Blog: Gene Pool launch & open archives release
Today Charles Darwin turns 200, and Pool turns 5 months, 3 weeks and 4 days. To celebrate both these occasions we're launching Gene Pool. And you're invited to the party.
We'll be providing the first course:
Throughout the year we'll be releasing to you some ABC archival material that loosely explores the idea of evolution. Today we launch with genetics professor Steve Jones talking about the life and work of Charles Darwin. In the next few days there'll be a clip from ABC's Monday Conference in 1971 featuring Paul Ehrlich talking about climate change. It's a small offering to start but there'll be a lot more to come. We're working madly behind the scenes getting clearance to release more more more.
You provide the second course:
These archives will be released under a Creative Commons licence allowing you to reuse or remix them in any way you like as long as it's for non-commercial use.
You can also create your own work exploring the themes of evolution and mutation in lateral ways, and share them back into the Gene Pool. Just tag any contribution 'gene pool'.
We'll be following the evolution in the Gene Pool and featuring your contributions on ABC radio throughout the year.
Later in the year a selection of the Gene Pool pieces will be chosen for a public exhibition at Melbourne's RMIT on November 24th - the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's book The Origin of Species.
Evolution means much more than ‘Survival of the Fittest’, sex and the ‘Selfish Gene’, or scientists in lab coats. Genes and viruses might mutate. But ideas and societies do too. And so do bodies and brains.
Evolution & mutation.
What do these themes evoke for you?
Read more here.
Tags
Derived from
SoundCulture Archive_10 ~ Sydney 1991
Comments
2 comments
19.06.09 — jhollinger
Congratulations to Pool for reaching this milestone and the "Gene Pool" party is such a great theme, not to mention clever title. In regards to ideas and communities evolving this will be a great way for members of this online community to get together and have our creative ideas mix. It'll be great to watch this groups' ideas evolve in the 'Gene Pool'. Can't wait for 11/24/09 to see the results!
24.02.09 — Bright Garlick
Howdy - great idea. I miss read that last bit as memes instead of themes and I guess thats how I see evolution and mutation. These are just concepts - ideas - memes that have flourished in the human mind. They mean many different things.
I for one believe that life was seeded on this planet by alien races and that they have assisted in the ongoing evolution (or adaption or mutation or change) of many different species on our planet - including our own. But that in additition, natural processes play the background role.
I think that evolution is a hazy concept and that our time scales are much mistaken and out of kilter with the reallity. Change can happen in natural systems very quickly. I guess I'm an advocate of the likes of Steven J Gould - who before he evolved into something greater, argued that evolution was not a static process - it was a process that was both slow and fast. His ideas on punctuated equilibrium suggested that in addition to long term stability in species, that there are rare bursts of evolutionary change. Which in my mind reflects what we know of natural history and the world we see around us.
As a former scientist myself and a lover of science and literature, I've come to embrace these concepts in the way that I look at the entire world - both human and non human. Add a touch of chaos and complexity theory, an element of mysterium and the world becomes an amazing place. There is nothing that exists in our world that is not evolving and mutating. Chage is the natural state of existance. As ideas or themes or memes or whatever conceptual framework we give them, evolution and mutation evoke great reverance in me, for the great ghost of monumental silence.