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All geoscientists have an interest in some aspect of the Earth. But little else unites them at first glance: there is no canonical academic education that Earth scientists share — in sharp contrast to other subject areas. Almost everybody attending a physics conference will have a degree in physics, and thereby a common scientific grounding. At the largest Earth science assemblies, participants who studied a straightforward geoscience subject such as geology or geophysics are probably in the minority.

Instead, our conferences are populated with researchers from all disciplines of the natural sciences (plus some economists and sociologists). Ecologists who now work on the carbon cycle, meteorologists who started out as physicists, palaeontologists with an interest in palaeoclimate, mathematicians turned climate modellers and chemists who decided to specialize in atmospheric chemistry or geochemistry all consider themselves Earth scientists. Charles Darwin — who is the centre of attention in this double-anniversary year marking his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species — would have fitted into this diverse crowd very well.

Indeed, the commentary on page 666 and the two reviews in our Books and Arts section on pages 668–669 argue that Darwin thought like a geologist. According to a study on how geoscientists think and learn (Eos 90, 265–266; 2009), this means sharing “a distinctive set of approaches and perspectives that are particularly well-suited to studying something as big, old and complicated as the Earth system”. More specifically, these approaches include “taking a long view of time, using temporal and spatial reasoning to formulate hypotheses and answer questions, interpreting observations in terms of intertwined processes rather than a single independent variable, and building cascades of inscriptions that begin with the raw materials of nature and tap into powerful visualization techniques.”

If these attributes truly define an Earth scientist, then Charles Darwin was an exemplary representative of our multidisciplinary branch of science — even though his greatest work primarily revolutionized biology.