Darwin

Two hundred years ago, some guy named Charles was born. He didn't know it by then, but he would become one of the most famous qualitative scientists ever (Mendel was too busy with his experiments, so he and this guy, Charles, never met).

Charles had some money and some intelligent family members, so he spent most of his time doing this and that. One day (no one knows whether he was doing that or this) he took a trip in this little boat called the Beagle.

Only Charles knows what he felt when he found what he did, as he stopped doing these and thats and started writing. My family members are so smart, he must have thought, as I'm really smart too. Then he wrote something about natural selection. Had they been dumb, he must have thought even further, quite a few years after he published "The Origin of Species," I wouldn't have done all this work (poor Wallace, I bet he felt a little less lucky than Darwin, but a lot more than Lamarck).

I write this little something in the memory of one of the greatest scientists ever produced by natural selection. He makes me feel a little less anxious about being so bad at math; he makes me feel a little less anxious about having so much sympathy for monkeys; he, most important of all, will make humanity a little less anxious when the time comes to redefine the concept of nature (I do feel sometimes that I'm a naturally selected robot).