next act.