The Red Notebook
I caught Richard Dawkins ripping the BBC's toughest and rudest interviewer apart on Radio 4 this morning. It was great radio. He berrated Jon Humphrys for going too easy on religious interviewees. Towards the end of the three-minute interview, Humphrys (himself an atheist, I believe) clearly realised he didn't have a leg to stand on. You can listen to the interview in horrible RealPlayer format for the next seven days here.
The interview arose as a result of recent comments made by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the UK's top Roman Catholic, which lunartalks has commented on.
Curious factoid: Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor is a friend of a friend of a friend of mine. I wonder if he knows Kevin Bacon.
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I just stood out in my garden with the first bat of the summer circling my head.
Utterly magical.
I've just finished reading Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin.
It's a good book. More here.
The miraculously resurrected Charles Darwin has kindly linked to the Friends of Charles Darwin website on his new blog, posing the deeply philosophical question, can I be a friend of myself?
Of course you can, Mr D. I have added your details to our membership list here.
And thanks for all the new members you have sent our way.
Whenever one of my fellow Darwin groupies is asked what they would tell Charles Darwin about, in the unlikely event of his miraculous return to the Land of the Living, their almost inevitable single-word response is genetics. It's an obvious and sensible answer: Darwin would have given his back teeth to understand the mechanism of heredity. It was a major missing link in his theory of evolution, and he knew it.
But I should like to suggest an alternative scientific field which would be of extreme interest to the resurrected Darwin. I don't for one second claim that it's a more appropriate topic than genetics to explain to the great man, but it's one that would fascinate him: I would tell Mr Darwin about plate tectonics.
Darwin first made his name in the world of science as a geologist. Having received some practical experience geologising with Adam Sedgwick in North Wales shortly before he set off on HMS Beagle, he picked up much of the latest revolutionary geological thinking by devouring Charles Lyell's recently published Principles of Geology during the voyage. Darwin later wrote that Lyell's book 'altered the whole tone of one's mind & therefore that when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes'.
Darwin put his new Lyellian eyes to good use. By the time he returned to Blighty in 1836, he had gathered considerable evidence to show that much of South America is gradually rising, and had come up with what proved to be the correct explanation for the formation of coral reefs. We now know that the underlying mechanism behind both of these phenomena is plate tectonics. Darwin would have been intrigued to hear the modern take on his geological theories.
But it wouldn't just be Darwin the geologist who would be want to learn about plate tectonics; Darwin the naturalist would be all ears too. Darwin and his friends (most notably Hooker) spent much time thinking about how species came to be distributed in the way that they are. They hypothesised former land-bridges, and Darwin brilliantly suggested how changes in global temperatures associated with the former glacial period (he did not know that there had been more than one ice age) would have allowed temperate species to relocate to tropical areas before being forced into the mountains as warmer temperatures returned. The following extract from a letter Hooker send to Darwin in 1858 is typical of their correspondence on the subject:
[I] want you to [go into] print that I may take up your refrigeration doctrine, to which I think I should have come clumsily at last by myself as the only way of accounting for the spread of European species to Australia.
It is curious—that so many more Europ. sp. should be in Australia than in Fuegia & S. Chili! Especially considering the enormous distance of Europe to Australia & no continuous mountains.
Put end of string on globe on England & other end on V[an] D[ieman's] L[and (i.e. Tasmania)] & it will run through the most continuous masses of Land on globe—it is the greatest stretch of all but [sic, presumably he meant by] dry land that you can find, & I can connect the Botany the whole way by mountains of 1. Borneo; 2, Java & Ceylon & Penins Ind. 3 Khasia; 4 Himal 5 Caucasus, 6 Alps. 7 Scandinavia.— I can thus connect Botanically England with VDL. better than I could Canada with Fuegia!
Had they known about plate tectonics, Darwin and Hooker might have understood better why the flora of Canada and Fuegia (which are nowadays connected by one huge, continuous landmass) are so different. We now know that North and South America were not always joined at the hip, and once formed separate continents with their own distinct species, divided by a wide ocean.
Charles Darwin would have had great fun working out how the modern theory of plate tectonics might be applied to his own theory of evolution. Perhaps he might have realised how it can be used to explain the mysterious Wallace Line which separates the Asian and Australasian zoogeographical regions. No doubt, he would have got many things wrong in his theorising, but knowledge of plate tectonics would have opened up a whole new line of enquiry for Darwin's species work. It would have been yet more grist to his cerebral mill.
Last week, I finished reading volume 7 of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, which deals with the years 1858–1859 (i.e. the lead-up to the publication of On the Origin of Species). As with all the other volumes in the series, it is a magnifient piece of research work, and a must-buy for any Darwin groupie.
Expect several posts over the next few weeks inspired by this fantastic book.
Nature is still red in tooth and claw at the side of the M62 motorway.
Heading out of Liverpool at 70 mph this evening (for to admit any faster would be to admit breaking the law), I noticed a buzzard circling about 30 feet above the carriageway. Suddenly, it wheeled left, plunged down, and took out an unsuspecting rabbit. I had never seen a buzzard make a kill before.
Five minutes later, on the other side of the carriageway, a kestrel assassinates some poor rodent with deadly precision.
Commuting has its moments.
On this date in 1851, Charles Darwin's daughter, Anne Elizabeth, died aged 10. Her death destroyed the last vestiges of Darwins's christianity. More on this post from last year.
On 21st February, 1854, Charles Darwin wrote to his old HMS Beagle midshipman shipmate, Philip Gidley King, who was now living in Australia:
My dear King
I can hardly tell you how pleased I was, about a week ago, to receive your letter dated the 26th. of October. I lead a rather solitary life, & in my walks very often think over old days in the Beagle, & no days rise pleasanter before me, than sitting with you on the Booms, running before the trade wind across the Atlantic.
Reminiscing two decades after the event about sitting with a friend high above the deck of a tall ship with a trade wind in your hair. What better reason could there possibly be for building a new Beagle?
I am delighted to announce that the Friends of Charles Darwin have their 2000th member: Rakibul Karim of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
An extra-special welcome!
The Beagle Project's Karen 'Nunatak' James and Peter 'I Need a Nickname' McGrath have been interviewed on the Minnesota Atheists Talk radio show. MP3 file here.
One for the car tomorrow, I think.
If my camera were a shotgun, I could have eaten grouse for dinner yesterday evening:
I've been trying to bag a decent shot of a red grouse for yonks. They're so elusive, you see. Can't say I blame them, what with the landed gentry having made so-called sport from blasting them out of the sky for the last couple of hundred years. Charles Darwin shot more than his fair share of game birds in his youth—mostly pheasants and partidges in his case—but he eventually grew out of it.
This time, I was prepared. I knew there was a grouse hiding, perfectly camouflaged in the heather ahead of me, as I had heard its distinctive go-back! go-back! call. So I had my camera held at eye-level, zoom set to maximum and already focused to about 20 yards, lens cap off, multi-shot mode and servo autofocus engaged, shutter speed set to 1/500th of a second, and finger on shutter. Even so, I was lucky to get this shot: the others were all very blurred.
The red grouse was once reckoned to be the UK's only endemic bird species. This turned out to be false on two counts: (1) the Scottish crossbill is now recognised as an endemic species, and (2) the poor old red grouse is now regarded as a mere variety of the willow grouse, which is common throughout northern tundra regions in Europe and America (where it is known as the willow ptarmigan).
Nuts to that! When it comes to grouse, count me in with the splitters. Unlike all the other 'varieties' of willow grouse, the red grouse's plumage does not turn white in winter. Forget about reproductive isolation and genetic variation and all that bumf; I reckon not turning white in winter should be enough to earn the red grouse a unique (and endemic) species label.
That was certainly what the majority of people seemed to think in Darwin's Day. As the great man wrote in chapter 2 of 'On the Origin of Species':
Several most experienced ornithologists consider our British red grouse as only a strongly-marked race of a Norwegian species, whereas the greater number rank it as an undoubted species peculiar to Great Britain.
Yeah! That's more like it! Willow grouse my peach-like arse! Bully for the famous red grouse!
Charles Darwin to Albany Hancock, 12th February, 1853
My dear Sir
I will begin a summary of what I have been able to make out on Alcippe, imagining you feel interest enough to read my scrawl: you must believe, that I express myself positively only for brevity sake. […]
Female organs of generation, all quite normal, as described under the Lepadidæ. The ovigerous fræna are very large & are destitute (as in some species of Pollicipes) of glands: they probably serve as Branchiæ, as well as the universally admitted Branchiæ in sessile cirripedes, of which they are the homologues.
Male organs none, except a rudiment of penis in normal position between & on ventral side of 6th cirrus.
Farbeit from me to criticise Charles Darwin on any front, but what kind of saddo spends his birthday writing about the sexual organs of barnacles?
Having said that, what kind of saddo spends his birthday blogging about somebody else writing about the sexual organs of barnacles?
I'm off down the pub!
On my way back from my Sedgwick pilgrimage last week, I drove past a second-hand bookshop which hadn't been there the last time I visited the area. I cannot resist a second-hand bookshop, so I popped inside.
It was fantastic.
I spent half an hour in the 'Collectors' section, drooling over numerous, old science books before plumping for a copy of The Student's Elements of Geology by Charles Lyell. Then I went upstairs to find an entire section labelled simply Darwin. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. In the end, I bought:
- HMS Beagle: the ship that changed the course of history by Keith S. Thomson
- Extreme Measures: the dark visions and bright ideas of Francis Galton by Martin Brookes
- Humboldt's Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey that changed the way we see the world by Gerard Helferich
- The Naming of Names: the search for order in the world of plants by Anna Pavord
- The British Journal for the History of Science (BJHS), vol. 24, part 2, no. 81 (June 1991): 'Darwin and Geology'
As I handed over my cash, I complimented the bookshop owner on his Darwin section, explaining how I am 'a bit of a Darwin groupie'.
"Ah!" You should see these, then!" he said, drawing me over to the locked glass cabinet containing the Darwin rarities.
Get ye behind me, Satan! I somehow managed to resist. Apart from the cuddly Charles Darwin I spotted on the way out, that is. The one which was entirely anatomically accurate—apart from the unopposable thumbs.
And, before you ask, no, I'm not about to tell you where the bookshop is. Do you take me for some sort of idiot?
As I explained to the bookshop owner, I'll be back!
As a memorial to a great geologist, it's rather fitting: a large boulder of local limestone converted into a fountain. I hope Adam Sedgwick would have approved.
Sedgwick's memorial is to be found in the picture-postcard-pretty village of Dent on the Cumbria-Yorkshire border. I took a spin round the Yorkshire Dales yesterday, and popped into Dent for a pint and a bite to eat at The Sun Inn.
Sedgwick was born in the village in 1785. His father was the local vicar. Sedgwick began his geologising in Dent, where he discovered the Dent Fault: a crack in the earth's surface where the shale rocks of the nearby Howgill Fells break through the younger local limestone.
Like many of his male relatives, Sedgwick went on to become a clergyman, but he continued his geological work, eventually becoming Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge. It was at Cambridge that he tutored the young Charles Darwin. Shortly before Darwin received his invitation to take part in the Beagle voyage, Sedgwick took him on a geological trip to North Wales. It was during this trip that Darwin gained his first proper experience of field geology. During the Beagle voyage, Darwin wrote to his other Cambridge tutor, Henslow:
Tell Prof: Sedgwick he does not know how much I am indebted to him for the Welch expedition.— it has given me an interest in geology, which I would not give up for any consideration.— I do not think I ever spent a more delightful three weeks, than in pounding the NW mountains.
In later years, the religious Sedgwick was to become an opponent of Darwinian evolution. Days after the publication of On the Origin of Species, he wrote to Darwin:
I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly; parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous— You have deserted—after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth—the true method of induction—& started up a machinery as wild I think as Bishop Wilkin's locomotive that was to sail with us to the Moon.
Sadly, Sedgwick was never to accept his former pupil's explanation of how species evolve (nor to see people travel to the moon), but he was undoubtedly a great scientist and is rightly regarded as one of the fathers of modern geology.
Guardian: Moose's sharp hearing is attributed to antlers
They are some of the most extravagant headgear in the animal kingdom, but a moose's antlers are not just for show. Scientists believe they act as elaborate hearing aids that help males to find calling females…
Scientists had previously suspected the antlers helped with locating mates because males with them were found to be better able to locate females than those without.
George Bubenik, of the University of Guelph, Ontario, and his son Peter, of Cleveland State University in Ohio, decided to test the antler amplifier hypothesis by using a moose skull and a fake ear made by a TV special effects team.
The two scientists put a microphone inside the fake ear, placed between the sweeping Alaskan moose antlers. They measured how well the microphone picked up sounds made by a speaker 32ft (10 metres) away while it was either facing towards the sound, away from it, or sideways on into the bowl of the antlers.
Honestly, stuff like this knocks my reasonably well-paid office job into a cocked hat. "What did you do at work today, dear?" "Oh, I stuck a microphone into a model of an elk's head."
The above article explains that what the North Americans call moose, the Europeans call elk. As a European, this one has done my head in for years: I call them moose too, you see—because that's what they were called on all the American/Canadian TV program[me]s I saw as a kid. To confuse matters further, our friends over the pond call an entirely different species of deer an elk. And their so-called robins are just weird.
Come back Carl Linnaeus, all is forgiven!
Brian Switek, FCD, over at Laelaps has written an excellent post, trying to redress some of the balance in the Richard Owen (villain) v Thomas Henry Huxley (hero) stereotype. It's a subject I have covered in the past, but Brian's post goes into more detail.
Nice one, Brain! More, please.
The Beagle Project's Peter McGrath, FCD, has a great post about visiting the Woolwich Dockyard where HMS Beagle was built. He was accompanied by a couple of other Beagle groupies. Photos and a radio programme are to follow.
I am consumed with jealousy yet again.
Happy St Patrick's Day, to be sure!
Legend has it that St Patrick rid Ireland of all her snakes. It's a nice story, albeit factually incorrect. I always thought it was a little odd that Patrick would banish snakes from Ireland, but not from his native Britain.
For those of you who worry about such things, here's a slightly more scientific explanation of why Ireland has no snakes.
I've been a bit busy lately, so I might have missed the major announcement… The Beagle Project's very own Nunatak, FCD, now has her very own blog: Data Not Shown. And, if the first few posts are anything to go by, it's going to be one well worth following.
The Friends of Charles Darwin have their first member from Bangladesh: Susanta Barman of Kurigram.
Welcome!
On this date in 1833, whilst in the Falkland Islands, Capt. Robert FitzRoy bought a schooner to accompany HMS Beagle:
Captain FitzRoy's Journal: 9th March, 1833
At this time I had become more fully convinced than ever that the Beagle could not execute her allotted task before she, and those in her, would be so much in need of repair and rest, that the most interesting part of her voyage—the carrying a chain of meridian distances around the globe—must eventually be sacrificed to the tedious, although not less useful, details of coast surveying…
I had often anxiously longed for a consort, adapted for carrying cargoes, rigged so as to be easily worked with few hands, and able to keep company with the Beagle; but when I saw the Unicorn, and heard how well she had behaved as a sea-boat, my wish to purchase her was unconquerable…
FitzRoy's decision to buy Unicorn, which he promptly renamed Adventure, was to earn him a sharp, long-distance reprimand from the Admiralty. This reprimand was probably a factor in FitzRoy's subsequent nervous breakdown later in the voyage.
But FitzRoy's unapproved purchase of the schooner meant that he was indeed able to achieve far more surveying work during the Beagle voyage.
No, not the latest album by The Fall; I've just started reading The Eye: a Natural History by Simon Ings. On page 28, I came across the following fascinating snippet:
Even with their superb visual acuity and excellent colour sense, extending well into the ultraviolet, kestrels find it hard to spot the drab voles which are their favourite food. Happily for the kestrels, however, voles communicate by leaving trails of urine—indeed, they pee almost continuously—and mole urine reflects ultraviolet light. For kestrels, hunting voles is simply a matter of following the arrows.
Amazing.
I must admit, I was initially irked by Ing's use of the word happily to describe what appeared clearly to be a marvellous hunting adaptation evolved by the kestrel. But not so: all birds can see into ultraviolet wavelengths, apparently; so kestrels can't have evolved their ultraviolet vision specifically to hunt voles. The apparent adaptation turns out to be a lucky coincidence, which the kestrel has put to good use—possibly refining it over time.
Ultraviolet mole piss detection isn't so much an adaptation as an exaptation, it would seem.
I've had a prominent link to it on the FOCD homepage for a couple of weeks now, but it occurs to me that I probably should also have written about it in the weblog…
There's an online petition to UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to commission a statue of Charles Darwin to occupy the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square. The petition is for UK citizens/residents only. Get over there and sign it, you chaps! (And don't forget to put FCD after your names!)
Citizens! Doesn't Downing Street know there is no such thing as a British citizen? No, in this twenty-first of centuries, we are still officially British subjects (of Her Majesty).
I'm with the Vatican on this one:
BBC: Vatican recants with a statue of Galileo
Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the great scientist by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls.
The planned statue is to stand in the Vatican gardens near the apartment in which Galileo was incarcerated while awaiting trial in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism, the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Nicola Cabibbo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and a nuclear physicist, said: "The Church wants to close the Galileo affair and reach a definitive understanding not only of his great legacy but also of the relationship between science and faith."
Pharyngula says it's too little, too late, too cheesy, and Civil Commotion describes it as chutzpah (whatever that means), but, to me, it sounds like a genuine attempt to draw a line under the whole Galileo business and acknowledge, straight cough, that they were wrong. If that is indeed the case, kudos to them (whatever that means too).
And, on his rare, conciliatory occasion with the Roman Catholic church, why don't I go the whole hog and disagree with Lunartalks too?
BBC: Italy row over Galileo's remains
The Renaissance genius Galileo Galilei is once again at the centre of a row between Church and science more than 360 years after his death…
Researchers in Florence want to exhume the two bodies from the city's Basilica of the Holy Cross but the rector of the basilica is having none of it - describing the plan as disrespectful.
I don't think the refusal of the rector to allow Galileo to be exhumed is hypocrisy; it is entirely consistent with the church's belief in showing respect to the dead. Why should we let someone dig up the remains of a scientific genius just because it would be interesting? Where's your respect, people? Leave the poor sod alone!
Besides, even if it were justifiable to dig up Galileo, standard archaeological best practice advises that most remains should stay in the ground because, in future, our techniques for examining them will no doubt have improved.
Whatever next? Digging up Darwin just to see if he really did have Chagas Disease?
I hope there would be an outcry.
Out for a lunchtime stroll on the waterfront in Liverpool today, I was fortunate enough to get an unusually close-up view of one of my favourite birds, a curlew [Numenius arquata], digging for lugworms [Arenicola marina].
An odd thought then occurred to me: how do lugworms manage to breathe when the tide is in? Equally to the point, how do they avoid drowning?
It turns out that lugworms have external gills for breathing underwater. I must have dug up hundreds of them for bait as a child, but I had never noticed their gills. Well, actually, that's not true: I had noticed their gills; I just hadn't realised that they were gills.
But now I know.
Fourteen years ago today, on 2nd March, 1994, the Friends of Charles Darwin were effectively formed when we sent our first letter to the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England.
Happy Birthday to us!
Well, someone had to do it!
(Different sizes available, if you're interested—or even if you're not.)
Join Us
The Friends of Charles Darwin currently have 2043 members in 63 countries. Our most recent new member is Suresh Rs of Shimoga, India.
If your haven't done so already, why not become a member? It's free, and entitles you to put the letters FCD after your name.
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