This year sees the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species. It also sees the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (1759–96). The media have been full of the Darwin anniversaries, but we have heard rather less about Burns, at least in Australia. Yet Burns is arguably as important as Darwin in our cultural formation.

Clearly, Burns did not influence our scientific understanding in the way that Darwin dominates our thinking (even for those who reject his ideas), although critics have claimed that one of his best known lyrics makes reference to the scientific interests of his time: ‘And I will luve thee still, my Dear, / Till a’ the seas gang dry. / Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear, / And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!’

Not that we normally think of this most moving of declarations as a product of the intense interest in geology in the Scottish Enlightenment. It is, after all, a love poem – we certainly wouldn’t turn to it for scientific understanding. Nor, despite his interest in geology, would we find anything elsewhere in Burns as metaphorically earth-shattering as Darwin’s theory of evolution. Yet Burns has been important in shaping our national psyche. If scientific theories mould our understanding of the world, so too do poems and songs – and Burns’s poems and songs have been widely known and loved since they first appeared.