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…

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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.)

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!

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.)

We now have members in 87 countries.

[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!

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.

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.

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.

The films describe two fictitious conversations between Charles Darwin and the real-life London Soho barber William Willis, with whom Darwin really did converse on the subject of dog-breeding. Although the conversations are fictitious, the events described in them are pretty accurate.

The conversations, as you will see, take place immediately before two key events in Darwin’s life:

Charles Darwin: A Genius in the Heart of London:

Part 1: Saved by a Soho Barber

 
Part 2: A Final Journey to the Abbey

Steven Shapin writes that Darwin’s uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life (LRB, 30 June).

Some years ago, to my delight, I worked out that the great man’s full name, Charles Robert Darwin, is an anagram of ‘rectal winds abhorrer’.

Unfortunately for my anagram, the meanings of words, like species, can evolve. On the rare occasions that Darwin mentioned his gaseous problems to friends, he always used the word ‘flatulence’. Nowadays, we think of flatulence as being synonymous with farting, but, in Darwin’s day, it simply meant (as it technically still does) an accumulation of gases in the alimentary canal.

While I’m sure that Darwin, like the rest of us, must have vented his excess gas one way or the other, there is no reason to believe that his farts were uncontrollable.

–
Richard Carter
The Friends of Charles Darwin

(As a postscript, I should perhaps add that, although Darwin’s nickname at school was Gas, this had nothing to do with his alimentary system, and everything to do with his passion for manufacturing gases in his amateur chemical laboratory at home.)

(As a second postscript, I should add that the LRB published the above letter in their 28-Jul-2011 edition.)

New Scientist's infamous cover, published one month before Darwin's bicentennial celebrations.

Well, today my New Scientist subscription finally came up for renewal (I have been a subscriber for about 20 years):

My response

We have long memories in Yorkshire.

On 22nd May, 1826, His Majesty’s Ship Beagle set sail from Plymouth on a surveying voyage to South America.

Neither Darwin nor FitzRoy were on board. This was Beagle’s first voyage. Her more famous second voyage was to begin five years later.

But her first voyage was not without incident: hardship; scurvy; several deaths; the suicide of Beagle’s captain, Pringle Stokes; his temporary replacement by Lieutenant Skyring; his official replacement by the 23-year-old Robert FitzRoy, who joined the ship at Montevideo; surveying; the discovery and naming of the Beagle Channel; the abduction of four young Fuegian natives.

The first Beagle voyage was to establish Robert FitzRoy as an able and talented ship’s captain, making him the logical choice to fulfil the same role on what was to become her far more famous second voyage. The need to return the young Fuegians to their homeland was surely a factor in FitzRoy’s acceptance of the commission; Stokes’s suicide a key factor in FitzRoy’s decision to take a gentleman companion on the voyage.

In other words, were it not for the events of the first Beagle voyage, history might have been very different.

We now have members in 86 countries.