Now is the time for all good evo-devotees

to come to the aid...the donate button is to the right. If we're going to have a replica HMS Beagle sailing and celebrating Darwin, helping to spread the word about evolution, inspiring a new generation of young scientists and sticking it's bowsprit up the noses of Creationists and Intelligent Designers, we need to build it. And to build it, we need money. Here's my dream for the replica Beagle that we want afloat and spreading the word in 2009: that tens, hundreds of thousands of scientists, students and science enthusiasts throughout the world each chip in a few pounds, dollars or euros and help us build the boat that changed world history.

Darwin and the Beagle grace the British £10 note, and President Jackson was in the White House when the young Darwin was retching and researching his way round the world on the Beagle. Jackson's face is on a $20. So please, hit that donate button and send us your Darwins or your Jacksons. If you feel strongly, as many do, that the Beagle must sail again, donate more. We need $200,000 by March to get the plans approved by Germanischer Lloyds, and the boat will cost £3.3 million, $6.6 million at current exchange rates. Please donate: your donation will be recorded on our website and will all go towards building the replica. We're a not-for profit company and have applied for charitable status. So there we are: donate, email this to your friends, mentally upend them, shake their pockets out and send us another Darwin or Jackson. Then pack them off to do the same to their friends. Email this post to five scientific friends, and ask them to email it on to five of theirs.

In 2009, it's Darwin's 200th anniversary and the world owes a great debt of thanks to him: lectures, books and poshed up buildings are very worthy and will make a great conrtibution. But square rigger sailing ships make heads turn, give people the yearning to get aboard and head for horizons: both the one over the bowsprit or the one found where the human minds yearn to know more. Darwin did both in 1831. I've sailed in the Tall Ships Races, skippered a youth sail training boat and know that great things can happen when young people challenge themselves on the decks of a boat.

And imagine: 2009, and a replica Beagle sailed around Cape Horn and through the Pacific by an international crew of young scientists sails into The Galapagos as part of a recreation of the Voyage of the Beagle. That, surely will be the TV picture of the Darwin 2009 celebrations. How can Darwin's 200th anniversary pass without that happening? Donate, and help us give a new generation of young people the chance to see a replica Beagle built and launched, and the opportunity to head for horizons of their own.

Rant ends.

Tags:hms beagle replica, charles darwin, 2009, voyage of the beagle.