The Forum | 23 January 2020 | 0h 39m | Listen Later | iTunes
Erasmus Darwin was a man of many talents: not only was he a successful physician, a popular poet, an ardent abolitionist and a pioneering botanist, he also worked out how organisms evolve, some 70 years before his grandson Charles’s theories about this revolutionised science. He is credited with many inventions and discoveries including the steering mechanism used in modern cars, the gas laws of clouds and a document copying machine.