When we were screening Darwin’s Dangerous Idea at T2F, my mother was hanging out at the Science Museum in London, paying tribute to Charles D on his 200th birthday.

She brought back a Darwin supplement published by the Times for me and I just LOVED this little sidebar:

Darwin the Tweet

Darwin clearly wasn’t thinking of future technologies when he coined the original title of his opus. Users of Twitter, who entertain each other by swapping messages of 140 characters or less, would recognize that you don’t give yourself much room for manoeuvre when your book title alone stretches to 111 characters: On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. By its sixth print run, Darwin had managed to pare it down to the snappier The Origin of Species. Given another 172 years, he could have probably distilled its contents down to one succinct tweet:

DarwinC: Great creatures adapt. Not so great ones die. Check out those finches beaks. Survival of the fittest innit.
10:31 AM Oct 27th, 1837 from TweetDeck