The Friends of Charles Darwin

Well, someone had to do it!

(Different sizes available, if you're interested—or even if you're not.)

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!

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.

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.

Galileo's memorial,
Santa Croce.
(cc) Richard Carter

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.

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).

A kestrel hunting behind my house

More kestrel photos »

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.

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.

The Friends of Charles Darwin have their first member from Bangladesh: Susanta Barman of Kurigram.

Welcome!

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.

Subscribed.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Memorial to Adam Sedgwick, Dent

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.

A nice little haul

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!