Darwin, Dickens and Dawkins Walk into a Bar…
A Few Good Drinks, a Few Great Minds, Perhaps One Great Thought.
Last week, I had the privilege of ordering a drink at the bar of a grand old Club in Mayfair, the kind of place where the heavy drapery of old empire and class keeps the raucous post-global London of today far out-of-sight. But in here, not far out of mind.
It turns out that in this place, great minds have been causing trouble and shaking things up for much of the outside world for several centuries, a tradition you are reminded of as soon as you walk into the bar. For here, center stage and towering over the bar, is a massive portrait of Charles Darwin, commanding your attention and reminding all who enter that in this place, thoughts have changed the world. And while other members of this august Club have also shaken things up in their own way — Charles Dickens, for example, Richard Dawkins (who is mercifully still with us) and approximately forty other members who have won a Nobel Prize for this or that — it is Darwin who holds the place of honor above the bar. Could it be that Chuckie D., in addition to discovering how life evolved, challenging superstitious religious beliefs, and turning social and economic thinking on its head, was also a great bartender?
Thrilled with the opportunity to experience the combination of both rarified alcohol and…
