OK I must confess that I have become a bit of a Kickstarter junkie. This is a crowd-funding site where people put up ideas and the public puts in pledges to help fund them. Typically, there are stretch goals which add more rewards to the backers when pledges reach certain levels of funding.

You can certainly waste a lot of time looking at the various projects. Also, if you back a project that goes crazy then you can get a lot of bang for your buck. It can be quite addictive to watch the total rising and ticking off the stretch goals (kind of like watching telethons back in the day for those of us who can remember them).

Board games have been very successful in Kickstarter, especially those that add bits and pieces for stretch goals (for example an ongoing one now Zombicide- Green Horde). There have been a number of evolution themed campaigns, such as a picture book adaptation of On the Origin of species, building a life simulator, a cool evolution poster, an evolution board game (which is really fun!), and animations for defending evolution).

Given Darwin’s interest in just about everything and his willingness to support scientists that wrote to him I think he would have loved crowd-funding.