In 1835, during his voyage on HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin spent several weeks in Galápagos exploring the islands and making extensive notes on their natural history. Darwin in Galápagos is the first book to recreate Darwin’s historic visit to the islands, following in his footsteps day by day and island by island as he records all that he observes around him.
Thalia Grant and Gregory Estes meticulously retrace Darwin’s island expeditions, taking you on an unforgettable guided tour. Drawing from Darwin’s original notebooks and logs from the Beagle, the latest findings by Darwin scholars and modern science, and their own intimate knowledge of the archipelago, Grant and Estes offer rare insights into Darwin’s thinking about evolution in the context of the actual locales that inspired him. They introduce Darwin as a young naturalist in England and onboard the Beagle and then put you in his shoes as he explores remote places in the islands. They identify the unique animals and plants he observed and collected, and describe dramatic changes to the islands since Darwin’s time. They also explore the importance of Darwin’s observations and collections to the development of his thinking after the voyage.
Ideal for visitors to Galápagos and a delight for armchair travelers, Darwin in Galápagos is generously illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs and line drawings, as well as detailed maps of Darwin’s island itinerary and informative box features on the archipelago’s natural history.
For Darwin’s bicentenary in 2009, Simon Gurr and Eugene Byrne put together a graphic novel. It was distributed throughout the UK, and I was happy to have been sent a copy:
It has now been published in the United States through Smithsonian Books:
Darwin: A Graphic Biography is an inspiring expedition into the physical and intellectual adventures of Charles Darwin. Presenting Darwin’s life in a smart and entertaining graphic novel, Darwin: A Graphic Biography attempts to not only educate the reader about Darwin but also the scientific world of the 1800s. The graphic medium is ideal for recreating a very specific time frame, succeeding in placing the reader right next to a young Darwin on a “beetling” expedition. With specimens in both hands, and anxious to get another, Darwin ends up stuffing the third beetle into his mouth. Darwin’s life presented in this form is an inspirational tale for kids of all ages. They’ll be sure to identify with a curious young Darwin finding his way on youthful adventures in the fields near his house. The ups, downs, and near-misses of Darwin’s youth are portrayed honestly and without foreshadowing of his later fame. This is a key point for younger readers: that Darwin wasn’t somehow predestined to greatness. He was curious, patient, and meticulous. He persevered–a great lesson about what science is all about.
It is available on Amazon today, one week before Darwin Day: Darwin: A Graphic Biography. And the National Center for Science Education has a preview, here.
Our friends The Bug Chicks – Kristie Reddick and Jessica Honaker – have published their very own insect coloring book. If you’ve ever seen them share their passion for segmented invertebrates at a school or library in Portland, then you’ll know that their “inner bug dork” has come out and expressed itself on the pages of their coloring book, titled Incredible Arthropods: Insects, spiders & more! With 29 coloring pages and a two-page glossary of entomological and ecological terms, this coloring book will either delight the already bug-crazed kid in your life or reel-in he or she that needs to be encouraged to learn about insects and understand that they are far from uninteresting or frightening.
Here are a some sample images that were shared on their Facebook page:
In books for children, Charles Darwin is generally depicted as an old man, a wise and respected gentleman. In more recent years, there have been many books that focus on Darwin during the voyage of HMS Beagle, and they show him as a curious young man, an explorer and collector, traversing exotic locales. For those wishing for a book about Darwin as he was in between young and old, as a middle-aged man at the time he wrote On the Origin of Species, then you must check out The Humblebee Hunter, Inspired by the Life & Experiments of Charles Darwin and his Children, written by Deborah Hopkinson and illustrated by Jen Corace.
This is not just a book about Charles Darwin, however. He is a peripheral figure in the story, for the main character is his daughter Henrietta, or Etty for short. The story is told from her perspective.
We are to take this story as a typical day in the life of Darwin and his children. Darwin, however, was not a typical father for his time. He is involved in the affairs of his children. The historical record captures this aspect of his character. In this story, Darwin calls on his children for help in a scientific experiment, as he did in real life. Although this story is fictional, Darwin did indeed receive help from his children in his experimental endeavours. Most important, they did this science at home.
This book shows Darwin as a diligent worker and as nature lover, Darwin as a devoted father and Darwin as a curious mind. Also, Darwin as storyteller; he recounts his beetle-collecting days and his time on the Galapagos. Etty describes some of the many researches she and her siblings helped their father with. But today, her father is interested in bees: “I am wondering… just how many flowers a humblebee might visit in a minute.” And thus we have our story, simply told and warmly illustrated.
The Humblebee Hunter is a wonderful addition to children’s books not only about Darwin and the history of science, but about curiosity and the love of nature, and of getting children outside (Etty remarks toward the beginning as she helps her mother in the kitchen, “More than anything, I wanted to be outside”). It is always great to see strong female characters interested in science and nature.
Note: all images except the book cover image were taken from the illustrator’s website, here. For an interesting take on children’s books about Darwin, read this post by historian of science Katherine Pandora. I received a copy of this book from the author herself, and she inscribed the book to my son, “To Patrick, Ask questions!” Wonderful!
If you’re interested in Linnaeus, or even the history of natural history generally, you should now about this project, which is nearing completion. It’s an eight volume (11 book) publication called The Linnaeus Apostles: Global Science and Adventure:
THE GREATEST RESEARCH AND PUBLISHING PROJECT EVER – on the chosen few who came to be known as the LINNAEUS APOSTLES. During the 18th century, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was to inspire 17 of his scholars to travel to distant corners of the world to document local nature and culture. They travelled on their own or with expeditions across land and sea – their travels covered every continent between the years 1745 and 1799.
Although Linnaeus and some of his apostles are known internationally, several of the apostles are relatively unknown despite their global pioneering work in the service of science and mankind. The publication of their journals – several of them now made available for the very first time – will for a long time to come stimulate fresh research, new thinking and not least provide exciting reading about cultures, landscapes and people of a bygone era.
DISCOVER THE WORLD WITH THE LINNAEUS APOSTLES The publication of a major international series of eight volumes – in all 11 books and over 5,500 pages – which has been in preparation since the late 1990s under the overall title of The Linnaeus Apostles – Global Science & Adventure. All the accounts of the apostles’ journeys to every continent have been published for the first time in English; those of the apostles who left no travel journals are described through their correspondence or other sources. In the introductory and concluding volumes world experts in various subject fields will provide accounts of the 18th century, of Linnaeus, of travelling and the hardships of field work, together with biographies and a index to volumes One to Eight, which contains more than 125,000 classified search terms.
CONTENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE AUTHORS FROM THE 18TH CENTURY TO MODERN TIMES All the 17 apostles’ complete texts, illustrations and maps have been published in the oeuvre mainly based on the original journals and, as an alternative where no such exist, previously printed old material or correspondence is used. This is the very first time this interesting and important material – about bygone horizons – is made public in its entirety; to the joy not only of interdisciplinary researchers into natural and cultural history, but also of everybody with a general interest in these subjects.
Even though the main authors of the six volumes of this oeuvre (Vol. 2-7) are THE 17 APOSTLES (C. F. Adler, A. Afzelius, A. Berlin, J. P. Falck, P. Forsskål, F. Hasselquist, P. Kalm, P. Osbeck, P. Löfling, D. Rolander, A. Rolandsson Martin, G. Rothman, D. Solander, A. Sparrman , C. P. Thunberg, O. Torén and C. Tärnström) we also present a number of leading scientific writers (G. Broberg, R. Edberg, U. Ehrensvärd, A. Ericsson, G. Eriksson, K. Grandin, V. Hansen, S. Helmfrid, C. Linnaeus, B. Nordenstam, H. Smethman, P. Sörbom and S. Sörlin) in the introductory (Vol. 1) and concluding (Vol. 8) volumes. Volume 1 (INTRODUCTION) will be the descriptive volume. Here the reader will get a deeper understanding of the world in which Linnaeus and his apostles lived. The 18th century was both like and unlike our world today. It was during this era that the modern world first saw the light of day.
The concluding volume 8 (ENCYCLOPÆDIA) will include maps, a categorised index for all the volumes, biographical fact files of each apostle and a list of the most important collections of scientific material in museums, archives and libraries connected to the apostles. Finally, an introduction to “iLINNAEUS” the global workshop to promote natural & cultural history inspired by the Linnaeus Apostles.
Much more detail about this series in this PDF. A purchase you should suggest to your university library…
Republicans reject science, they make war on it, they hate it, they spit on it, they want to repeal the 20th Century. Actually they want to roll back the 20th, 19th, and 18th Centuries.
UPDATE (9/14): It dawned on me yesterday that while I have provided here at The Dispersal of Darwin many examples of anti-evolutionists claiming Darwin said something when he did not (quote-mining), this post is an example of Darwin having written something and then it being claimed that he did not. Interesting.
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In 1875 Darwin published his book about plants that eat insects, Insectivorous Plants. It was rather technical in nature, so did not receive the popular readership as did his Journal of Researches (1839, later The Voyage of the Beagle), On the Origin Of Species (1859), or the later (and last book) The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881). Like many of his books, Insectivorous Plants was a continuation of Darwin’s theory of transmutation project. Specifically, the book is a study of the adaptations of such plants to impoverished conditions. Darwin wrote of it in his autobiography:
During subsequent years, whenever I had leisure, I pursued my experiments, and my book on Insectivorous Plants was published July 1875,—that is sixteen years after my first observations. The delay in this case, as with all my other books, has been a great advantage to me; for a man after a long interval can criticise his own work, almost as well as if it were that of another person. The fact that a plant should secrete, when properly excited, a fluid containing an acid and ferment, closely analogous to the digestive fluid of an animal, was certainly a remarkable discovery.
A remarkable discovery indeed, but a fellow naturalist, whom Darwin shared the discovery of the theory of natural selection with, was concerned that some would not find natural selection a suitable explanation for the adaptations of carnivorous plants. In a letter to Darwin on July 21, 1875, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote:
Dear Darwin,–Many thanks for your kindness in sending me a copy of your new book [Insectivorous Plants]. Being very busy I have only had time to dip into it yet. The account of Utricularia is most marvellous, and quite new to me. I’m rather surprised that you do not make any remarks on the origin of these extraordinary contrivances for capturing insects. Did you think they were too obvious? I daresay there is no difficulty, but I feel sure they will be seized on as inexplicable by Natural Selection, and your silence on the point will be held to show that you consider them so! The contrivance in Utricularia and Dionaea, and in fact in Drosera too, seems fully as great and complex as in Orchids, but there is not the same motive force. Fertilisation and cross-fertilisation are important ends enough to lead to any modification, but can we suppose mere nourishment to be so important, seeing that it is so easily and almost universally obtained by extrusion of roots and leaves? Here are plants which lose their roots and leaves to acquire the same results by infinitely complex modes! What a wonderful and long-continued series of variations must have led up to the perfect “trap” in Utricularia, while at any stage of the process the same end might have been gained by a little more development of roots and leaves, as in 9,999 plants out of 10,000!
Is this an imaginary difficulty, or do you mean to deal with it in future editions of the “Origin”?–Believe me yours very faithfully,
ALFRED R. WALLACE.
Letters to and from Darwin of 1875 are not yet available through the Darwin Correspondence Project, but this letter can be found on pages 233-34 of Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (edited by James Marchant, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916). Wallace’s words in this letter have been taken up by intelligent design proponents as a way to criticize Darwin. Remember, Wallace is the new poster boy for the Discovery Institute. In “Carnivorous plants eat Darwin” (August 18, 2011), Denyse O’Leary (also blogging about this at The ID Report) writes for Uncommon Descent:
University of Bonn geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig will soon have a new book out, on the 200-year-old headache that carnivorous plants pose for Darwinism. Briefly, how does a plant evolve in slow, Darwinian steps, toward making insects part of its normal diet? Like the pitcher plant, for example.
In every family of the plant and animal kingdoms there are species whose sudden appearances and whose irreducibly complex features pose problems for neo-Darwinism. But certain carnivorous plants pose these problems in such a spectacular way that they are a focal point of the Darwinism debate, ever since Alfred Wallace warned Darwin about the problems posed by Utricularia, saying “I feel sure they will be seized on as inexplicable by Natural Selection” and implored him to address these difficulties in a future edition of his book “On the Origin of Species.”
These words are indeed from Wallace, in the letter to Darwin above. The way they are being used, however, seems to imply that Wallace finds natural selection an unconvincing explanation, whereas he is only stating that others might criticize Darwin for this (Wallace remarked, “I daresay there is no difficulty”). Moreoever, O’Leary writes in her post, in response to Wallace imploring Darwin “to deal with it in future editions of the Origin,” that “Darwin never did.” To state that Darwin never responded to Wallace’s question in a later edition is to imply that Darwin gave no response at all.
If one were to look in the historical record more deeply, they would find that Darwin did indeed respond to Wallace. On July 22, 1875, one day after Wallace’s letter about Utricularia, Darwin wrote to Wallace that he had “thrown some light on the acquirement of the power of digestion in Droseraceae,” another group of carnivorous plants (unfortunately there is no full text of the letter available until the DCP publishes the 1875 letters; they are currently readying 1871 for print). Darwin is referring to pages 361-63 of Insectivorous Plants:
The six genera of the Droseraceae very probably inherited this power from a common progenitor, but this cannot apply to
Pinguicula or Nepenthes, for these plants are not at all closely related to the Droseraceae. But the difficulty is not nearly so great as it at first appears. Firstly, the juices of many plants contain an acid, and, apparently, any acid serves for digestion. Secondly, as Dr. Hooker has remarked in relation to the present subject in his address at Belfast (1874), and as Sachs repeatedly insists, the embryos of some plants secrete a fluid which dissolves albuminous substances out of the endosperm; although the endosperm is not actually united with, only in contact with, the embryo. All plants, moreover, have the power of dissolving albuminous or proteid substances, such as protoplasm, chlorophyll, gluten, aleurone, and of carrying them from one part to other parts of their tissues. This must be effected by a solvent, probably consisting of a ferment together with an acid.† Now, in the case of plants which are able to absorb already soluble matter from captured insects, though not capable of true digestion, the solvent just referred to, which must be occasionally present in the glands, would be apt to exude from the glands together with the viscid secretion, inasmuch as endosmose is accompanied by exosmose. If such exudation did ever occur, the solvent would act on the animal matter contained within the captured insects, and this would be an act of true digestion. As it cannot be doubted that this process would be of high service to plants growing in very poor soil, it would tend to be perfected through natural selection. Therefore, any ordinary plant having viscid glands, which occasionally caught insects, might thus be converted under favourable circumstances into a species capable of true digestion. It ceases, therefore, to be any great mystery how several genera of plants, in no way closely related together, have independently acquired this same power.
So when asked by Wallace how to account for the evolution of one particular group of carnivorous plants, Darwin responded that his thoughts about another group should answer the question, it is understandable that Darwin need not have addressed this issue in a future edition of On the Origin of Species.
In his book, available as a PDF here, Lönnig quotes Wallace on page 145, and states (this is a Google translation from German), “I am not aware that Darwin has replied…” Well, to set the record straight, he did reply.
As I am not one to go into the actual biology of this issue, see Nick Matzke’s comments on O’Leary’s post and twoothers about carnivorous plants. The Darwin Correspondence Project has many letters to and from Darwin on carnivorous plants (Drosera and Utricularia), and some from Mary Treat about Utricularia have been published online ahead of print as part of the project’s Darwin and Gender initiative.
Space Shuttle Atlantis' (STS-135) final launch, July 8, 2011 (AP Photo)
I took Patrick to OMSI today to watch the final launch on the planetarium screen. I’m glad I did.
Several Portland news stations were there to film it, and one station (KATU) filmed people in the crowd, including Patrick. I saw the story on their live streaming a little while ago, and there’s two quick shots of Patrick, one of him flying his little shuttle toy in the air. If they post the video to their website, I’ll be sure to post it here!
I was not a NASA-crazed child, but I grew up with the Space Shuttle. I can recall the day when I found out, at age 7, that Challenger had exploded and its crew perished. It’s an important part of our history, not just as Americans, but as humans, to share in these awesome achievements of science and human ingenuity. I hope Patrick remembers this moment.
Summer is upon us, and many of you are looking forward to time away from desks and books and computer screens. So, take this edition of your favorite history of science blog carnival (the only!) as a last call for intelligent, historical entertainment (but honestly, don’t forget about the July and August editions).
A is for Ancient texts, Alchemy, Agassiz, Anenomes, and Astronomy
Thank you for stopping by this 3rd anniversary edition of The Giant’s Shoulders! As of right now, the carnival does not have a blog host for the July edition. Think about it. In the meantime, be sure to look over my ever-updated list of history of science bloggers and tweeters, and if you’re on Twitter yourself, search #histsci.
Happy Summer!
2011-06-17 UPDATE: The next edition will appear at Romeo Vitelli’s psychology blogProvidentia on July 16th. Entries are due by the 15th of the month, and can be submitted directly to the host blog or through BlogCarnival.com.
A. Hunter Dupree. “Yellowstone’s history: A backdrop to the nation’s and the author’s scientific development” Technology in Society 16:4 (1994): 465-477.
“… but Wren and Sloane owed the honour to their public work rather than to their eminence in science. England was slow to reward scientific achievement by this distinction and I believe that Davy, in the early years of the nineteenth century, was the next to receive royal recognition; and even during that century such physicists as Faraday and Maxwell, and such a biologist as Darwin, were not knighted.”
- Louis Tenchard More, Isaac Newton: A Biography (1935)
Came across this yahoo Q&A on Darwin & lack of knighthood. That this wrong answer ‘resolves’ Q is dispiriting http://j.mp/eBdCFs #histsci
Here is the question and the various answers:
Question (Nick.391): How come Charles Robert Darwin never received a knighthood?
Answer 1 (Will): You must remember that Queen Victoria was not only the head of state, she was also the head of the Church of England. As Darwin’s theories were denounced by leading churchmen, it would have been virtually impossible for the Queen to have honoured him. He was simply too controversial at the time.
Answer 2 (Michael B): It was not common in the 19thC to knight men outside the service of the Crown. Soldiers and sailors who had done well and politicians or civil servants were knighted or even ennobled; the fashion for ladling out honours to entertainers, academics and sportsmen is comparatively recent. Controversy had nothing to do with it. Some of the political and military figures who were promoted to a K or even a peerage were, in their way, just as controversial. Simply, academics and scientists did not expect, and did not get, that type of recognition.
Answer 3 (NC): Church of England made sure of that. Many of its notable members (both clergymen and laymen) were openly hostile to Darwin.
Noted by the asker as the “Best Answer” is… #1, and he also commented “Great answer, thanks. Michael B [no, this is not me!] must be on drugs or something because none of that is even accurate” (referring to the second answer). So, the favored answer is that science versus religion tensions kept Darwin from receiving a knighthood, while the possibility of a more nuanced explanation is not possible because such a suggestion could come only from someone whose mind is not properly functioning. Dispiriting, indeed! (I’ll note that another Yahoo Q&A asks the same question, with the answer: “When deciding on who to knight not only must the nominee have done something notable but “usually” must also have a character that does not upset the status quo of the country or upset the citizens in general. Charles Darwin was such a controversial figure that there was “no way” that the monarch of the time could even have considered him for a knighthood.”)
This Anglican censure had more personal repercussions. Darwin may even have lost a knighthood. Lord Palmerston, the incoming Liberal Prime Minister in June 1859, had apparently mooted Darwin’s name to Queen Victoria as a candidate for the Honours List. Prince Albert concurred; he was a friend of science, a friend of Owen’s, President of the British Association in September 1859, where Lyell had spoken of Darwin’s forthcoming work, and he had seen Sir Charles similarly honoured. Darwin would have been delighted and astonished. But then came the Origin. The Queen’s ecclesiastical advisers, including the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, scotched it. The honour would imply approval, and Palmerston’ request was turned down. (488)
As Hesketh noted, Desmond and Moore cite the short 1974 biography of Darwin by James Bunting:
Bunting, Charles Darwin, 88-89, based on evidence apparently found while researching Parliamentary history. The sources have not been located and the author is deceased.
So, we have two ways of looking at a little bit of history. For one, the historical documents purporting to show that indeed Darwin’s lack of a knighthood was due to religious criticism of his work on evolution are lacking. For the other, as Becky has nicely shown, there is good reason to suggest that Darwin did not receive a knighthood (was he even really suggested for one by Palmerston?) because he did not carry out work in service of the British government, as was the case for many of the scientists who did receive royal honours. For now, I will go with the latter. But one’s willingness to go with Wilberforce on this one is perhaps to insist on there having been an absolute science versus religion conflict in nineteenth-century Britain (the conflict thesis, or warfare thesis). Surely there were those who perceived it as such (Tyndall, for example), and classic books devoted to it (John W. Draper’s 1881 History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and Andrew Dickson White’s 1896 History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom), but we must understand this time as one of not a simple dichtomoy of views but of plenty of in-betweens (such as Charles Kingsley). Moore addressed this in The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900(1979). He dispelled the notion that religion was strictly separated from science in the nineteenth century. He notes that, although not the best way to describe what was actually going on in nineteenth-century exchanges between science and religion, the military metaphor of “conflict” or “warfare” was a common trope within the post-Darwinian controversies and that “testifies to its symbolic importance” (13).
Just as the Oxford debate between Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley has been demythologized, by Hesketh and Gould (and Brian Switek, too!), it seems – pending some graduate student tasking him or herself with finding the documents Bunting says are there and doing a deeper analysis of this moment – that Desmond and Moore, although acknowledging the sketchy documentation, like to tell a good story. What sounds more exciting: Darwin not a public servant, or evolution-hating Wilberforce knighthood-blocking Darwin?
Joseph Dalton Hooker, one of Darwin’s supporters and botanist to the British government, did receive several honours. In his case, however, he did not really care to receive them. When in 1869 Lyell and Murchison urged the Duke of Argyll to suggest Hooker for recognition of his service in India, Hooker’s response to Darwin was:
I do not think there is the least chance of my getting the offer of it. The K.C.S.I. is so rare an honour that I might well be proud to have it, for my Indian services; but I really do not desire Knighthood, and would infinitely rather be plain
Dr. Hooker with C.B. to testify to my having done my duty as well as others who have that certificate. So if it comes I shall be proud of it; if not, I shall be as well content. Please say nothing about it. The fact is the Duke might do it with a stroke of the pen, but he don’t like my Darwinism and my Address and I am right proud of that! [emphasis mine]
But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one. [MB: for this passage using the names of the species he lost, go here]
I was very successful in collecting and invented two new methods; I employed a labourer to scrape during the winter, moss off old trees and place [it] in a large bag, and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of the barges in which reeds are brought from the fens, and thus I got some very rare species. No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen’s Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.” I was introduced to entomology by my second cousin, W. Darwin Fox, a clever and most pleasant man, who was then at Christ’s College, and with whom I became extremely intimate. Afterwards I became well acquainted with and went out collecting, with Albert Way of Trinity, who in after years became a well-known archæologist; also with H. Thompson, of the same College, afterwards a leading agriculturist, chairman of a great Railway, and Member of Parliament. It seems therefore that a taste for collecting beetles is some indication of future success in life!
I am surprised what an indelible impression many of the beetles which I caught at Cambridge have left on my mind. I can remember the exact appearance of certain posts, old trees and banks where I made a good capture. The pretty Panagæus crux-major was a treasure in those days, and here at Down I saw a beetle running across a walk, and on picking it up instantly perceived that it differed slightly from P. crux-major, and it turned out to be P.quadripunctatus, which is only a variety or closely allied species, differing from it very slightly in outline. I had never seen in those old days Licinus alive, which to an uneducated eye hardly differs from many other black Carabidous beetles; but my sons found here a specimen and I instantly recognised that it was new to me; yet I had not looked at a British beetle for the last twenty years.
The words “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.” did not really appear as such, for Darwin was probably summarizing his many mentions in Stephen’s work. Much information about Darwin and his early beetle-collecting is available at Darwin Online, including the 1987 monograph “Darwin’s insects: Charles Darwin’s entomological notes, with an introduction and comments by Kenneth G. V. Smith.”
Beetles, Finches and Barnacles, University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge
The above passage reflects Darwin’s passion for insects, and for the thrill of discovery – outside, in nature. Following his time at Cambridge was of course his time on and off HMS Beagle, followed by work in London to organize and research his collections from the voyage. Once he got heavy into his transmutation ideas, Darwin focused on collecting facts and writing, writing, writing in notebooks. In 1846, he turned to a study of barnacles, for several reasons: he felt he needed to cement his status as a naturalist, and he felt that a taxonimc study of a group of marine invertebrates would give insight to his developing transmutation theory. He thought the study would take him a year. Barnacles became such a part of not only Darwin’s life, but his family’s as well that, according to Darwin’s son Francis, one of the children once inquired of a friend, about his father, when visiting their home, “Then where does he do his barnacles?” Darwin expressed in letters to his botanist friend Joseph Dalton Hooker that he saw no end to this work, “but do not flatter yourself that I shall not yet live, to finish the Barnacles & then make a fool of myself on the subject of Species.” In the end, the barnacle work took him eight years, and produced 4 volumes, which resulting in his being awarded the Copley Medal from the Royal Society. Done with barnacles, Darwin was surely tired of sitting at a table peering through a microscope. He reflected in his autobiography:
My work on the Cirripedia possesses, I think, considerable value, as besides describing several new and remarkable forms, I made out the homologies of the various parts—I discovered the cementing apparatus, though I blundered dreadfully about the cement glands—and lastly I proved the existence in certain genera of minute males complemental to and parasitic on the hermaphrodites. This latter discovery has at last been fully confirmed; though at one time a German writer was pleased to attribute the whole account to my fertile imagination. The Cirripedes form a highly varying and difficult group of species to class; and my work was of considerable use to me, when I had to discuss in the Origin of Species the principles of a natural classification. Nevertheless, I doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time.
Darwin then in September 1854 moved on “to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and experimenting, in relation to the transmutation of species.” One such series of experiments were on the germination ability of various seeds after their immersion of saltwater, for Darwin desired to know how plants could disperse across oceans to islands. Like the barnacles, this work was also crucial for On the Origin of Species, in the chapters on geographical distribution. Studying seeds in 1855, however, was no more exciting for Darwin than barnacles. He complained in a letter to his cousin Fox: “Seeds will sink in salt-water – all of nature is perverse & will not do as I wish it, & just at present I wish I had the old Barnacles to work at & nothing new.” To Hooker he called them “horrid seeds” and “ungrateful rascals.” Darwin tired of the whole process. “Thanks, also, for your little note with all the terrible wishes about the seeds,” he wrote to a skeptical Hooker, “in which I almost join for I begin to think they are immortal & that the seed job will be another Barnacle job.” Again, Darwin’s work became a family affair, for the children asked their father if he “should beat Dr. Hooker?!!”
Darwin worked tirelessly in his home outside of London. Down House became a “country house” laboratory for his scientific endeavors, and he utilized many areas of the house and its grounds for his experiments. Yet while he worked away on his “one long argument,” all he really wanted to do was get outside. To the entomologist John Lubbock, also Darwin’s neighbor, he wrote in 1854:
I do not know whether you care about Beetles, but for the chance I send this in a Bottle, which, I never remember having seen, though it is excessively rash to speak from a 26 year old remembrance. Whenever we meet you can tell me whether you know it.—
… I feel like an old war-horse at the sound of the trumpet, when I read about the capturing of rare beetles— is not this a magnanimous simile for a decayed entomologist. It really almost makes me long to begin collecting again.
Darwin’s move to Downe marked an event in his life that had lasting influence. This transition in physical location mirrors the transition, although in an opposite direction, of his work from stationary barnacles to mobile seeds. Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore suggested in Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (1992, p. 232) that thinking about transoceanic dispersal in the seed experiments allowed a solitary and confined Darwin to travel once more. “Thinking about blue seas took him back to the voyage,” they wrote. “During those years island-hopping himself, he would have given his right arm to be home. Now he was dreaming himself back to the sea again.” We return to Carson’s passage about dispersal in The Sea Around Us, and we can envision Darwin imaging himself as one of those plants “drifting on the currents” or an animal “rafting in on logs.” It seems daydreams sailing upon seeds were not enough to satiate a shut-in naturalist.
Caricature of Darwin by fellow beetle collecter Albert Way (from the Darwin Correspondence Project website: By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Copyright CUL)
Darwin continued to reminisce about beetle-collecting. To Charles Lyell’s sister-in-law, Katharine, Darwin wrote in 1856: “With respect to giving your children a taste for Natural History, I will venture one remark, viz that giving them specimens, in my opinion, would tend to destroy such taste. Youngsters must be themselves collectors to acquire a taste; & if I had a collection of English Lepidoptera, I would be systematically most miserly & not give my Boys half-a-dozen butterflies in the year. Your eldest Boy has the brow of an observer, if there be the least truth in phrenology.” If he could not go back to collecting, he surely encouraged others to. In 1858, he shared with Fox, “I am reminded of old days by my third Boy having just begun collecting Beetles, & he caught the other day Brachinus crepitans of immotal Whittlesea-mere memory.— My blood boiled with old ardour, when he caught a Licinus,—a prize unknown to me.” To his caricaturist Way, in 1860: “It is a very long time since we met.— Eheu Eheu, the old Crux Major days are long past. I sincerely hope that you are well in health.” And finally, in 1862 Darwin wrote to Fox: “About two years ago I stumbled at Down on a Panagæus crux major: how it brought back to my mind Cambridge days! You did me a great service in making me an entomologist: I really hardly know anything in this life that I have more enjoyed that our beetle-hunting expeditions; Prince Albert told Lyell, that he looked back with more pleasure to collecting insects, than he had ever found in stag-shooting.”
So happy that my son is curious and willing to pick things up!
At 6:30 p.m. on February 9, Michael Blouin of Oregon State University will speak on “Evolution in Captivity: Fitness of Hatchery and Wild Salmon” in room 223 of Jefferson Hall on the Forest Grove campus of Pacific University. The event, Pacific University’s third annual Darwin Day keynote address, is free and open to the public. For further information, visit here.
At 5:30 p.m. on February 11, Edward Davis of the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History will speak on “Oregon’s Saber-toothed Salmon: A Story of Natural and Sexual Selection” at the museum, 1680 E. 15th Ave. in Eugene. The lecture is free with museum admission ($3.00; $2.00 for youth). For further information, visit here.
And from noon to 4:00 p.m. on February 12, it’s family day at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History: “Make a mask of your favorite animal, join a scavenger hunt, see fossils from the paleontology vaults, and enjoy cake in celebration of Darwin’s birthday.” Admission is $5.00 for families; free for museum members. For further information, visit here.
This past weekend I attended the 5th annual Science Online conference in North Carolina (I have wanted to go for several years now but was unable, however this time I received some travel money, thanks to Bora & Anton!).
Somewhere over Texas on my way to North Carolina
[From the website: Read the posts and tweets, see the photos and watch the videos uploaded by our participants, hashtag #scio11]
Opening reception on Thursday night (Photo credit: Louis Shackleton)
Me in the history of science session (Photo credit: Stacy Baker)
For my part, I discussed the creationist tactic of quote-mining Darwin, gave some examples, and called for science writers to be weary of using quotes – know thy source and know thy context in which the quotee was writing. Here are my slides:
I will put up another post with the tweets about the history of science session (future link) [EDIT: click here to see a messy Word document with those tweets]. Unfortunately, my laptop got sick and since I do not own a smartphone, I was unable to be online (kind of ironic given the nature of the conference).
The best part of this conference, first and foremost for me, was the opportunity to meet in person many people whose blogs I have read for several years, chatted with, shared information online, friends on Facebook, followers on Facebook, etc. Putting IRL personalities and faces to online personas and avatars is interesting, and it felt weird being recognized and approached by people whom I have never shared physical space with before. It was a pleasure to meet, in no particular order: Brian Switek, Carl Zimmer, David Dobbs, Ed Yong, Tom Levenson (again), Hannah Waters, Krystal D’Costa, Stacy Baker and her biology students, Kevin Zelnio, Glendon Mellow, Louis Shackleton, Karen James (again), Miriam Goldstein, Jason Goldman, Minjae Ormes, Alice Bell, Carin Bondar, Carl Boettiger, Lucas Brouwers, John Hawks, Anne Jefferson, Blake Stacey, Sheril Kirshenbaum, David Orr, Joshua Rosenau, Janet Stemwedel, scicurious, Christie Wilcox, Jeremy Yoder, and Danielle Lee; and to meet some new faces: Lisa Gardiner, Kate Clancy, Holly Menninger, Brian Krueger, Brian Malow, Emily Willingham, Alexandra Levitt, and Stephanie Zvan.
With Skyskull (Photo credit: Greg Gbur/Skyskull)
Other sessions I attended were: Technology and the Wilderness (technology, i.e. smartphone apps, should be an accessory to nature experiences and education, not a replacement; #techwild, wiki); Still Waiting for a Superhero – Science Education Needs YOU! (an opportunity to hear from Stacy Baker’s biology students); Parenting with Science Online (Carin Bondar will have resources up on the wiki soon); Science-Art: The Burgeoning Fields of Niche Artwork Aimed at Scientific Disciplines (wiki); “But It’s Just a Blog!” (science blogging newbies get advice); Blogging on the Career Path (be upfront about your blogging activities when seeking employment); Keepers of the Bullshit Filter (tell people when they are wrong, publicly; use MediaBug to report errors in the media); Communicating Science: Have You Ever Wondered, “What the Hell’s the Point?” (Science Cheerleader Darlene Cavalier spreading some sciencey cheer); and Defending Science Online: Tactics and Conflicts in Science Communication (are online methods of correcting disinformation effective?).
Looking on as Josh Rosenau discusses attacks on evolution education
Robert Krulwich, NPR science correspondent and co-host of Radio Lab was the keynote speaker, and he shared his experiences turning scientific topics into stories for the public (the key: use words/language not for scientists but for everyday people).
Robert Krulwich (of NPR and Radio Lab) was the keynote speaker
All I can say is, he had the room’s attention. He also shared this video, which is astonishing:
Kevin Zelnio sings “Wayfaring Mollusk” during the open mic session:
And Christie Wilcox does her rendition off Meridith Brooks’ “Bitch,” “Extinction’s a Bitch” (lyrics/audio):
itʼs not easy to survive / but at least youʼre still alive / and thatʼs way more than a trilobite can say!
To start off this edition, let me remind you that, yes, evolution kicks ass!
Two evolution-related topics have received much attention in December, not only for their interesting nature, but how the media has spun the conclusions of the research.
Kele’s Science Blog, The Mario Genome!: “While I am sort of familiar with the idea of genetic algorithms, and many are cooler than what this does, I think the Mario Genome easily illustrates what the idea is all about to someone with little prior knowledge.”
Smithsonian, The Top Ten Daily Consequences of Having Evolved: “all species inhabit bodies imperfect for the lives they live. Our own bodies are worse off than most simply because of the many differences between the wilderness in which we evolved and the modern world in which we live. We feel the consequences every day.”
john hawks weblog, The Denisova genome FAQ: “Today, a paper by David Reich and colleagues presents the nuclear genome of the Denisova pinky bone. This is the second “whole genome” of an apparently extinct population of Pleistocene humans. This genome is nearly as distinct from Neanderthals as the draft Neanderthal genome is from living people.”
National Center for Science Education, “Molecular Insights” videos on-line: “Featured are four exciting speakers whose research in molecular evolution is revolutionizing our understanding of familiar and compelling examples of evolution.”
Neurotic Physiology, Friday Weird Science: Female Orgasm, Evolutionary Byproduct? Or not?: “Evolutionary biologists have debated the “purpose” of the female orgasm for a good long while. They have debated WHAT the purpose is, to be sure, but even more so, they have debated whether there IS one. Is the female orgasm just an evolution byproduct?”
The Atavism, Sunday Spinelessness – The origin and extinction of species: “Extinction is a natural part of life, and the fate of all species eventually, but when it’s driven by human short-sightedness and robs us of not just a wonderful product of nature but a window through which we might have understood nature’s working it’s very hard to write about.” (this could go in the History section, too)
Anthropology in Practice, The Evolutionary Roots of Talking With Our Hands: “The role of gestures in communication has been on my mind recently because my goddaughter is just beginning to communicate beyond crying and laughing. She recently celebrated her first birthday, and she’s begun to speak her first words. It’s extremely exciting. I find it really interesting that she points with increasing frequency to emphasize her exclamations—Elmo isn’t just a word, he’s a recognizable part of her world, from the decorations that were a part of her birthday celebration to her stuffed muppet that laughs when shaken. Her gestures help her bridge a communication gap.”
Why Evolution Is True, “Reinforcement” and the origin of species: “Curiously, though, the “reinforcement” seen in the wild applies to gametic isolation but not sexual isolation. While sexual isolation (mate discrimination) quickly became stronger in forcibly-coexisting lab populations, it’s no stronger in nature in areas where the species coexist than elsewhere. It’s a mystery to us why both forms of isolation evolve so quickly in the lab but only one is seen in co-occurring populations in nature.”
archy, Blood of the mammoth: “Catastrophists love frozen woolly mammoths. It doesn’t matter what their preferred catastrophe is–Atlantis sinking, falling ice moons, the Noachian flood, abrupt changes of the Earth’s axis, or a near miss by a pinballing planet disguised as an ancient Near Eastern god–at some point, they will trot out the frozen mammoths as proof positive of their theory. Frozen mammoths have already been spotted milling around 2012. What is it about mammoths that make them so attractive to catastrophists?”
13.7 – Cosmos and Culture, Our Family Tree: Chimps, Bonobos And Our Commonality: “So here’s the six-million-dollar question: What was the human-chimp-bonobo MRCA like? A great ape for sure. But what about behavior? Was it Homo-like? Pan-like? And what do we mean by such distinctions?”
Quodlibeta, Island of the Hobbits: “My best guess – going on past performance – is that the culprit is a yet to be discovered species, Hamster Giganticus, which polished off the islands inhabitants in a violent feeding frenzy and died of starvation shortly afterwards. The evidence will arrive any day now, you’ll see.”
Greg Laden’s Blog, There are two species of African elephant: “Everyone knows that there are two kinds of elephants in this world: Asian and African… Once again, everything you know is wrong. But you knew that.”
Denim and Tweed, Under the mistletoe, coevolution is about s and m: “Plants and plant products, from sprigs of holly to pine boughs, have been traditional winter holiday decorations since before Christmas became Christmas. Nowadays, if we don’t resort to plastic imitations, we deck our halls with garlands from a nursery and a tree from a farm. But seasonal decorations have natural histories apart from mantelpieces and door frames—ecological roles and, yes, coevolutionary interactions with other species.”
Denim and Tweed, Coevolutionary constraints may divide Joshua trees: “Scientists love it when the real world validates our more theoretical predictions. It helps, of course, if those predictions are rooted in the real world to begin with. This is more or less what happened in my own research, with results reported in two just-published scientific papers.”
The Mermaid’s Tale, A new broom sweeps gene?: “The idea that strong directional or ‘positive’ selection favored a single gene grew out of the Mendelian thread, but nobody in quantitative genetics (such as agricultural breeders or many working in population genetics theory) and those who understood gene networks, should have known that most of the time, especially given the typical weakness of selection, selection would not just find and fix a single allele in a single gene.”
The Mermaid’s Tale, Should we cut Darwin out of parts of the human skin color story?: “But it’s difficult to go into the details and nuance of these issues about skin color variation and vitamin D while introducing evolution to students. For many of my students, this is the first time that they’ve learned about evolution in a scholarly setting and we perform activities to illustrate the differences between Lamarckian evolution and Darwinian selection. Of course we also discuss all the known evolutionary forces—mutation, gene flow, drift, and selection—not just selection.”
Why Evolution Is True, New genes arise quickly: “What role does the appearance of new genes, versus simple changes in old ones, play in evolution? There are two reasons why this question has recently become important… The first involves a scientific controversy… The second controversy is religious.”
Wired Science (Brian Switek of Laelaps), 6 Strange Fossils That Enlightened Evolutionary Scientists: “Even so, Darwin brought the subject of evolution to the forefront of Victorian science. And with an eye toward evolution, his colleagues began to pick through the traces of ancient life for clues about how organisms changed. This is a gallery of some of the key fossil species that have both confounded and inspired scientists in their efforts to understand the history of life and, placed in context of what we know today, have confirmed Darwin’s vision of a branching tree of life produced by natural selection.”
360 Degree Skeptic, Insight into the Minds of Turtles and Dogs: “Because most animals behave in a way foreign to our own minds, we tend to overlook and belittle what is going on in their minds. So to speak. The following two studies got my primate brain thinking about the minds of other species.”
Dr. Carin Bondar, The Fish-Stache: A Whole New Level of Sexual Selection: “Sexual selection is alive and well in the animal kingdom… Case in point: males of the Mexical guppy Poecilia sphenops seem to get by just fine with a little peach-fuzz on the upper lip. Yes, you read that correctly. Researchers hypothesized that epidermal outgrowths on the upper maxilla of these male fish (aka fish-staches) may be a sexually selected characteristic.”
Lab Rat, Levels of evolution: “From a bacteriologists point of view this is a fascinating example of just how variable a single strain of bacterial species can be. From a medical viewpoint it’s more worrying. The ability of highly virulent bacteria to chop out large portions of their genome and pass them onto other, potentially non-virulent strains could help to spread not just antibiotic resistance, but also other tricks like biofilm formation and different enzymes which help the bacteria to cope with antibiotic challenges.”
Teenage Atheist, Unintelligent Design: Blind Cave Fish: “When discussing evolution with Creationists, I love to bring up the case of the Mexican Tetra, more commonly known as Blind Cave Fish. These fishy critters are wondrous emblems of the blind processes of evolution and prove to be conspicuous hollows in the Intelligent Design movement.” (this post could go in the Culture Wars section, too)
Pharyngula, The molecular foundation of the phylotypic stage: “Two recent papers in Nature have examined the real molecular information behind the phylotypic stage, and they’ve confirmed the molecular basis of the conservation.”
The Scientific Fundamentalist, Is This Why Teenage Girls Don’t Swoon for Middle-Aged Billionaires?: “The parent-offspring conflict theory of mate choice that Bram Buunk and his students have been advancing for the last several years questions the assumption of individual mate choice commonly used in evolutionary psychology. The pioneering work of David M. Buss and others since then all implicitly and explicitly assumes that men and women choose each other in mate selection according to the criteria that they consider important. Buunk and others question this assumption of individual autonomy in mate choice, and instead suggest that, both throughout human evolutionary history and in most traditional societies in the world today, parents may have exerted significant influence and control over their children’s mate choice.”
NeuroDojo, The lonely places: Where could life exist, but doesn’t?: “While as a biologist, even microbes would be a spectacular finding, the question of whether habitats are vacant for complex, multicellular life is almost as interesting. And if Mars is ever found to support microbial life, why doesn’t it support macroscopic life?”
Pleiotropy, Pleiotropy is 100 years old: “This year, the term pleiotropy was defined 100 years ago, and Frank Stearns, graduate student at the University of Maryland biology graduate program has written a perspective in Genetics, which I highly recommend.”
Kele’s Science Blog, Of Lobsters, Sticklebacks, and Google Chrome: “The following is the last take-home essay for my developmental class. This essay is about the concept of modularity and how it is being used in biology today. It’s fairly basic stuff and if you are reading this blog, you probably know most of it already! I do hope you find the comparison to Google Chrome convincing though.”
Genome Engineering, Oh darling I love your bacteria: “Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) can be annoying in the summer when they cluster round the kitchen compost crock, but they are also a vital weapon in evolutionary and genetic research. Research published in PNAS has suggested that fruit fly evolution may be driven by something as simple as diet and bacteria.”
Brian Switek (Laelaps) for Smithsonian, Guest Blog: Breaking our link to the “March of Progress”: “I hate the phrase ‘missing link’. It immediately sends up a red flag in my mind, and is almost always a sure indicator that the person employing it has only a very superficial understanding of the way evolution works. To understand why this is, however, we have to inspect the intellectual baggage that the phrase carries with it.” (I reviewed Switek’s first book, Written in Stone, here)
Evolving Thoughts, Darwin’s motivation: “For some time now I have been convinced that Darwin’s original and most pressing problem was not adaptation. It was the existence of taxonomic diversity.”
Whewell’s Ghost: [Review] Wiker “The Darwin Myth”: “But all of this serves as a mere 134 page prelude to real argument that Wiker wishes to make. Three chapters (“What to make of it all”, “Darwin and Hitler”, “Christianity and Evolution”) repeat a series of creationist canards. Natural selection is a tautology. Darwin lied to himself when he felt that morality and natural selection could co-exist. Darwin’s ideas led to, or supported, eugenics, Nazism, abortion, euthanasia, sex education and contraceptives for the poor, and pornography. Indeed, Darwinism can be used to justify cannibalism.”
History of geology, Island Life: “Even the first naturalists noted that islands display important peculiarities in the animals and plants found on them, but it was only with the formulation of Darwins and Wallaces theory that these phenomeas could be explained.”
History of geology, The greatest show on Earth: “But Darwin’s theory by killing many of the old monsters created a lot of new ones. It is interesting to note that the classic cryptid monsters in modern pop culture since the late 19th/ early 20th century are in fact such “missing links” as imagined by the layman. Cryptozoologists are searching, based on presumed sightings, for Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Orang-Pendek and other cryptids, all described as the classic ape-man creatures. Even if all these creatures lack physical evidence, the theory of evolution somehow provided to these animals a plausible background.”
Sandwalk, Students vs Icons of Evolution: “Students have to read Icons of Evolution and write an essay analyzing the arguments in one of the chapters (their choice). They have no problem recognizing the flaws in the logic and the outright mistruths in that book. For typical university students with a rudimentary understanding of evolution it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The Discovery Institute sees it differently but they must live on another planet.”
World of Wonders, How Does Understanding Evolution Make Us Better Citizens?: “It is not so much our understanding of the fact of evolution that is so important to being an informed, responsible citizen. It is our understanding of how we know that evolution is a fact that is critical.” (want to understand evolution better, then check out Understanding Evolution, which just won a Science Prize for Online Resources in Education for 2010)
Dipping in the Toe, On Evolution: You are a Mutant: “The problem was there was a point that could have been made – perhaps a clarifying moment for some in the audience – to wipe away one of the very many misunderstandings surrounding evolution. Neither you, nor I, have ever (in the biological sense) evolved. You were born, you live, you die. And, genetically speaking, the essence of the physical “you”, your body, is a result of that one one event, when you were first conceived. What your body became was locked in at that moment. Yes, environment and other factors have their roles – some quite dramatic, but the genetic component is the core of it all. From birth to death, YOU do not evolve. But… when you were conceived and then born, there was something different about you. Something that does have to do with evolution. I’ll tell you what it is…”
National Center for Science Education, “Evolution and its rivals”: “‘Evolution and its rivals’ — a special issue of the philosophy journal Synthese focused on the creationism/evolution controversy — was just published.”
Skeptic, Top Ten Myths About Evolution: “This concise pamphlet provides answers to common objections to evolution, such as: If humans came from apes, why aren’t apes evolving into humans?; Only an intelligent designer could have made something as complex as an eye; The second law of thermo-dynamics proves that evolution is impossible; Evolution can’t account for morality; and more…”
The Panda’s Thumb, Chapman U. welcomes Evolution Education Research Center: “I’m particularly happy to see this because a few years ago, as readers will recall, the Chapman Law Review published a terrible creationist article. As an alumnus, I was so embarrassed to see the school’s name on such a piece of tripe that I responded with an article of my own. It’s nice to see Chapman step up for science!”
The Mermaid’s Tale, Encounters with Evolution… or… the Ark-etype of ignorance: “In the foreseeable future, it’ll be us Americans who are sitting around a meagre campfire gnawing raw meat (probably rat-meat, or maybe just McBurgers), while people in other countries, who value real education, will be dining on caviar…..and smiling patronizingly at our plight.”
Homologous Legs, The ID community isn’t Lönnig from their mistakes: “Once again, a touted “pro-ID, peer reviewed paper” hasn’t made a positive case for its favoured hypothesis. It’ll be interesting to see how much positive publicity this paper will get in the ID community, but it deserves no praise from the scientific one.”
Homologous Legs, BIO-Complexity’s opinion on intelligent design isn’t complex: “As you can see, all of the editorial board members (expect one) are either sympathetic to or supporters or proponents of intelligent design. The odd one out is Branko Kozulic, about whose ID viewpoint I could find very little. I doubt he’s a hardcore ID critic, however. So, make up your own mind: do you think BIO-Complexity is a journal with an editorial board that has “a wide range of views on the merit of ID”, or is it simply another place for ID proponents to submit “research” to uncritical peer review and pass it off as legitimate science?”
Miscellany
World of Wonders, Lamarck is Alive and Well Living in Language: “And yet, nearly three centuries after his birth, we describe evolution with language that more closely suggests Lamarck’s idea than Darwin’s. We write that ‘snakes modified their lungs—one lung has been slimmed and elongated and the other reduced to a functionless relic.’”
Charlie’s Playhouse, Winners of the Evolution & Art Contest!: “In this contest we asked kids to think of an animal alive today, imagine a bunch of them stranded in a different environment, and draw a picture of how the animal might evolve to fit its new environment after a long time. And boy, did the kids think, imagine, and draw!” (interviews with two of the winners, here and here; and my own son’s entry)
She Thought, My 5 year old just worked out evolution: “I don’t mean she’s intuited natural selection or anything like that, she’s 5 and not even I’m that deeply into Mummy pride. And honesty compels me to admit that we’re just a little bit into ‘science activities’ around here so she probably has a head start on 99% of the population. But I can track the way her understanding has developed and it’s fascinating to see.”
Richard Dawkins, “History of the Earth” in C Major:
The Flying Trilobite, Calvin Mellow: this is a wonderful, evolutionary welcome to a new life (congratulations, Glendon!)
Drawing Files, THIS JUST IN: Reviews!: “We are tantalizingly close to having a finished book! Here are the first two reviews of Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth. So far so good!” (the NCSE has a free preview)
Jon’s Blog, Best Birthday Gift: “Marvel Apes: The Evolution Starts Here”: “The best part this series of one-shots, IMHO, was a serial about the time that Charles Darwin pissed off the Ancient One (Earth’s now-deceased Sorcerer Supreme) and got mystically exiled to the Planet of the Marvel Apes for a couple weeks. He immediately drew the attention of L-ook-i (God of Mischief), who proceeds to split Darwin into three forms (Human Darwin, Ape Darwin, and Future Human Darwin). Eventually, Future Human Darwin uses super-science to transform Human Darwin into the Low Evolutionary and super-evolved hijinks happen. I won’t spoil how things turn out, though I will gleefully reveal that at least one of these three Darwins survives the storyline and is traveling the cosmos and just begging to return to someday to comics.”
Why Evolution Is True, Redundant parts: “We are bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal organisms descended from bilaterally symmetrical fishes. In some cases having two of something isuseful. Our two eyes give us binocular vision, but we have two not because of that facility, but because our fishy ancestors had two eyes that enabled them to see, nonbinocularly, on both sides of their bodies.”
Babel’s Dawn, Riding A Two-Horse Shay: “David Sloan Wilson has an online essay, ‘Take the Evolution Challenge,’ calling for the extension of “evolutionary theory beyond the biological sciences to include all things human.” It is a radical proposition, perhaps overstated as a way of encouraging people to take the idea to its limit. I’m not sure what new insights the theory of evolution has to offer a history of, say, the crusades, but you never know. And I have to say that I have been amazed by how much I have clarified my understanding of language simply by taking an evolutionary approach to its origins. It turns out that evolutionary theory forces a series of questions that, at least in the study of language, pays off handsomely. So, despite my uncertainties, I want to endorse Wilson’s call. No study of anything human should ignore what evolutionary theory has to offer.”
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Thus ends this New Year edition of the Carnival of Evolution. The next edition will be hosted by Jeremy Yoder at Denim and Tweed. Submit your posts on this page. Take note, also, that CoE is seeking help in creating another logo.
Visual representation in science is the study of how images can inform an understanding of scientific practice and the production and dissemination of knowledge. There will be at least two worskshops on this topic in the next year (here and here). The description of one describes images as “occupy[ing] a special place… for their power to encapsulate scientific knowledge, their capacity to communicate to various publics, and their flexibility in the production of meanings by the interaction of producers and users.” For this month’s edition of the history of science blog carnival, The Giant’s Shoulders and it’s theme of visuals and representations in science, I thought I’d share some information about Darwin and evolution in cartoons and caricatures.
Where do political cartoons and caricatures fit into this? Surely, such images were avenues of knowledge for the public, and how a cartoon represented Darwin or evolution (anti-evolution, pro-evolution, etc.) had an impact on the viewer, and evolution was used as a means to comment on society and culture or whatever was in the news. I know of at least two historians of science who have published on the topic:
Davis presented at the History of Science Society meeting in 2009 on “Demonizing Evolution,” sharing some of the fundamentalist cartoons. Since Google Books won’t let me see the cartoons in the article, I’m not sure if those in his talk are the same as those in his article, but I will share a few from his talk:
Sunday School Times, June 1922
Why be an ape--? (London, 1936)
Sunday School Times, January 1929
no source given for this one
These cartoons in the era of the Scopes trial present evolution as: dangerous to one’s faith (learning about and accepting evolution will creep into one’s religious life), “modern” education is cheating on God and the Bible; evolution is anti-religion; evolution is sacred and religious itself; the theory of evolution is collapsing, full of speculation and not fact-based. Much of these claims are still used today, by many creationists and intelligent design proponents who spend more time trying to discredit evolution than convincing us that their view is scientific. Such cartoons and anti-evolution pamphlets, according to Davis, “provide new insights into the intense debate about the meaning of science and the nature of religion that took place among American Protestants in the 1920s. From popular publications such as these, we see just how the fundamentalists and the modernists both attempted to influence public opnion about the religious image of science in the decade of the Scopes trial” (193).
There is a wonderful resource for political cartoons that do the opposite of demonizing evolution. Historian of science Joe Cain has brought to our attention the ephemeral journal Evolution: A Journal of Nature, which ran from 1927 through 1938, 21 issue in all, and he provides a publication history for it in a 2003 article for Archives of Natural History. Evolution was “a monthly platform for pro-evolutionist perspectives and as a device for rebutting anti-evolutionists. It also aimed to bolster the resolve of teachers caught in the centre of curriculum debates.” Its purpose was laid out in the first issue: ”This magazine will help bridge that gap by furnishing a forum in which science itself can speak in popular language without fear of the restraints with which fundamentalists are seeking to shackle them.” Among the articles within Evolution were scores of political cartoons. Cain has made all the issues available (also available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library) and a page with some of the cartoons. Here are a few:
Unfortunately, Evolution was not a great success (hence, only 21 issues). By its 12th issue, the journal touted its 5,000 subscribers, and provided a list of how many by state. Interestingly, it had the most subscribers in New York City (675), California (551), New York State (494), Illinois (486), and Ohio (299). A few others in the 100-200 range (including Pennsylvania), and the rest under 100, including all states in the South.
Piers Hale, an historian of science at the University of Oklahoma, taught over the summer a month-long Study Abroad course in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands: HSCI 4970/5970 Charles Darwin and Galapagos: Solving the “mystery of mysteries.” Undergraduate students took both a zoology course in evolutionary ecology and a course on the history of evolutionary thought. Plus, exploring the places and following in the footsteps… not a bad way to get some credits! Piers hopes this can become a regularly offered course.
He has been posting pictures on his Facebook page, so I share here some Darwin-specific shots with his permission.
Here’s a shot from the University of San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador, of Darwin and Wallace (George will like this one):
Darwin bust:
Darwin bust:
Darwin statue:
Charles Darwin:
The bay where the Beagle dropped anchor 15 September 1835:
The bay where the Beagle dropped anchor 15 September 1835:
Avenue 12th February, San Cristobal:
An iguana for Darwin:
That Darwin bust again, nice sunset:
Convention center named after Darwin:
On the grounds of the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island:
With 29 coloring pages and a two-page glossary of entomological and ecological terms, this coloring book will either delight the already bug-crazed kid in your life or reel-in he or she that needs to be encouraged to learn about insects and understand that they are far from uninteresting or frightening.
, and Greg Good (
(1992):
(1979). He dispelled the notion that religion was strictly separated from science in the nineteenth century. He notes that, although not the best way to describe what was actually going on in nineteenth-century exchanges between science and religion, the military metaphor of “conflict” or “warfare” was a common trope within the post-Darwinian controversies and that “testifies to its symbolic importance” (13).
(which all attendees received in their swagbag!) and 
. 
. One could look at Darwin portraiture and photography, maybe Janet Browne 
, specifically chapter 1, 
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