The Red Notebook

I tend to avoid god-botherer baiting on this website. Life’s too short, and all that. But I was just looking through some old photos, and came across this shot which I hope even the most devoutly deluded of religious fundamentalists will find amusing:

Harry the ex-faith Baptist, Sydney, Australia, 2000.

Harry was a former Baptist who felt very disillusioned that Jesus had not returned as foretold in January that year. As soon as I saw him, I knew I had to photograph him. So, for the first (and, so far, only) time in my life, I went up to a complete stranger and asked to take their photograph.

As he posed for the shot, Harry explained how the non-second-coming of Jesus at the turn of the millennium had quite destroyed his faith. He was now preaching the word of Newton and Einstein—two blokes who knew what they were talking about.

“What about Darwin?” I asked.

“Him too!” said Harry.

(I didn’t point out that, to be pedantic, the new millennium wasn’t actually due to start until January 2001.)

Postscript: Is it just my imagination, or does Harry bear an uncanny resemblance to PZ Myers, FCD? We have a right to know.

Those awfully nice chaps over at the Beagle Project have assimilated me into their Beagle blogging collective. My current designation is Four of Four. Look out ScienceBlogs, Discovery Network and Nature Network, we’re about to eat your lunch.

I have no intention of closing the Red Notebook—even though, let’s be honest, I don’t post to it nearly as often as I should—but, from now on, my more Beaglesque posts will be over at the Beagle Project blog. My first three posts over there were:

• Conrad Martens’ sketchbooks
• Download it while you still can
• Beagle barks and poops

At the mulled wine reception at the Natural History Museum last Friday evening, to my great embarrassment, Karen and Peter from the Beagle Project kept introducing me to assorted scientists as the chap who got Darwin on the £10 note. When I saw the delighted look on the scientists’ faces, I would immediately and mumblingly explain that I had campaigned to have Darwin on a banknote, but that I didn’t think the campaign had had much influence on the Bank of England’s eventual choice. After my second mumbling qualifier, I began to suspect that Karen and Peter were doing it deliberately.

The Darwin tenner made the press again last week, when Prof. Steve Jones criticised the depiction of a hummingbird on the back of the note. For the record, although I have nothing at all against the delightful creatures, I did always think that a hummingbird was a pretty odd choice for the Darwin tenner. Not because, as Prof. Jones points out, you do not get hummingbirds on the Galápagos Islands, but because there are an awful lot of other species with far closer Darwinian associations which would have made a more appropriate choice: Galápagos tortoises, mockingbirds and finches, Darwin’s rhea, beetles, pigeons, orchids, insectivorous plants, barnacles, the humble earthworm.

But, the simple truth is, all species should forever be associated with Darwin, because Darwin came up with the brilliantly simple explanation of how they are all related, and how they all evolved.

I suspect, however, that the famously modest Darwin would feel uneasy having the entirety of life’s grandeur forever associated with his name.

Pesky British modesty!

Some soft porn yesterday.

The UK’s National Heritage Memorial Fund has announced that it will be donating £10 million of our National Lottery losings to the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery. (I don’t think I’ve ever used the word National four times in one sentence before.)

The donation is to help the galleries keep Titian’s masterpiece Diana and Actaeon on public display in the UK. Jenny Abramsky, chair of the NHMF, reportedly said that it is as “important as ever” to protect the UK’s cultural heritage.

Erm… The last time I looked, Titian was a Johnny Foreigner from Venice, in modern-day Italy. How the loss of such a painting—magnificent as we are assured it is—would be a loss to the UK’s cultural heritage is quite beyond me.

It seems to me that there must be better ways of spending TEN MILLION pounds’ worth of quids. Like, say, oh, I dunno, building TWO HMS Beagles. One should really be enough, I suppose, but, hey, if they’ve got £10 million to give away, why not build two? To doubly celebrate our great scientific heritage. Instead of frittering it away on some old soft porn.

It’s just a thought.

But all this talk of Titian gives me the perfect excuse to repeat one of my favourite limericks (not, alas, written by yours truly):

While Titian was mixing rose madder,
A model posed nude on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he snuck up the ladder and had her.

(And there you were beginning to think I was some sort of philistine.)

Darwin’s iconic notebook image

One of the goodies I bought for myself at the big Darwin exhibition last week was a fridge magnet depicting Darwin’s iconic tree of life image with the rather wonderful caption, I think.

It wasn’t until I got the magnet home that I noticed there was a bit of a howler on the packaging, repeated on the Natural History Museum’s website, which says:

The Tree of Life is the only illustration in Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’. Darwin used it to show that all things living are related.

Well, not quite.

Although the only image in On the Origin of Species does indeed depict a tree of life, it bears very little resemblance to the one depicted on the fridge magnet, which is taken from one of Darwin’s early notebooks on evolution. A facsimile of the notebook is on display at the exhibition (and just to the right).

Now that I’ve returned home and a couple of days have passed, I think it only right and proper that I give a well-considered summary of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin exhibition. Here it is:

V E R Y   G O O D   I N D E E D !

If you get the chance to see it, you really should. The two highlights of the exhibition for me were getting to see Darwin’s original Red Notebook in the flesh, so to speak, and being shown the original Galápagos mockingbird specimens which first set Darwin to wondering about evolution by the Beagle Project‘s Karen James, who has recently been working with these very specimens.

The potentially embarrassing moment of the evening came when I seized the opportunity (over mulled wine) to ask a snail expert working for the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature a question which has been bothering me for over six years now: why are there are so few snails in my garden? It hadn’t occurred to me that there are an awful lot of snails in the world, and that this particular expert might specialise in those from another part of it (like the African rift lakes, for example).

Still, I think I got away with it.

Many thanks to Karen and Peter from the Beagle Project for our fantastic day out in London yesterday. I had never met either of them before, but we were already old friends. More about the Darwin exhibition later, but, in the meantime, here are some photos (originals here):

As announced yesterday, all day today, I’ll be live-blogging my trip to London to meet those awfully nice chaps from the Beagle Project. In the evening 3pm (UK time), we’ll be attending the opening bash at the new Darwin bicentennial exhibition.

Keep your eyes on the frame to the left (or click the link below it to open a separate mini-window). There is no need to refresh your screen: it will happen automagically.

While you’re at it, why not make a donation to the Beagle Project?

You know you want to.

Postscript: The live-blogging session is now over. A full transcript of it can be read here.

Tomorrow (Friday), I’m off to see some old friends whom I’ve never met before: Peter McGrath and Karen ‘I used to be called Nunatak’ James from the Beagle Project. Peter and Karen need no introduction.

Karen works at the Natural History Museum in London and has managed to get us tickets to the opening bash at the new Darwin bicentennial exhibition. For a total Darwin groupie like me, this is about as cool as things can possibly get, so I’ve decided to try an experiment in so-called live-blogging.

I warn you now that the technology is untried and untested, and will rely on my sending updates via my mobile phone and/or minuscule Nokia N810 handheld computer. There’s plenty that could go wrong as this is fairly cutting-edge ‘Web 2.0′ stuff, but, what the hell, let’s given it a go! With any luck, Peter and/or Karen might also provide occasional updates.

If all goes to plan, the updates should start tomorrow morning (UK time) and continue into the late evening, possibly resuming Saturday morning. I have more than a sneaking suspicion that beer will also be involved at some point in the proceedings.

So tune into the Red Notebook throughout the day tomorrow to see if any of this nonsense actually works. If you set yourself up with a FriendFeed account, you’ll even be able to add your own comments to anything we publish.

Belated congratulations to Michael Barton over at the Dispersal of Darwin for the publication of his article Between Heaven and Hell: Religious Language in Early Descriptions of Yellowstone in vol. 16 no. 3 of Yellowstone Science.

Michael’s well-research and profusely illustrated article is available here (PDF, 802kb). It is based on a paper he wrote as part of a history internship in 2007, and discusses how early explorers in the Yellowstone area, influenced perhaps by the Romantics, gave biblical, often satanic, names to the area’s breathtaking natural features. It’s well worth a read.

The BBC Wales news website has been covering the Beagle Project‘s recently announced partnership with Nasa. The piece includes an embedded BBC Wales radio news article, which includes an interview with a friendly astronaut.

Wow! There are only 100 days to go until Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday.

Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?

Martin Parr is one of my favourite photographers. He’s a great capturer of Britishness, and has taken many wonderful photographs in two places very dear to my heart: the Wirral peninsula where I was born and raised, and Hebden Bridge where I now live.

This Saturday’s Guardian magazine had a great set of Martin Parr photos. They also published them and some of his other photos online. One of the online-only photos grabbed my attention for obvious reasons:

Darwin’s beetle collection, Cambridge University Museum of Zoology.