Noel Castree (2009) regrets that academic geographers let pass without much fuss, the sesquicentenary of the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. In part, this is the voice of Madison Avenue admonishing the sales team for missing a glorious promotional opportunity: `buy evolution, get geography free'. Castree has also a more serious point to make in remarking that Darwin used geographical reasoning to fundamentally alter the way people think about human life on earth. These issues still matter and Castree implies that the neglect of Darwin is part of geography's more general failure to engage critically with the sort of big-picture views of life on earth that could gain the discipline the popular attention it deserves.