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.