Rhymin' Eisen

December 06, 2012

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A biologist at University of California, Berkeley, and a co-founder of PLoS, Michael Eisen is more accustomed to publishing research papers than verse. Recently, though, he found himself getting in touch with his inner bard.

As Eisen writes on his blog, his daughter had to recite a poem for a school assignment and asked him if he knew any good poems about nature.

"There are, of course, many good ones," he notes, "but I really wanted her to have the most poetic thing ever written about nature."

And so, Eisen set to work turning the final paragraph of Darwin’s Origin of Species into a poem, sharing the end results on his blog.

Now, we're no experts, but we have to say, so far as Darwin-inspired verse goes, it's not bad. And, as a bonus, one of Eisen's commenters links to another recent bit of evolution-related poetry – a piece published this week by Oregon State University zoologist David Maddison in the journal Systematic Biology.

If we're not careful, this could very easily get out of hand.

It may already be out of

Submitted by dgalas on Fri, 12/07/2012 - 14:35.

It may already be out of hand. See my book of poetry on Amazon - and buy several copies - Kirkus review of "Lost Thunder" suggests that it's not entirely to be dismissed. So I guess there's accumulating evidence that biologists have other talents. While that's not surprising it would be interesting to collect more of these pieces of evidence and share them.

Me, some poems and a

Submitted by mark.e.samuels on Mon, 12/10/2012 - 15:46.

Me, some poems and a biographical essay in Sunday@6 , a Quebec english-language literary magazine.

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Rhymin' Eisen

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