The Red Notebook

I have to admit, when I head that Aardman Animation, the makers of Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, etc., had made an animated film about Pirates in an adventure with none other than Charles Darwin, I was concerned that it might contain one or two historical inaccuracies. However, I am pleased to report that whatever liberties the film takes with established historical fact—diabolical though they might seem—can easily be explained.

First things first, though: as we have come to expect from Aardman, the animation is as brilliant; the film is great fun; kids will love it; grown-up kids will love it too; and even sad, old Darwin groupies like me will be enthralled.

Second things second: as I said, the film does appear to contain a number of historical inaccuracies and anachronisms. I do not think it will spoil your enjoyment of the film too much if I were to list a few:

• the film begins early in the reign of Queen Victoria. A short while later, we encounter Charles Darwin in his cabin (presumably aboard H.M.S. Beagle, although the ship is not referred to by name).  Darwin even has a portrait of Victoria in his cabin (because, we later learn, he has something of a crush on Her Majesty). But Victoria did not come to the throne until 1837, by which time Darwin had already returned to Blighty (the Beagle completed her voyage on 2nd October, 1836);

Charles Darwin in his cabin. (Note the apparent anachronism: Victoria was not yet Regina when Darwin was on the Beagle.)

• when we first encounter Darwin, he is writing in his journal on what he describes as the 93rd day of his voyage. A short while later, he goes on to record in his journal that the ship is being attacked by pirates. The 93rd day of Darwin’s Beagle voyage fell on 28th March, 1832—over five years, incidentally, before Victoria came to the throne. Darwin’s Beagle Diary entry for that day actually reads:
  

  During these two days the labours of the expedition have commenced.—We have laid down the soundings on parts of the Abrolhos, which were left undone by Baron Roussin.—The depth varied to an unusual extent: at one cast of the lead there would be 20 fathoms & in a few minutes only 5.—The scene being quite new to me was very interesting.—Everything in such a state of preparation; sails all shortened & snug: anchor ready to let fall: no voice or noise to be heard, excepting the alternate cry of the leadsmen in the chains.—

… You will note that Darwin makes absolutely no mention of any pirates;

• confronted by the Pirate Captain in the Beagle‘s cabin, Darwin explains that two objects which the captain mistakes for gold are actually baboon’s kidneys. The baboon is an African species. The Beagle did not visit Africa until 1836. So how could Darwin have obtained a pair of baboon’s kidneys as early as 28th March, 1832?
• later on in the film, we visit Darwin’s London residence. At one point, somebody flips an electric light switch. The first commercially viable electric light bulbs were not invented (independently, by Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan) until the late 1870s;
• in the film, Darwin has a monkey servant named Bobo. There is no record of any monkey named Bobo in any of Darwin’s papers;
• the word scientist was coined by William Whewell in 1833. It seems unlikely, therefore, that Charles Darwin would describe himself as a scientist on the 93rd day of his Beagle voyage—as he does in this film—in 1832. Although, in fairness, the film does claim to take place in 1838 (see first anachronism);
• throughout the film, one of the pirates is quite clearly wearing a Blue Peter badge on his hat. For the non-Brits amongst you, Blue Peter is the world’s longest-running children’s television show, which first aired in 1958—long after the events supposedly depicted in this film.

Deadly as the above observations might seem to the historical veracity of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, I believe they can easily be explained. If you listen very carefully to Charles Darwin’s voice, it is quite clearly identical to that of the tenth incarnation of Dr Who. As we all know, Dr Who is a Time Lord—an extraterrestrial from the planet Gallifrey—who travels through time and space in a time-machine called the TARDIS. The important fact that we had not previously been aware of is that Charles Darwin and Dr Who are/were/will be one and the same person! Once you introduce a time-machine into the equation, all arguments about anachronistic inaccuracy are automatically invalidated.

Which leaves us with Bobo, the monkey-servant. How do we explain him? Once again, there is a deceptively simple explanation. It is well documented that Charles Darwin did indeed have a servant aboard the Beagle, who remained his servant for some time after they returned to Blighty. That servant’s name was Syms Covington. It seems clear to me that, contrary to what has previously been believed, Syms Covington was not a human, but a monkey. This explains his rather unusual first name: Syms is clearly a corruption of Simian. Furthermore, Bobo is a common nickname for people whose surname is Covington.

Historical concerns utterly refuted, I have no hesitation in recommending this highly entertaining film. Here is the trailer:

Note to American Readers: In America, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists has been given a different title, namely: The Pirates! Band of Misfits. This, presumably, is on account of misfits’—and even pirates’—being deemed far more appropriate for young American audiences than those incorrigible investigators of reality, scientists!

Postscript: Peter Lord, the co-owner and Creative Director of Aardman, tweets:

I am delighted to announce that the Friends of Charles Darwin have their first members from Côte d´Ivoire: Mariam Ture of Abidjan. Welcome!

We now have members in 89 countries.

130 years ago today, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, at Down House in Kent, Charles Darwin died in the arms of his loving wife, Emma.

Darwin’s life must surely be the most well-documented of any scientist, thanks to his notebooks, Beagle diary, and phenomenally copious correspondence. But the shortest, saddest entry in his life’s unofficial journal was recorded by Emma:
 

Emma Darwin's diary entry, 18th (sic) April, 1882.

 
From the corrections made to her subsequent diary entries, it would appear that Emma missed a day somewhere, which explains why her husband’s death is incorrectly recorded as falling on Tuesday 18th April, 1882, rather than on Wednesday 19th.

We all have to go some time.

The world will not see his like again.

I am delighted to announce that the Friends of Charles Darwin have their first members from the Faroe Islands: Hjalgrím Vang Magnussen of Lamba. Welcome!

We now have members in 88 countries.

No! Could this be the end for Charles Darwin?

Charles Darwin walks the plank

Had that plank been shorter, the whole history of the scientific world would have been changed.

I trust everyone is as ridiculously excited as I am at the prospect of seeing none other than Charles Darwin appear in an Aardman Animation feature.

Here’s the trailer:

The Friends of Charles Darwin came into being 18 years ago today, with the sending of this letter.

A very Happy Darwin Day.

Yours truly, writing on the Beagle Project blog:

A miserable birthday aboard HMS Beagle

Sometimes even plain sailing isn’t plain sailing:

12^th There has been a little swell on the sea to day, & I have been very uncomfortable: this has tried & quite overcome the small stock of patience that the early parts of the voyage left me. — Here I have spent three days in painful indolence, whilst animals are staring me in the face, without labels & scientific epitaphs. — This has been the first day that the heat has annoyed us.

Charles Darwin writing in his diary aboard HMS Beagle 180 years ago today, on his 23rd birthday. In almost five years voyaging around the world, the poor lad never really overcame his dreadful seasickness.

Your truly, writing in the Beagle Project blog today:

The Dickens Connection
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. On days such as these, it has become something of a tradition to write a blog post linking the subject of the anniversary in question with the theme of the blog—no matter how tenuous the link. Charles Dickens and HMS Beagle? That’s quite a tall order. All right, I’m game…

Continue reading »

The Beagle Project's Peter McGrath, writing in the Guardian Notes & Theories blog:

Will a new HMS Beagle set sail in 2013?
The HMS Beagle Project is seeking a port in the UK where a modern replica of the ship that carried Darwin on his famous voyage will be built.

Let’s bloody hope so!

The Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project: Alfred Russel Wallace’s address books are now available for downloading

Beautiful! These are not simply address books; they are works of art. Please check them out!

(I have a bit of a thing about old notebooks.)

This site is, presumably, currently unavailable in Turkey—to children, at least:

Bianet: Darwin Sites Banned – Survival of the Fittest?
Access is being denied to all internet sites related to evolution as the result of the children profile of the internet filtering system implemented by the Council of Information Technology and Communications (BTK). The latest restriction on internet access caused uproar among internet users.

The “Secure Internet” filtering system was applied on 22 November. Its children profile bans the entire number of websites concerned with the theory of evolution and British naturalist Charles Darwin. This comprises all sites that contain the words “evolution” or “Darwin”.

Come on, chaps. If you really want to join the EU, you’re going to have to stop doing stuff like this!

The Friends of Charles Darwin now have an official Google Plus (G+) page.

I am a big fan of G+, and have been waiting for this day for some time. Be happy for me!

(Now go and tell all of your friends.)

I have just posted a review of Melanie Challenger’s excellent new book (due out next week), On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature in the books section.

I am delighted to announce that the Friends of Charles Darwin have their first members from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Nijaz Deleut and Kemo De Leut of Tjentiste. Welcome to you both! (Nijaz is also based in Novi Vinodolski, Croatia.)

We now have members in 87 countries.

[I wasn't really sure where this post belonged, so I am cross-posting it from my natural history blog.]

[W]hile on the one hand the study of Nature today aims to describe a system governed by immutable laws, on the other it delights in drawing our attention to creatures noteworthy for their bizarre physical form or behaviour. Even in Brehm’s Thierleben, a popular nineteenth-century zoological compendium, pride of place is given to the crocodile and the kangaroo, the ant-eater and the armadillo, the seahorse and the pelican; and nowadays we are shown on the television screen a colony of penguins, say, standing motionless through the long dark winter of the Antarctic, with its icy storms, on their feet the eggs laid at a milder time of year. In programmes of this kind, which are called Nature Watch or Survival and are considered particularly educational, one is more likely to see some monster coupling at the bottom of Lake Baikal than an ordinary blackbird.

—W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (trans. Michael Hulse)

 
I’m with Sebald: I would much rather watch a documentary about blackbirds than one about monster couplings at the bottom of Lake Baikal. Darwin’s remarkable theory describing how life’s grandeur came about works for all species. A blackbird is every bit as remarkable as a seahorse or a pelican—and a lot more relevant to me personally.

As young boys, my dad and uncle were evacuated to Harlech in North Wales during the Second World War. They can still sing a particular song in Welsh together, although they have no idea what the words mean. Surprisingly, the woman who looked after them in Harlech was German noblewoman, Amalie (Amy) Elizabeth Sophie Graves, née von Ranke (1857–1951). She also happened to be the mother of the poet and author Robert Graves (1895–1985).

Dad was telling me recently that, although he doesn’t remember an awful lot about his life as an evacuee, one of his clearest memories from that time is being allowed to look at a German book full of wonderful engravings of animals. I wonder if it was Brehms Thierleben, as described by Sebald:

Frontispiece from a reprint volume of the second edition of Brehms Thierleben (Image: Wikipedia).

North Wales, the Second World War, evacuees, German noblewomen, famous poets, zoological compendiums, unreliable memories…

All very Sebaldian!

Marcus Chown writing in this week’s New Scientist [subscribers only link] about the so-called Goldilocks Paradox (i.e. why do the laws of physics seem fine-tuned for life?):

The most likely explanation for fine-tuning is […] that our universe is merely one of a vast ensemble of universes, each with different laws of physics. We find ourselves in one with laws suitable for life because, again, how could it be any other way?

The multiverse idea is not without theoretical backing. String theory, our best attempt yet at a theory of everything, predicts at least 10⁵⁰⁰ universes, each with different laws of physics. To put that number into perspective, there are an estimated 10²⁵ grains of sand in the Sahara desert.

I don’t think that puts it into perspective at all. Do you? What Chown is saying is that the number of grains of sand in the Sahara is 10⁴⁷⁵ times smaller than the theoretically predicted minimum number of universes in the multiverse (10⁵⁰⁰ ÷ 10²⁵ = 10⁴⁷⁵).

I don’t think 10⁴⁷⁵ is much easier to envisage than 10⁵⁰⁰. That’s a 1 followed by 475 zeroes, as opposed to a 1 followed by 500 zeroes.

Chown might almost as well have said, “To put that number into perspective, I only have two legs”. Two is much closer to 10²⁵ than 10²⁵ is to 10⁵⁰⁰. Several hundreds of orders of magnitude closer, in fact.

In other words, as I’m sure Chown would agree, 10⁵⁰⁰ is an unimaginably vast number. You can’t really put it into any sort of perspective.

Nice try, though, Mr Chown: you certainly got me thinking.

Having had the good fortune to have been brought up in Britain, I was never short of excellent nature documentaries to watch on television. I must have seen thousands of them over the years. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched cheetahs chasing gazelles, lions hunting wildebeest, and polar bears padding over the frozen wastes. It’s remarkable what you we can observe from the comfort of our own living rooms.

In a perverse way, though, the sheer number and quality of nature documentaries on television inevitably means that some of the Wow! factor has gone. When David Attenborough first sat amongst the gorillas, my whole family, and an entire nation, watched spellbound. But nowadays you can catch up-close-and-personal documentaries about gorillas pretty much any week on one channel or another. We’ve seen it all before.

But, this week, sitting watching yet another BBC Nature documentary with my dad, I experienced a true Wow! moment. I mean it literally: both my dad and I actually said “Wow!” We saw an animal neither of us had ever seen in action before do something truly amazing. I was, quite frankly, shocked (and a little embarrassed) that I had not known about its remarkable behaviour. And, to top it all, it was a British animal (although, it turns out, there are numerous species which perform this remarkable feat)…

Fortunately, the BBC has made the clip in question available online. [Postscript: The video is not available outside the UK, apparently. This YouTube video covers the same subject matter.]

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be Wowed! I give you the sexton beetle [Nicrophorus vespilloides]:

It is famously said that God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. I don’t know about that. But I do know that the sexton beetle is now officially my favourite member of that inordinately vast order.

This via Open Culture: Peter Greenaway’s 53-minute exploration of the life and work of Charles Darwin. The film is structured around 18 separate tableaux, each focusing on another chapter in the naturalist’s life, and each consisting of just one long uninterrupted shot. Other than the narrator’s voiceover, there is no dialogue.

CG animator Richard Spence recently uploaded a 3-minute sequence he created of Sir David Attenborough explaining the entire history of life on earth. You’ve probably seen the sequence before, but this version is in high definition, without an annoying YouTube logo in the corner.

Today marks the completion of the planet Neptune‘s first orbit of the sun since it was discovered by astronomers on 23 September, 1846.

The discovery of Neptune is one of those neat stories often used to illustrate the predictive capabilities of science. Englishman John Couch Adams and Frenchman Urbain Jean-Joseph Le Verrier independently calculated the orbit of the inferred new planet, based on known irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. And, sure enough, when astronomers pointed their telescopes where Adams and Le Verrier said, there shone Neptune! Interestingly, though, these astronomers were probably not the first to observe Neptune: Galileo, Lalande and Herschel are each thought to have seen the it earlier, but none of them seems to have realised that they were looking at a new planet.

Another frequently told story of a scientific prediction proving correct comes courtesy of Charles Darwin. (You must have known I’d be getting to him eventually.) In his snappily titled book On the Various Contrivances by which British And Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing, Darwin famously predicted the existence of a moth with an extremely long proboscis, which would be the pollinator of a strange Madagascan orchid with an extremely long nectary, writing:

I fear that the reader will be wearied, but I must say a few words on the Angræcum sesquipedale, of which the large six-rayed flowers, like stars formed of snow-white wax, have excited the admiration of travellers in Madagascar. A whip-like green nectary of astonishing length hangs down beneath the labellum. […]

I could not for some time understand how the pollinia of this Orchid were removed, or how it could be fertilised. I passed bristles and needles down the open entrance into the nectary and through the cleft in the rostellum with no result. It then occurred to me that, from the length of the nectary, the flower must be visited by large moths, with a proboscis thick at the base; and that to drain the last drop of nectar even the largest moth would have to force its proboscis as far down as possible.

Xanthopan morganii praedicta
(Image: cc kqedquest on Flickr)

Darwin’s prediction was seen as a bold one by at least one of his correspondents. In 1862, just 16 years after the discovery of Neptune, Edward Cresy Jr went so far as to compare Darwin’s prediction with that of Adams and Le Verrier, writing to Darwin:

I think your anticipation by analogy of a Madagascar moth with a probiscis ten inches long equals Adam’s & Leverrier— What a triumph it will be to find him—

Unlike Adams and Le Verrier, Darwin did not live to see his prediction confirmed. It was not until 1903 that a new sub-species of the African hawk moth was discovered in Madagascar. As Darwin had predicted, the moth feeds from the nectaries of Angraecum sesquipedale with its extremely long proboscis. The new sub-species was given the very appropriate scientific name Xanthopan morganii praedicta in recognition of yet another triumphant prediction for science.

Postscript [02-Dec-2011]: …although, apparently (see comments), Xanthopan morganii praedicta was named in honour of Alfred Russel Wallace’s similar prediction, not Darwin’s.