‘The Devil’s Chaplain’ a talk on the life and work of Charles Darwin via Zoom video link – Thursday February 25th 2021 at 11am
Peter Boyle, Fellow Emeritus of TCD, h presented a talk to the Trinity Retirement Association entitled ‘The Devil’s Chaplain’ – the life and work of Charles Darwin.
The Talk: ‘When he left school at the age of sixteen in 1825, Charles Darwin said about himself that ‘I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect’. And yet when he died in 1882 his name was a household word. Today Darwin is arguably the most written about and most widely discussed scientist of all time. It could also be said that no other scientist in history was to cause such a dramatic change in how ordinary people understood themselves and their place in the world. This talk will review the life, times, and career of this extraordinary man.
Biography: Dr Peter Boyle is a Fellow Emeritus of Trinity. He was brought up in County Sligo in the house in which the famous Cambridge mathematician, Sir Gabriel Stokes (of ‘Stoke’s Law’ fame) was born. He was educated in The King’s Hospital School in Dublin and then in Trinity College, where he was elected a Scholar and then took a moderatorship in chemistry, followed by a Ph.D. He joined the academic staff of Trinity and was elected a Fellow of the College in 1972. He remained working in Trinity until his retirement, with periods abroad working in USA and Germany. In 2015 he published a new book on the Provosts of Trinity College.