The Friends of Charles Darwin

Tim Adams's piece on scientific illiteracy, The New Age of Ignorance, in today's Observer brought a smile to my face:

…The longest two minutes of my life occurred in the company of James Watson, one half of the famous double act who discovered the double helix. I was interviewing Watson, then in his late seventies, at his lab in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. At one point, I referred blithely to the 'perfect simplicity' of his and Francis Crick's findings about the code of life.

Watson is a mischievous, famously prickly man and that phrase seemed to get under his skin. He raised an eyebrow. He sat back. He thought he would have some fun. Seeing as it was all so perfectly simple, he suggested, maybe I could briefly run through my understanding of DNA base pairing, say, or chromosome mapping.

What followed—a tangled, stuttering stream of consciousness reflecting distant O-level biology and recent half-understanding of Watson's brilliant books, punctuated with words like 'replication' and 'mutation' and meaning nothing much—gave new resonance to the notion of floundering.

Nice one, James.

Adams's article also cites C.P. Snow's famous example of scientific illiteracy taken from his lecture The Two Cultures:

'A good many times,' he suggested, 'I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold; it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: have you ever read a work of Shakespeare's?'

Where are the Snows of yesteryear?

As second laws go, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is one of the best. In fact, let's not mince words, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the most important law in science. In the inconceivable event that it is ever proved wrong, it really will be back-to-the-drawing-board time. As I have previously stated on my other website, I find the Second Law of Thermodynamics rather comforting: you can never get more out of something than you put in, stuff wears out, things break, people die, so you might as well get used to it.

For any of you with a general ignorance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, who would like to do something about it, I would recommend you pop over to the In Our Time website and 'listen again' to their excellent programme on the subject. It was one of their best ever shows.

Reuters: Scientists fly into raptures over flightless Fred

The remains of a dodo found in a cave beneath bamboo and tea plantations in Mauritius offer the best chance yet to learn about the extinct flightless bird, a scientist said on Friday.

The discovery was made earlier this month in the Mauritian highlands but the location was kept secret until the recovery of the skeleton, nicknamed "Fred", was completed on Friday. Four men guarded the site overnight.

Julian Hume, a paleontologist at Britain's Natural History Museum, told Reuters the remains were likely to yield excellent DNA and other vital clues, because they were found intact, in isolation, and in a cave.

I wonder if Nunatak knows any more about this.

My Chinese chop

The Friends of Charles Darwin have their first member based in China. She is Laura Colbert of Kunming. Welcome, Laura!

Now I'll have you know that I have visited Hong Kong and Beijing, and I know for a fact that there are a lot more people in China than just Laura. So, if you're reading this in China, and you have a thing about Charles Darwin, don't be bashful, come and join us!

The following brief news item seems to lend support to a hunch I have had for some years:

New Scientist: Bird song goes out of fashion too

… Behavioural ecologists have long known that some songbirds develop local dialects, and that individual birds respond more strongly to their own dialect than to a foreign one. Less is known about how, or how quickly, such differences arise.

To study how a dialect changes over time, Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioural ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, compared recordings of male white-crowned sparrows' song from 1979 […] and 2003. The modern song, she found, was slower and lower in pitch.

This difference mattered to the birds… [Derryberry] found that females solicit more copulations and males showed more aggressive territorial behaviour to the contemporary song than to the older ones… The result shows that meaningful differences in song styles can arise within just a few years, and thus that mating barriers can be erected quickly, says Derryberry.

I have long suspected that sexual selection might be more important in species-creation than it is generally given credit for. Sexual selection tends to play second fiddle to natural selection in discussions about speciation. In fact, I would argue that sexual selection is simply a sub-category of natural selection—albeit a very important sub-category.

It seems to me that differing sexual preferences amongst potential mates creates evolutionary niches without the need for haphazard geographical isolation. This must greatly increase the opportunities for speciation. In fact, my hunch is that sexual selection could prove to be more important than traditional natural selection in terms of speciation.

HMS "Beagle": Survey Ship Extraordinary
Amazon UK|US
(Or, better still, order it from your local bookshop.)

My copy of HMS Beagle: Survey Ship Extraordinary by Karl Heinz Marquardt has just arrived through the post. Many thanks to Peter at the Beagle Project for the tip off.

The book is really aimed at model-makers, and might come in handy to that end when I retire, but it's also packed with research and illustrations of great interest to us Darwin groupies. My partner Jen shook her head in resigned disbelief when she saw what I'd ordered, and went off to do a Sudoku.

Oh, and it could also come in extremely handy if you were—oh, I don't know—planning to build a working replica of HMS Beagle, or something truly magnificent like that.

John H. Wahlert, FCD, Ph.D., Professor of Biology and Chair of Natural Sciences at Baruch College, New York, has been reseaching how Maer, the home of Charles Darwin's cousins, the Wedgwoods, influenced Darwin and his thinking. His resulting paper is entitled Maer Hall and Environs - Monuments to Intellectual History.

Maer Hall and the surrounding countryside was undoubtedly of great importance to Darwin, who spent many happy days there in his youth. It was at Maer Hall that he proposed to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. They were married in Maer church. In his autobiography, Darwin wrote:

My visits to Maer during these two or three succeeding years were quite delightful, independently of the autumnal shooting. Life there was perfectly free; the country was very pleasant for walking or riding; and in the evening there was much very agreeable conversation, not so personal as it generally is in large family parties, together with music.

As well as providing interesting background information about Maer, Prof. Wahlert's paper describes how observations made at Maer contributed to Darwin's scientific work.

Prof. Wahlert carried out his researched at the request of Kenneth Hancock, FCD, who is fighting to save the Maer Hills from inappropriate development. I wish him the best of luck with his campaign.

The Friends of Charles Darwin have their first member based in Austria. He is Jürgen R. Plasser of Linz. Welcome, Jürgen!

WOOT!

Guardian: Yesterday in parliament

… Coins celebrating Henry VIII, Charles Darwin and Robert Burns will be issued in 2009, [UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair] Darling announced… A £2 coin will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of his work The Origin of Species.

Fan-bloody-tastic!

In fact, it's a double celebration: not only is our Charlie to appear on a coin, but so is Robert Burns, the bard who wrote Charlie He's My Darling, upon which our theme tune is based.

A £2 coin, eh? That means there'll be five Darwins to a, erm, Darwin.

I must have been living with my head buried in the sand. I am totally addicted to podcasts, but, until I read yesterday's Blog Go the Heads announcement on the Cosmic Variance weblog, I had never even heard of Bloggingheads.tv.

What a fantastic concept! Two side-by-side talking heads having a conversation via video link. And what a great show too: the one of the aforementioned Cosmic Variance's resident (astro)physicists, Sean Carroll, in a 79-minute conversation with science writer George Johnson about string theory, religion, love, the anthropic principle, and old photographic plates. Two highly intelligent people having a highly intelligent conversation about science.

It's the future of television.

Michael Barton, FCD over at The Dispersal of Darwin has tagged me with the eight things to know about me blog-meme.

Will you just listen to yourself, Richard… Tagged with a blog-meme indeed! When did I start spouting this sort of gibberish? What I meant to say is that I have been sent a chain-letter, the rules of which are as follows:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

Now, the thing is, I haven't passed on a chain-letter since I first had the maths explained to me. By the time this particular chain-letter reaches its 11th generation, assuming we don't duplicate any recipients, it should have reached 8,589,934,592 (8¹¹) people, which is considerably more than the current population of the planet. The chain has to break somewhere, and, as ever, it is going to break with me.

But just to prove that I'm not a total spoil-sport, he is a list of eight random facts/habits about myself, many of which are true:

1. 

   The view from my garden.
   I live with my partner Jen in a former farmhouse in the Yorkshire Pennines on one of the hillsides above the milltown of Hebden Bridge—or Hippy Central, as I affectionately refer to it. Hebden Bridge is a magnet for those in search of alternative lifestyles, be they aging hippies, tree-huggers, homeopathic voodoo merchants, crystal healers, or vegetarians. The town is rumoured to be on the same ley line as Glastonbury, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Marrakesh, and San Francisco. It is also the per capita lesbian capital of Europe.
2. I was born and raised on the Wirral peninsula, just across the River Mersey from Liverpool. My primary school music teacher told us that she had also taught John Lennon and Cilla Black. My primary school music teacher was a liar.
3. I went to a posh public school, which I greatly enjoyed—apart from the chapel, which pupils (all boys) were compelled to attend six days a week. The headmaster was a former double-grand-slam-winning Welsh rugby captain, famous for his disciplinary standards and religious views. He took my class for Divinity one year, when I earned myself a reputation as a philosophical trouble-maker. To get his own back, the headmaster made me into a monitor—a lesser prefect—which meant I had to usher people into chapel. On one such occasion, I was collared by the school chaplain in the vestry: "What's your name, boy?" he asked. "Carter, sir." "Carter, I need you to shake hands with the Bishop of Chester… Bishop of Chester, this is Carter." "How do you do, Carter?" "Carter, this is the Bishop of Chester." "Hi, Bish!"
4. In 1983, I went to Durham University to study Physics. But Physics at university proved to be a totally different kettle of fish to physics at school, so I concentrated on my beer drinking instead. I proved to be very good at this, once winning a bet by drinking three pints of real ale in 51 seconds. After the first year, I changed my subject to Natural Sciences—a strange mixture of Physics, Archaeology and the History & Philosophy of Science. If I had my time over again, I would without doubt study the History & Philosophy of Science full-time. In 1985, I went on an archaeological dig to Shetland. After three weeks' digging in rain and blizzards, during which time my colleagues unearthed all manner of Viking and Iron Age artefacts all around me, the sum total of my finds came to 136 snail shells—all of which I dug up on my final day.
5. My first job was working in a torpedo factory. Only we didn't call them torpedoes; we called them underwater vehicles. Underwater vehicles that happened to be programmed to bump into ships very fast. But they didn't officially become torpedoes until the military bolted warheads on the front.
6. I have stood on the Great Wall of China and can confirm that it is possible to see space from there. I have also visited the so-called 'Forbidden' City—I walked straight in! In the year 2000, I visited Australia, where I bumped into a placard-wielding ex-faith baptist named Harry, who was extremely pissed off about the non-second-coming of Jesus at the end of the previous year.
7. The Friends of Charles Darwin were originally going to be called The Friends of Mary Anne Lee. Mary Anne Lee was fined by a local magistrate for dancing lasciviously with navvies at The Old Hill Inn during the construction of the Ribblehead Viaduct in the 1860s. My Friends of Charles Darwin co-founder, Fitz, and I approve of lascious dancing—especially when beer is involved.
8. 

   Down House (beech tree on left)
   In Charles Darwin's garden at Down House, there is a magnificent beech tree, underneath which sits the worm stone. When I visited Down House some years ago, I gathered a dozen or so beech seeds from around the worm stone and gave them to my dad, a keen gardener, to grow me a scion of one of Darwin's trees to plant in my own garden. Not one of them germinated. A classic example of Natural Selection in action. Pesky Natural Selection!
9. Following a freak accident in August 2005, I have 13 clones. I am still awaiting the call from the Nobel Committee.
10. I'm not really innumerate; I just like to break the rules occasionally.

The Friends of Charles Darwin have their first member based in El Salvador. He is Luis Mario Domenzain of San Salvador. Welcome, Luis!

Here's a nice example of an evolutionary arms race in action:

BBC: Butterfly shows evolution at work

Scientists say they have seen one of the fastest evolutionary changes ever observed in a species of butterfly. The tropical blue moon butterfly has developed a way of fighting back against parasitic bacteria.

Six years ago, males accounted for just 1% of the blue moon population on two islands in the South Pacific. But by last year, the butterflies had evolved a gene to keep the bacteria in check and male numbers were up to about 40% of the population. Scientists believe the comeback is due to "suppressor" genes that control the Wolbachia bacteria that is passed down from the mother and kills the male embryos before they hatch.

The parasitic bacterium can only be passed on through the female line of its host, so it evolved a mechanism to ensure that only female host embryos survive. But the dearth of male blue moon butterflies created a massive niche that was just crying out to be filled. Any mutation that enabled male butterfly embryos to survive the bacterium's attack would spread quickly through the population. Which is exactly what appears to have happened, and the butterfly sex ratios are rapidly returning to normal.

The development of resistance to the wolbachia bacterium is a lovely example of Natural Selection in action: a single beneficial mutation spreading quickly through a severely depleted population. The alternative was extinction.

With males having dropped to 1% of the population, the blue moon butterfly has just come through an evolutionary bottleneck. Evolutionary bottlenecks are a fascinating subject in their own right. They are a means by which rare, possibly disadvantageous traits can become more common in a population by serendipitously piggybacking on the back of strongly selected beneficial ones. Genes mutate, but it is individuals that are selected. If a particular genetic mutation gives an individual a major selective advantage in an evolutionary bottleneck situation, that individual's genes are likely to become more common in the general population warts and all: the benefits of the highly advantageous mutation might well outweigh the penalties of any disadvantageous ones. Evolutionary bottlenecks lead to in-breeding.

Recent DNA studies indicate that our own hominid line went through an evolutionary bottleneck in its dim and distant past, which left us and our chimpanzee cousins more vulnerable to genetic disease such as cancer. It would be interesting to know what other traits piggybacked on the blue moon butterfly's highly advantageous new wolbachia resistance.

At the end of May, there was a news story doing the rounds about how bipedalism evolved in the trees and not, as has been traditionally thought, via knuckle-walking on the ground. Now, a new study says bipedalism evolved because it uses less energy than knuckle-walking.

What is an interested non-expert supposed to think? (Actually, for the record, as an interested non-expert, I didn't buy the first story at all.)

Anyway, I only mention this second story, because it included a funny photo of a chimpanzee on a treadmill:

This one will have the animal rights people doing their nuts.

Reuters: Skulls confirm we're all out of Africa

An analysis of thousands of skulls shows modern humans originated from a single point in Africa and finally lays to rest the idea of multiple origins, British scientists said on Wednesday.

Don't see it myself. I can't believe that a single study—no matter how compelling—is going to make the sceptics accept the Out of Africa hypothesis. Some very capable scientists will continue to promote alternative hypotheses. They might be right, although I suspect not: the Out of Africa hypothesis makes perfect sense to me, whereas the multiple origins hypotheses don't. But, as long as Out of Africa deniers' arguments are backed up by any sort of plausible evidence, they should be given airtime. That's good science, as far as I'm concerned.

Human evolution is a fascinating subject. We need to leave room for alternative hypotheses—even if they are, in all likelihood, wrong.

There are two different collective nouns for bats (by which I mean the nocturnal mammals): a colony and a cloud. Both nouns seem a bit excessive when it comes to the number of bats that flitter about our garden on summer evenings. Last year we had four; this year we have three. Carry on at this rate, and next year the most appropriate collective noun will be a brace.

My partner Jen and I are thrilled to have bats in our garden. As soon as we spot one flying past the window on its crepuscular jaunts, we call out "Bats!" and rush on to the patio to watch them. It is a totally magical experience.

Watching bats is the sensual equivalent of culture shock: we and the bats perceive the world in totally different ways. If we stand still for a few seconds, the bats seem to assume we are inanimate objects and happily fly about our heads, apparently oblivious to the fact that we are large mammals that might constitute a danger to them. To us, the bats fly by totally silently, whereas, from the bats' point of view—or should that be point of listen?—they are making such a racket of clicks to assist with their echolocation system that they temporarily have to disconnect their auditory bones (or ossicles) during each click to avoid deafening themselves. We cannot begin to imagine how bats perceive the world.

So mesmerised was I by the bats on Friday evening that I didn't realise I had rushed out on to the patio without any shoes on. Until, that is, I felt the unique squishing sensation that comes from standing on a slug in your socks.

Just finished watching John Horgan speaking with PZ Myers on Science Saturday (70 mins). Highly recommended.

Contrary to all expectations, PZ neither sports horns nor spouts fire. In fact, entre nous, I think he looks a little bit like me!