ANDRZEJ KRAUZE“My name is Charles Robert Darwin,” the bearded man on my phone’s screen says to me. “ I think I am most famous for establishing without a doubt that species change over time, and that they do this mostly by a process I discovered that I call natural selection, and that species are related to each other by a long history of common descent.”
The man speaking to me is not Charles Darwin, obviously, but he does look like him—right down to the hairdo. He’s got the distinctive hairless pate, and the dark gray hair on the sides of his head transitions smoothly into mutton-chop sideburns. He’s dressed in typical 19th-century British attire—a black suit with a white shirt, paired with a matching maroon vest and ascot—and he’s standing in a digital replica of Darwin’s office at Down House. He even sounds like the pioneering evolutionary thinker. The lines spoken by actor Randy Kovitz come largely from letters and manuscripts Darwin himself wrote, and Kovitz studied recordings of the historical dialect spoken in Darwin’s hometown outside London.
“We need to introduce Darwin as a man, an individual who lived ...
