The Red Notebook

I am delighted to announce that the Friends of Charles Darwin have their first member from Saudi Arabia: Abdulaziz Alotaibi of Riyadh. A very warm welcome!

We now have members in 85 countries.

Over the years, the Red Notebook has become an odd blend of: (a) posts about Darwin, evolution, history, science, etc, and (b) posts about stuff I have seen when out on my nature walks.

In recent months, I have begun to look covetously at friends’ natural history blogs, where they simply write about what they have seen in the natural world. So I have decided to set up my own natural history blog and reserve the Red Notebook primarily for Darwin, evolution, history, science, etc.

But, as I hope you will gather from the new blog’s name (and cool domain name), Darwin will not be entirely forgotten over at the new blog: Life’s Grandeur.

Way back before you were born, in 1985, my university archaeology tutor handed our study group a cardboard box full of Roman pottery sherds and asked us to sort them into groups. When we asked how he would like them sorting, he explained that working that out was the whole point of the exercise.

There are at least as many ways of categorising things as there are people to categorise them. But some ways of categorising seem more sensible and useful than others. When it came to Roman pottery, colour, we soon decided, was not a particularly useful way of categorising sherds (an observation which won nodding approval from our colour-blind tutor), but the impurities and inclusions (or lack of them) within the sherds quickly helped us to sort them into what seemed—to our untrained eyes at least—to be sensible groups: flawless samian ware, versus groggy iron age stoneware, for example.

Like Roman pottery, living species can be categorised in many different ways—some of them more useful than others. Debates about such taxonomies can get rather heated, and I don’t intend to get embroiled in them here. But, this week, I came across an intriguing and rather barmy plant taxonomy suggested by the Nineteenth Century art critic and social thinker John Ruskin. It is described in Richard Mabey’s new book Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature:

John Ruskin would have been appalled by this mechanical exploitation of a wild plant, and by the assumption that the burriness of burdock had evolved to help the plant distribute its seeds. In the first volume of his Proserpina – Studies of Wayside Flowers (1874) – he describes how the construction of a burdock’s leaf (which he perfectly describes) contributes to its beauty:

When a leaf be spread wide, like the Burdock, it is supported by a framework of extending ribs like a Gothic roof. The supporting functions of these is geometrical; every one is constructed like girders of a bridge, or beams of a floor with all manner of science in the distribution of their substance in the section … But when the extending space of a leaf is to be enriched with the fullness of folds, and become beautiful in wrinkles, this may be done either by pure undulation as of a liquid current along the leaf edge, or by sharp `drawing’—or ‘gathering’ I believe ladies would call it—and stitching of the edges together. And this stitching together, if to be done very strongly, is done round a bit of stick, as a sail is reefed round a mast; and this bit of stick needs be compactly, not geometrically strong; its function is essentially that of starch,—not to hold the leaf up off the ground against gravity; but to stick the edges out, stiffly, in a crimped frill. And in a beautiful work of this kind, which we are meant to study, the stays of the leaf—or stay-bones—are finished off very sharply and exquisitely at the points; and indeed so much so, that they prick our fingers when we touch them; for they are not at all meant to be touched, but admired.

A few pages later, more bluntly, he urges readers to study its structure: ‘Take a leaf of burdock—the principal business of that plant being clearly to grow leaves wherewith to adorn foregrounds.’

These are extraordinary and baffling passages, full of intimate glimpses of the engineering of leaves, but seeming to suggest that these exist more for the beatification of the observer than the livelihood of the plant. Proserpina is like this throughout. It is a confused and at times deranged attempt to devise a new, anti-Linnaean plant taxonomy, based on aesthetic principles rather than scientific understanding. It passes moral judgements on whole orders of plants, yet sometimes has moments of startlingly original observation and insight, as in this evocation of a poppy flower: ‘We usually think of the poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the field … the poppy is painted glass; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Wherever it is seen—against the light or with the light—always, it is a flame, and warms the wind like a blown ruby.’ This may be the best descriptive passage on the poppy in the English language, and it comes close to offering a poetic intimation of the role of the sun in plant growth, and of the seductive power of the hot scarlet petals to other creatures.

But such plant- or nature-centred views were an abomination to Ruskin. In one of his deeper depressions he remarked with disgust that the theory of photosynthesis made us look on leaves as no more than ‘gasometers’. Beauty of form or function in a plant he saw as an abstract quality, planted there by God for the elevation of humans. That it might in some way be ‘recognised’ by a non-human organism was repugnant to him. That the ruby flame of a poppy, or the intricate anatomy of an orchid bloom, might be attractive—be beautiful, as it were—to an insect was a blasphemy. This led Ruskin to believe in a hierarchy of organisms based on his own aesthetic ideas. ‘The perception of beauty,’ he wrote, land the power of defining physical character, are based on moral instinct, and on the power of defining animal or human character. Nor is it possible to say that one flower is more highly developed, or one animal of a higher order, than another, without the assumption of a divine law of perfection to which the one conforms more than the other.’

Ruskin had in effect devised an aesthetic version of the Doctrine of Signatures. God had ‘signed’ certain plants with imprimaturs—symmetry of petals, for instance, or the angles between stalk and leaf—which might have some base biological function, but which were principally indices of the divine quality of beauty. It was the responsibility of the cognoscenti to recognise and interpret these signs…

Ruskin didn’t deny that the forms of plants could be functional. But he passionately denied that they had any significance or value (beyond the purely mechanical) inside the universe of their own lives. A quality like beauty has no connection with the grace and elegance with which a plant lived out its existence on its own terms and amongst its own kind. It could only be granted to them, or withheld, by human beings with the divinely endowed gift of making moral judgements on nature. Which is why he argued that the flower itself was the be-all and end-all of plant existence, not because it was an inspiration to insects and the forerunner of the seed, but because of the pleasure that it gave to human eyes.

I’m all for people deriving aesthetic pleasure from plants, but, it seems to me, you can take such pleasures too far.

Last week, the albino Australian gorilla and philosopher John S Wilkins and I and a few others took part in a brief Twitter discussion about Charles Darwin. Wilkins, a big fan of Darwin, had apparently had enough: “We just spent 2 yrs on Darwin; can we do modern biology now?” he asked. “Evolution is not a cult of personality,” he added.

The exchange seems to have led to a Wilkins blog post, Darwin Day: Enough already, the main thrust of which was that continuing to talk about [Darwin] leads people to, possibly correctly, think that this is a cult of personality rather than something about the history and nature of science.

Wilkins might be surprised to hear that I agree with many of his sentiments. I feel particularly uncomfortable when people wheel Darwin into modern debates and start speaking on his behalf, quote-mining him in support of whatever particular point they want to make, as if having someone who has been dead for almost 129 years on your side counts for anything much.

But that’s not why I continue to bore the pants off people about Darwin.

Darwin means many things to many people. Which is why, when my mate Fitz and I set up the Friends of Charles Darwin all those years ago to campaign to see Darwin celebrated on a British bank note, we opted for a deliberately vague motto—an amusing pun concocted by Fitz—which any self-professed Darwin groupie could surely embrace: Charlie is my Darwin. And, if Charlie was your Darwin too, you were welcome to join us.

Yes, I am fascinated by modern biology, and I am delighted that so much of what Darwin wrote still holds true and is re-enforced every day by new discoveries in the natural world. But the world has moved on, and we now know far more about evolution than Darwin could ever have dreamt. Wilkins is right, the research programme began with Darwin; it didn’t finish with him. And nobody would have been more delighted about this than Darwin.

But modern biology isn’t why I continue to bore the pants off people about Darwin. Nor is philosophy. And it certainly isn’t Bible-bashing. In fact, Wilkins put it best in the opening sentence of his post:

I love studying about Darwin and his life and times.

Isn’t that good enough reason for studying Darwin and his life and times? And for boring the pants off people about him? Can’t we be interested in Darwin for his own sake, rather than for what he might tell us about the history and nature of science? Others have soccer or cars or Justin Bieber (no, me neither); but Charlie is my Darwin, and, if I’m boring that pants off you about him, well, that’s just what I do.

The Friends of Charles Darwin have their 3,000th member: Stuart Williams of Bloxwich, England.

Welcome, Stuart.

On 6th March, 1860, Charles Darwin advised a scientist whom he correctly believed to be sceptical of his views how to go about reading On the Origin of Species:

The fair way to view the argument of my book, I think, is to look at Natural Selection as a mere hypothesis (though rendered in some degree probable by the analogy of method of production of domestic races; & by what we know of the struggle for existence) & then to judge whether the mere hypothesis explains a large body of facts in Geographical Distribution, Geological Succession, & more especially in Classification, Homology, Embryology, Rudimentary Organs The hypothesis to me does seem to explain several independent large classes of facts; & this being so, I view the hypothesis as a theory having a high degree of probability of truth. All turns on whether the above classes of facts seem to you satisfactorily explained or not.

In other words, think of evolution by means of Natural Selection as an idea worthy of consideration, then actually consider the facts which can be explained by Darwin’s idea, and decide whether you find them compelling.

You can’t ask much more of a reader than that.

Unfortunately, in this case, Darwin’s correspondent, the naturalist and geologist Samuel Pickworth Woodward (1821–65), found it impossible to accept Darwin’s views.

Two years ago today, to mark Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, I planted the Darwin Bicentennial Oak in my garden.

Having survived two unusually harsh Yorkshire winters, here is how the oak looks today:

The Darwin Bicentennial Oak this morning.

I have never watched an oak tree grown before, but it appears to be an extremely slow (albeit not particularly time-consuming) process.

Happy Darwin Day, everyone!

Just came across this rather odd ‘humorous’ 1930 British newsreel on the British Pathé website:

Bizarro!

Who says the reporting of science in the media has gone downhill?

There has been quite a lot of debate recently about the right tone to take when disagreeing with people misguided enough to deny evolution, or believe in pseudoscience or the supernatural. My own approach is to try to avoid engaging with them at all. I don’t particularly want to be rude to such people, but I don’t particularly want to be polite with them either. Life is too short to spend it arguing with people you are never going to agree with.

In these days of the 140-character tweet and the ten-posts-per-day blog, it’s all too easy to get into a heated arguments with someone on the strength (or weakness) of a ill-considered online blurt. I’ve done it myself. Our modern means of communication encourage instant feedback, often to the detriment of thoughtful reflection.

Less so in Darwin’s day. This from William Whewell in January, 1860:

My dear M^r Darwin

I have to thank you for a copy of your book on the ‘Origin of Species’. You will easily believe that it has interested me very much, and probably you will not be surprized to be told that I cannot, yet at least, become a convert to your doctrines. But there is so much of thought and of fact in what you have written that it is not to be contradicted without careful selection of the ground and manner of the dissent, which I have not now time for. I must therefore content myself with thanking you for your kindness.

believe me | Yours very truly | W Whewell

William Whewell (1794–1866)

This seems to me the right way to go about things. Whewell—a mathematician, historian and philosopher of science, who was also an Anglican priest and theologian—disagrees fundamentally with Darwin’s revolutionary new theory, but is not prepared to dismiss it without more careful consideration.

I’m not sure how much careful consideration Whewell gave evolution by means of Natural Selection after his polite letter to Darwin. Not much, if their lack of subsequent correspondence is anything to go by. But at least Whewell had the decency to recognise that Darwin had provided a lot of food for thought: a position worthy of the gentleman who gave us the word scientist.

Martin Amis on the latest volume of letters by the poet Philip Larkin in Saturday’s Guardian:

The age of the literary correspondence is dying, slowly but surely electrocuted by the superconductors of high modernity. This expiration was locked into a certainty about 20 years ago; and although William Trevor and VS Naipaul, say, may yet reward us, it already sounds fogeyish to reiterate that, no, we won’t be seeing, and we won’t be wanting to see, the selected faxes and emails, the selected texts and tweets of their successors.

Larkin touched upon the death of literary correspondence himself in early 1981, writing to his friend Judy Egerton, “We may be the last generation to write to each other.” This was in the days before ubiquitous email, but I’m with Amis: faxes, emails, texts and tweets can’t compare to a traditional letter.

I’m no poetry groupie, but I can’t resist a good collection of letters. Larkin’s previously published letters are riveting. His correspondence with Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley, in particular is a joy to read: humourous, warm, opinionated, and frequently filthy. Anyone only familiar with the two literary giants’ published works has no idea what they were really like.

As a self-confessed Darwin groupie who loves reading other people’s letters, the Correspondence of Charles Darwin is, quite simply, a must-possess, as far as I’m concerned. I own every volume published so far, and am slowly working my way through them.

A Darwin groupie’s bookshelf.

One thing is for certain, Charles Darwin wrote and received an awful lot of letters. And the wonderful people at the Darwin Correspondence Project have done a frankly magnificent job researching each letter, and annotating them with with copious footnotes. I genuinely believe they should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature when they eventually complete their mammoth task. I just hope I live long enough to see it! Forget the biographies. Forget the published works. If you really want to get to know Charles Darwin in person, you need to read his correspondence.

Last week, I began reading volume 8 of the Darwin correspondence, which covers the year 1860—the year following the publication of On the Origin of Species. So expect to see a few more Red Notebook posts about Darwin’s 1860 correspondence over the next few months.

The following two items just came up one after the other on my RSS reader. Their juxtaposition pleased me:

Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary: Captain Fitzroy’s Journal: Reflections following the visit to the Galapagos (2)

Striking instances of the manner in which high land deprives air of its moisture may be seen at the Galapagos. Situated in a wind nearly perennial, those sides only which are exposed to it (the southern) are covered with verdure, and have water: all else is dry and barren, excepting such high ground as the passing clouds hang upon indolently as they move northward. In a similar manner may we not conclude that western Peru is deprived of rain—since the easterly trade wind which carries moisture, and consequent fertility, to eastern Peru, is drained, or dried, as it crosses the Andes? And may we not extend this reasoning to other countries similarly situated, such as Patagonia, perhaps Arabia, and even Africa, upon whose arid deserts no moist wind blows? Currents of air, moving from ocean to land, convey vapour; but as these currents pass over high land, or even a considerable extent of low country, much if not the whole of their aqueous contents is discharged, and until such a body of air has again acquired moisture, it is found to be dry, parching, and unfavourable to vegetation.

Mick Hartley: Wet Uluru

It doesn’t often rain on Ayers Rock, but last week it did – and photographer Peter Carroll was there (via):

[Photo © Peter Carroll]

The Beagle Project‘s Karen James on this week’s Guardian Science podcast:

Hopefully we can find a way to make the outside of the ship really, really look like the Beagle, because that’s the inspiring thing: people want to see the Beagle sailing into Galápagos with scientists aboard.

Dammit, Karen, you finally made me cry.

Note: Thanks to GrrlScientist for using this post on her Guardian Science blog, thereby quadrupling my daily readership count to at least four.

Lapwing, dipper, swallow, robin, curlew…

I’ve never drawn up a list of my top ten birds, but wheatears would very likely be on it.

A wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe), photographed during a spot of nature waiting on an Anglesey headland earlier this month.

They’re such smart creatures. Smart as in neat and well-groomed, I mean; I can’t comment on their intelligence. And it’s always a real treat to see one, because you’re usually on a nice walk somewhere in the hills or near the coast, kind of hoping you might spot the white flash of a wheatear’s rump.

I remember my first wheatear. I was a young boy. My parents had taken my sister and me for a walk near the seashore at Thurstaston on the Wirral. My mum, who was entirely responsible for my love of the natural world, pointed out the elegant bird on a nearby fence-post, explaining that it was called a wheatear because of the light stripe running above its eye and behind its ear. The stripe, she explained, was supposed to look like an ear of wheat. It’s a lovely reason for a lovely name.

It’s also total bollocks.

Years later, I found out where wheatears really got their name. It was on account of their distinctive white rumps: wheat-ears is apparently a corruption of white-arse!

Typical view of a fleeing wheatear (note the white arse)

I told my mum, of course. She claimed to be shocked, but I could tell she was secretly delighted.

More of my wheatear photos »

People love quoting Darwin out of context. Quote-mining, it’s called. Creationists are particularly prone to the practice—the one about the eye is one of their favourites— but Darwin groupies are not above cherry-picking their hero’s words from time to time, to prove some point or other.

So why shouldn’t I?

As a proud Brit, I am of the opinion—don’t try to gainsay me—that I live on the most beautiful island on this most wonderful of planets. The British countryside is second to none. Which is why I love walking in it so much. And, every time I repeat the same old walk, I delight in spotting something new to catch my interest.

So imagine my delight when I came across this lovely quote from the great man himself:

In England any person fond of natural history enjoys in his walks a great advantage, by always having something to attract his attention;

Correct as ever, Mr D.

A few years ago, I added the mysterious phrase Nothing For any Purpose to the bottom of the Red Notebook blog’s sidebar. I’ve never bothered to explain it before, as it was intended to be my own private little joke—and to act as a reminder that it doesn’t matter if nothing useful comes out of this blog.

The phrase is, as if you couldn’t have guessed, a Darwin quote. It is to be found in—or, more correctly, on the back of—the original Red Notebook. I will let Darwin scholar Sandra Herbert explain:

The Red Notebook is one of a series of notebooks kept by Charles Darwin during and immediately following his service as naturalist to the 1831-1836 surveying voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. It forms part of the collection of Darwin manuscripts at Down House in Kent, Darwin’s former home, and, since 1929, a museum in his honour. The notebook came to Down House by arrangement with the Darwin family following Sir George Buckston Browne’s purchase of the house for use as a museum. It is a well-made but otherwise ordinary pocket notebook, measuring 67/16″ × 315/16″ (164 mm × 99 mm), leather bound with a metal latch, which still works, and, as the name suggests, red in colour, although the original brilliance has faded. The leather cover is embossed with a border design on both sides. The front cover of the notebook bears the initials ‘R.N.’, written on a rectangular piece of white paper. On the back cover is pasted a similar piece of paper with the identical initials and the additional phrase ‘Range of Sharks’, referring to an entry within the notebook. There is also an ominous epigram written in larger letters across the back of the notebook: ‘Nothing For any Purpose’. All of these inscriptions are written in brown ink in Darwin’s handwriting.

Darwin clearly thought that his own Red Notebook did not contain anything useful. What better tribute could I pay the great man than ensuring that my own red notebook is equally unproductive?

I am delighted to announce that the Friends of Charles Darwin have their first member from Malawi: Allen Mukwenha of Blantyre. A very warm welcome, Allen!

We now have members in 83 countries.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
     —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

The name of this, my 500th, Red Notebook post is The clue doesn’t need to be in the name. Its uniform resource locator (URL) is: http://blog.friendsofdarwin.com/2010/08/20100814/

I had some element of choice over the format of this blog’s URLs. For example, I could have adopted a format beginning http://rednotebook.friendsofdarwin.com/… But that would have given me a major headache, had I ever decided to change the name of the blog.

Similarly, I chose to incorporate the year and month of each post (e.g. /2010/08/) into the URL. With hindsight, I didn’t need to do that: my decision was based on an assumption about the WordPress blogging platform, which I later discovered to be incorrect (I won’t bore you with the details).

Also thanks to my incorrect assumption, the final part of the URL rather redundantly repeats the year and month, as well as including the day number of the post. By default, WordPress suggests a final URL element based on each post’s title (which would have made this post’s URL http://blog.friendsofdarwin.com/2010/08/the-clue-doesnt-need-to-be-in-the-name/ ). But I don’t like that format because, as you can see, it can lead to very lengthy URLs, and it creates problems if you ever decide to change the title of the post, which I frequently do between drafts.

My preferred, date-based format is not without its problems. Although it is unlikely that I will ever change the date of a post, it does mean that I have to introduce an inelegant kludge [or kluge, for any American readers out there] in the infrequent event of my wanting to post more than one post on the same day (again, I won’t bore you with the details).

What I have done with my URLs, therefore, is to try to include some metadata about each post (namely the post’s date) in the URL, to tell you a little something about each post.

As an IT professional of 24 years, I should have known better.

Computers are pretty good these days at linking things together, categorising, cross-referencing, and doing boring administrative stuff like that. The purpose of a blog post’s URL is to give you a permanent link to the post. It doesn’t need to contain metadata about the post. That is putting too much responsibility on the URL. By giving it two jobs, I have created an unnecessary conflict of interests.

Note that I talk about a blog post’s URL as if there was only one of them. But this simply isn’t the case. The U in URL stands for universal, not unique. There can be literally scores of URLs for any particular blog post. For example, here is a short selection of URLs for this particular post:

• http://blog.friendsofdarwin.com/2010/08/20100814/
• http://blog.friendsofdarwin.com/20100814/
• http://blog.friendsofdarwin.com/?p=2601
• http://tinyurl.com/29trk8r
• http://bit.ly/dxOmW6
• http://is.gd/eh7yc

Like I said, though, those clever computers keep track of what’s what, so all of the above links lead you straight back to this post.

Why all this talk about URLs on a blog which is supposed to be about Darwin and evolution and stuff like that? Well, because I think we commit pretty much the same mistake trying to build metadata and uniqueness (as opposed to universality) into species names.

The purpose of giving a species a name is to enable us to talk about it. Simple as that. It doesn’t matter whether I refer to the bushy plant currently in flower at the top of my lane as a dog rose [English], hunderose [Danish], or stenros [Swedish], provided we all know what I’m talking about. Clearly, it would be a lot more convenient if we tried to standardise on a name, and Carl Linnaeus did a nice job of that by coming up with the name Rosa canina.

And, in this age of computers, it should be pretty easy for me to translate (as I just did, thanks to Wikipedia) the name with which I am familiar (dog rose) into the name with which, despite my classical education, I was not (Rosa canina). Juliet was right, whatever you call a rose, it will still be a rose.

But, there is an inherent problem with Linnaeus’s method of naming species. It tries to make the names do too much. It tries to give species a universal label which people can refer to (which is a very good thing), but it also tries to classify the species. For example, the name Rosa canina tells us that the dog rose is a species of the genus Rosa, i.e. the roses. This is fine, provided we get our initial genus classification correct. But we frequently don’t. So do we fix the problem of an incorrectly classified species by renaming the species, or do we keep the old name that people are already familiar with? The answer is, it depends: we decide on a case-by-case basis. Which is why the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature recently voted 23 to 4 to reject a petition to rename, amongst other species, the geneticist’s favourite fruit-fly Drosophila melanogaster: a decision which would wreak havoc with the massive scientific literature on the species. But the debate continues.

Similarly, convention has it that the scientific classifications for species should be unique: we should not have different names for the same species. Which is fine until you find out that you have inadvertently given the same species two names, in which case, convention has it, one of them has to go. Which is why the delightfully named ‘thunder lizard’ dinosaur Brontosaurus excelsus now goes by the much less satisfactory moniker Apatosaurus excelsus.

Worse still is when two different species are given the same ‘unique’ scientific name. This can happen, say, when scientists initially fail to realise that they are talking about different, closely related species. There is, for example, an ongoing debate about whether the giraffe should be reclassified into several different species.

It’s a total mess, basically, and certainly puts my URL problems into perspective.

I don’t have any solutions for the mess, but my gut feeling is that we should stop trying to put too much responsibility on species’ names. In this age of computers, the clue doesn’t need to be in the name; we can cross-reference things and look them up. Computers are very good for that sort of thing.

Species need names to act as universal labels, but those labels do not need to be unique, and they do not need to contain metadata. By all means let’s keep using the very useful Linnean species names, but let’s stop messing around with them!

In chapter 18 of The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin describes a royal visitor to the ship in the large, awkward shape of Queen Pomarre of Tahiti:

November 25th [1835]. – In the evening four boats were sent for her majesty; the ship was dressed with flags, and the yards manned on her coming on board. She was accompanied by most of the chiefs. The behaviour of all was very proper: they begged for nothing, and seemed much pleased with Captain Fitz Roy’s presents. The queen is a large awkward woman, without any beauty, grace or dignity. She has only one royal attribute: a perfect immovability of expression under all circumstances, and that rather a sullen one. The rockets were most admired, and a deep “Oh!” could be heard from the shore, all round the dark bay, after each explosion. The sailors’ songs were also much admired; and the queen said she thought that one of the most boisterous ones certainly could not be a hymn! The royal party did not return on shore till past midnight.

Freedom of thought will best be promoted by that gradual enlightening of the human understanding which follows the progress of science. I have therefore always avoided writing about religion and have confined myself to science.

Charles Darwin, 1880
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (F. Darwin, Ed.)
(…but see comments below!)

Although Darwin undoubtedly did avoid writing about the thorny, old subject of religion, he did occasionally make passing comment on the subject, such as in this passage from The Voyage of the Beagle:

A strong desire is always felt to ascertain whether any human being has previously visited an unfrequented spot. A bit of wood with a nail in it, is picked up and studied as if it were covered with hieroglyphics. Possessed with this feeling, I was much interested by finding, on a wild part of the coast, a bed made of grass beneath a ledge of rock. Close by it there had been a fire, and the man had used an axe. The fire, bed, and situation showed the dexterity of an Indian; but he could scarcely have been an Indian, for the race is in this part extinct, owing to the Catholic desire of making at one blow Christians and Slaves.

In their book Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Desmond and Moore claim, with more than a little supporting evidence, that Darwin’s abhorrence of slavery heavily influenced his scientific thinking. It was certainly a subject very close to his heart—which perhaps goes some way to explaining his uncharacteristic dig at religion in the above passage.

I love swallows. Check out my previous swallow posts if you don’t believe me.

This evening, a pair of them were feeding their young on the power-line outside my house, so I took a few photos. Here is a slideshow of the best ones (original photos here):

Swallows rock.