The Friends of Charles Darwin

Charles Musters didn't have much of a life. As a Volunteer First Class aboard HMS Beagle, and coming, as he did, from a wealthy, albeit broken, home, he might have gone far. The young lad—he was only about 12 when Beagle set sail from England—was a great favourite amongst the officers and crew, and with Charles Darwin, who, when the ship reached South America, took young Musters on a number of exploratory walks.

But then disaster struck. Captain Fitzroy takes up the story:

It was while the interior of the Beagle was being painted, and no duty going on except at the little observatory on Villegagnon Island, that those officers who could be spared made this excursion to various parts of the harbour [of Rio]. Among other places they were in the river Macacu, and passed a night there. No effect was visible at the time; the party returned in apparent health, and in high spirits; but two days had not elapsed when the seaman, named Morgan, complained of headache and fever.

The boy Jones and Mr. Musters were taken ill, soon afterwards, in a similar manner; but no serious consequences were then apprehended, and it was thought that a change of air would restore them to health. Vain idea! they gradually became worse; the boy died the day after our arrival in Bahia; and, on the 19th of May, my poor little friend Charles Musters, who had been entrusted by his father to my care, and was a favourite with every one, ended his short career.

Musters and his shipmates almost certainly died of malaria. Nowadays, we know that malaria is caused by the protozoan Plasmodium, which is carried by mosquitos, but, in those days, it was though to be caused by bad air—hence the French name: mal-aria—which is presumably why Fitzroy had believed that a change of air would restore them to health.

Darwin was equally distraught by Musters' death:

1832

June 4^th

I also found King, who had arrived late the evening before in the Beagle. — He brought the calamitous news of the death of three of our ship-mates. — They were the three of the Macacu party who were ill with fever when the Beagle sailed from Rio. — 1^st Morgan, an extraordinary powerful man & excellent seaman; he was a very brave man & had performed some curious feats, he put a whole party of Portugeese to flight, who had molested the party; he pitched an armed sentinel into the sea at St Jago; & formerly he was one of the boarders in that most gallant action against the Slaver the Black Joke. — 2^d Boy Jones one of the most promising boys in the ship & had been promised but the day before his illness, promotion. — These were the only two of the sailors who were with the Cutter, & picked for their excellence. — And lastly, poor little Musters; who three days before his illness heard of his Mothers death.

Charles Musters was buried in Bahía. He had barely reached his teens. When some of his former shipmates visited his grave on Beagle's third and final voyage, they discovered that it didn't even have a grave stone.

Poor little Musters indeed.

The stories Charles Musters might have told, had he survived the Beagle voyage: encounters with naked savages, earthquakes, Indian wars, scientific and geographical discoveries, jungles, mountains, the Falkland Island, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Galápagos. Can you just imagine how experiences like those would have totally transformed a young boy's life?

Which is where you can help:

A new Beagle is about to be built. This new Beagle will be crewed by young scientists and sailors following in the wake of Darwin and Fitzroy. The sights these young first-class volunteers will see! The adventures they will have! The new Beagle will provide the sort of experiences that will transform young scientists' and explorers' lives.

So please go over to the Beagle Project website and make a donation to help make this dream into a reality. No donation is too small (or too big). Do it to make a difference. Do it for science. Do it for Darwin.

But, most of all, do it for poor little Musters!

I just wrote a new item for this weblog, comparing Darwin's theory of evolution with Newton's theory of gravitation, but it turned out longer than I expected. So, by way of a minor Darwin Day Eve celebration, I've made it into a full-blown article, entitled A Far More Satisfactory Theory.

A year ago today, to celebrate Darwin Day 2006, I published a Darwinian Cryptic Crossword.

I thought today would be a suitable day to publish the solution. Unfortunately, the only copy of the answers was held on my dear old Psion Organiser, which gave up the ghost several months ago. So I've just had to solve the crossword myself—and it was ridiculously difficult.

Sorry about that.

You can find a link to the solution by following the above link.

I still think 6-down was a bloody clever clue, though!

Oh, Happy Darwin Day, by the way!

The uptake of new Friends of Charles Darwin members always seems to pick up around 12th February, but on this 198th Darwin Day, I should like to wish an extra-special welcome to new member, Dominika Trzaska of Warsaw: our very first Polish member.

Na zdrowie, Dominika!

I promise I won't make a habit of pointing to my other weblog, but it seems pretty appropriate in this case…

If there are any physics graduates reading this, you (and only you) will probably appreciate one of the cleverest puns I've made in my life.

Apparently, there's a new time-travelling sci-fi series showing on ITV (UK) called Primeval. I didn't catch the first episode, and I'm unlikely to try to catch any more, if reports of the first episode are anything to go by.

One of the regular commenters on my other weblog, Keith Beach, emailed me about episode one of Primeval earlier this week, summarising one scene as follows:

Scientist, in the past looking for missing wife finds modern human skeleton. Soldier with him asks if it's his wife, said scientist counts the ribs and states "No, it's a man!"

WHAT!!!!!!!!!!

That's right, somewhere in the Land of Darwin, there is a scriptwriter who apparently still believes the one about men and women having different numbers of ribs (because, according to the usually highly reliable Book of Genesis, God took one of Adam's ribs to make Eve, so it stands to reason that men must have one fewer ribs than women).

In fact, I'm pretty sure not even the most naive of fundamentalist god-botherers (and you don't get much more naive than that) believes this hoary, old chestnut. Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that Genesis is totally correct, why on earth should anyone expect men to have only 23 ribs to women's 24? For Adam's sons to inherit his rib-deficiency, they would have to inherit an aquired trait from their father. In other words, so-called Lamarckism would need to be correct.

Which it isn't.

Sexing human skeletons is far from easy. For part of my degree, I attended an archaeological course where we got to mess around with exhumed Anglo Saxon skeletons. One day, the teacher (who was a surgeon in his day job), handed me a skull and asked me to tell him what I could about it:

"It's definitely human," I said.
"Very funny. Anything else?"
"It's definitely dead."
"Come on now, be serious. Can you tell me anything about this skull?"
"Erm… It's female."
"Excellent! That's amazing! Sexing a human skull is surprisingly difficult. What makes you say it's female?"
"Its mouth is open."

I don't think the outspoken feminists on the course thought my joke was particularly funny.

The Berberis dawinii in my garden this morning

The Darwin's Barberry in my garden is in flower already. It's supposed to flower from April to May. There's global warming for you.

Berberis darwinii, to give it its scientific name, was named by William Hooker, after it was first collected in Chiloe, Chile in 1835 by Charles Darwin during the Beagle voyage. The plant later became of interest to Darwin, because it was believed to be self-fertilising (although Darwin correctly dismissed this idea). It is now a very popular garden shrub.

The Berberis darwinii in my garden was a gift from my father, who is a keen gardener. I had asked him for something named after Darwin. The week after my father presented me with the plant, my favourite science writer, Stephen Jay Gould died, so I planted the Berberis darwinii in his memory.

I fully approve of the modern secular practice of planting trees as living memorials to the deceased, but I like to think Gould would have preferred a Berberis darwinii: partly because it is named after his personal hero, but mainly because—thanks partly to my supreme laziness as a gardener—it should soon grow into his favourite evolutionary motif: a straggly bush.

I am sure Gould would have approved.

The Beagle Project gets some great publicity in the Times.

This thing is really going to happen. I feel it in my water.

Conversation with my parents last night:

Dad: How many members have you got in that Bernard Darwin thing of yours now? …I mean Charles Darwin.
Me: Eight-hundred and ninety-eight. We haven't had any new members for a whole week, which is unusual. I think they're all waiting for one more person to join so they can be number 900.
Dad: [Gestures at himself and Mum, nodding enthusiastically.]
Me: What, you want to join?
Dad & Mum: Yes please!
Mum: Can I be number 900?
Dad: Go on, it's her birthday in a fortnight; I don't mind being number 899.
Me: But is Charlie your Darwin, mum?
Mum: Oh yes!
Me: You have to say it!
Dad & Mum: Charlie is my Darwin!
Me: You're in!

I think my mum is pretty impressed to finally have some initials after her name after 70 years (minus two weeks) on this planet.

I very nearly didn't let my dad (who is a golf nut) become a member: Bernard is very much my dad's Darwin. That's Bernard Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin, who helped his grandfather experiment on worms, and who grew up to become a famous golf writer when my dad was a boy. But I reckon I'm entitled to a spot of nepotism.

Nice quote spotted on the New Scientist letters page:

If atheism is a faith, then not playing chess is a hobby.

I will, no doubt, be stealing that one.

OK, I'm perplexed. I've read this story three times, and I still can't work out what the big deal is supposed to be:

New Scientist: When co-operation is the key to survival

Forget what you might have heard about "nature, red in tooth and claw". Mother Nature, bless her heart, may be much kinder and gentler than most people give her credit for.

That will come as a surprise to many ecologists, who for decades have tended to focus on the "selfish" ways organisms make life harder for one another, such as when one species preys on another or competes with it for space or food. In contrast, relatively few ecologists have studied the ways in which species - unconsciously, of course - make life easier for their neighbours. These positive interactions have generally been assumed to play relatively unimportant roles in ecosystems.

That assumption is wrong, some now claim. "People weren't really looking at the big picture of why a group of species is found together. Often it's because of the positive effect of some other species," says Andrew Altieri, a marine biologist at Northeastern University's Marine Science Center in Nahant, Massachusetts. These so-called "foundation" species can underpin an entire ecosystem by creating a suitable habitat for all the other species that live there. »

The item goes on on to describe studies which show how a certain species of coastal grass and a certain species of muscle initially colonise pebble beaches in Rhode Island, thereby allowing other species to establish themselves.

But isn't that exactly what we would expect? A couple of founder species manage to establish themselves in a hostile environment, then other species move in to take advantage of the new niches created by the founder species. Isn't that textbox evolutionary selfishness at work?

Or am I missing the point?

[T]he great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact…

Thomas Henry Huxley
Biogenesis and Abiogenesis (1870)

Back in 2002, I wrote an essay entitled (in tribute to Huxley) …So Let's All Be Scientists! It was my contribution to Darwin Day Collection One: The Single Best Idea Ever [ISBN: 0972384405, Amazon.com], a collection of articles, reviews and cartoons in celebration of Darwin and science. In the essay, I observed:

…for all the thousands of slugs I have found, I have never come across a single snail in my garden. Why is that? Is it too cold (I live in the Pennines)? Do the slugs eat them […], or out-compete them? Am I just not looking hard enough? Or is there simply not enough calcium in the area to allow snails to make shells (possibly because the soil is too acidic)?

Well, it would appear that the not looking hard enough hypothesis had some merit. The other weekend, I was moving a rockery in my garden (don't ask), when I came across this:

A very small snail!

OK, as snails go, it wasn't exactly the biggest (or, indeed, the alivest), but a snail is a snail, and an ugly fact (no matter how small) is an ugly fact: my no snails in my garden hypothesis is well and truly falsified. So now I have had to modify it slightly:

There are no big snails in my garden.

Actually, I have been keeping an active look-out for snails ever since I wrote my essay, and I can confidently say that I believe my modified hypothesis is correct. Which is odd, because I have observed large snails a couple of hundred yards away from my garden, albeit at a significantly lower altitude (I live on a very steep hill).

But, despite this stark evidence to the contrary, I still like my acidic soil explanation for the (near) absence of snails in my garden. In fact, until last week, I was growing increasingly confident that it was the correct explanation, having first confirmed that the soil in my garden is indeed acidic, and having recently come across the following in the New Scientist subscribers' archive:

Acid attack

Acid rain has progressively thinned the shells of eggs laid by British thrushes over the past 150 years, a new study suggests. Ornithologists fear that the trend could make thrush eggs less likely to hatch…

[Rhys Green of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds] thinks that acid rain, caused by sulphur emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is the most likely cause. This would reduce both the calcium content of leaf litter consumed by worms and the abundance of snails, which together make up a large part of the birds' diets.

So maybe there is still enough calcium in my garden for some very small snails, but not enough for any snails bigger than a couple of millimetres across.

I will get to the bottom of this one! Eventually.

Reuters: Biologists record call of rare bird

The call of the rare Sumatran ground cuckoo, which was widely believed extinct until a decade ago, has been recorded for the first time, the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society said on Monday.

OK, be honest now: hands up who thought Sumatran ground cuckoo was a cooking ingredient.

Blimey! Who'd have thought it? The meek and mild common earthworm, beloved of Charles Darwin, is crawling amok in the good old U.S. of A.

According to an article in this week's New Scientist [full article available to subscribers only]:

… Earthworms have a reputation as environmental good-guys, churning and enriching the earth as they munch their way through soil and leaf litter. The trouble is that Minnesota shouldn't have any worms. Nor should anywhere else in the US and Canada north of a line that runs roughly west from Boston—at least not since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. These worms are invaders who hitched a ride with goods and settlers from Europe three centuries ago, and are now brought in as fishing bait…

In Europe, where the species is native, L[umbricus] terrestris and other earthworms play an important role in incorporating nutrients from fallen leaves into the earth. Their burrows aerate the soil and create handy channels for growing roots, water infiltration and gas exchange. Their casts form hotspots for nitrifying bacteria, which fix nitrogen into a form that plants can absorb. In Minnesota, though, the soil is aerated by soil insects, such as beetles, centipedes and millipedes, and other duff [i.e. leaf litter] inhabitants like salamanders or small mammals that move through the duff and keep it loose. "A more efficient system of aerating the soil is displaced when the earthworm invades," says [Lee] Frelich [University of Minnesota]. As a result it becomes denser, native plants and tree seedlings can't take root in the packed forest floor, and those that do are promptly polished off by burgeoning populations of deer.

Sweet revenge for what the Yanks' nasty grey squirrels did to our reds, you might be tempted to think, but invasive species are becoming a bigger and bigger problem throughout the world. Whether they be cane toads, cats and rabbits in Australia; crayfish, Himalayan balsam, ragwort and rhododendrons in the UK; rats and goats on the Galápagos Islands; or dear old Mrs Tiggywinkle on the Western Isles—introduced species, once they establish themselves, are almost always disastrous news for the local flora and fauna.

In many places (either literally or metaphorically) the cat is out of the bag. There is very little we can do to put right the mess that we have created (for it is generally us who have introduced the invasive species, either deliberately or unintentionally). In other places, such as the Galápagos, we are doing our best to make amends.

You can't blame the invasive species for the damage they're doing. They're just doing what they evolved to do: fighting the good Darwinian fight, tooth and claw; trying to fill their new-found ecological niches.

You can't blame them, but you don't have to like it.