February 12, 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.
This cache is dedicated to a highly misunderstood individual who rightly predicted the simple notion that things change over time. We see it every day in many examples such as our cars. Take a car from today and compare it to a car made twenty, forty, eighty years ago or even before that, the horse and buggy. The computer you are probably using to view this page is not like the computers ten years ago, or twenty, or thirty! (can you still remember an Intel 386?). And finally geocaching. What started out as a nice hike in the woods for an old ammo can with room for trinkets has “evolved” into the highly specialized containers that we are seeking today that barely hold a log. Things change.
Since this is my first puzzle cache it will be a simple one to start. All you need to do is find the necessary info and plug it in to get the coords to the cache. One hint is that the cache is located near a place that profits from natural selection.
N41° AB.CDE W085°FG.HIJ
AB = Last two digits of the year Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published minus 3.
CD = The number of children he had.
E = The number of children that survived past age 10.
FG = The year he got married and had his first child.
H = The number of apes shown on the special commemorative two pound coin that the United Kingdom is issuing on the 200th anniversary in 2009.
IJ = Darwin’s age at time of death minus 9
The final paragraph from Darwin’s “Origin of Species”:
“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.