The Friends of Charles Darwin

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 6^th 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!

If my camera were a shotgun, I could have eaten grouse for dinner yesterday evening:

Red Grouse [Lagopus lagopus]

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!

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.

I am delighted to announce that the Friends of Charles Darwin have their 2000th member: Rakibul Karim of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

An extra-special welcome!

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 26^th. 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.