The Red Notebook

Reminiscing about his father, Charles Darwin’s son Francis wrote:

In the evening, that is, after he had read as much as his strength would allow, and before the reading aloud began, he would often lie on the sofa and listen to my mother playing the piano. He had not a good ear, yet in spite of this he had a true love of fine music. He used to lament that his enjoyment of music had become dulled with age, yet within my recollection his love of a good tune was strong. I never heard him hum more than one tune, the Welsh song “Ar hyd y nos,” which he went through correctly;

Ar hyd y nos—better known to us heathen English as All Through the Night—is a classic Welsh folk tune. Perhaps Darwin was familiar with it having been brought up near the Welsh border.

I think it’s delightful that we know which tune Darwin used to hum to himself. Especially since it is such a wonderful, moving tune:

Happy 201st birthday, Mr D.

Iechyd da!

Thomas Harriot (c. 1560–1621)

400 years ago today, on 26th July, 1609, the early English scientist Thomas Harriot pointed his new-fangled telescope at the moon and made a drawing.

Four months later, but much more famously, Galileo did the same.

In the same way that Darwin is rightly remembered as the father of evolution by means of Natural Selection, even though other people had touched on similar ideas before him, Galileo is rightly remembered as the father of telescopic astronomy. Harriot did not publish his findings, whereas Galileo followed through on his research, proving to the world once and for all—and at considerable personal risk—that there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Aristole’s geocentric cosmology.

The Strozzi Palace in Florence, Italy, is currently housing a wonderful exhibition, entitled Galileo: Images of the Universe from Antiquity to the Telescope. I was lucky enough to be in Florence earlier this year, and visited the exhibition (which runs until 30th August, 2009). It is quite simply one of the best scientific exhibitions I have ever seen, packed full of priceless scientific artefacts, including Galileo’s original watercolour sketches of the moon in different phases, and the notebook in which he recorded his first observation of the Jovian satellites.

If you are passing anywhere near Italy before the end of August, I urge you to make time to visit the exhibition.

Starlings have their murmurations, toads their knots, weasels their sneaks. I always felt the collective noun for beetles should be a fondness of beetles, after JBS Haldane‘s reported response to a clergyman regarding what we might conclude about the creator by studying the natural world: that He must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.

In his youth, Charles Darwin also had an inordinate fondness for beetles. Late in life, he wrote in his autobiography:

No poet ever felt more delighted at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing, in Stephens’ ‘Illustrations of British Insects,’ the magic words, “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.”

The Stephens in question was James Francis Stephens, a top entomologist, whom the young Darwin had visited in early 1829, later writing to his cousin:

On Monday evening I drank tea with Stephens: his cabinet is more magnificent than the most zealous Entomologist could dream of: He appears to be a very goodhumoured pleasant little man.

The momentous event of Darwin’s citation in Stephens’ illustrious journal occurred a few months later, 180 years ago today, on 15th June, 1829.

175 years ago today, this happened:

The Beagle laid ashore, Santa Cruz River, 16th April 1834.

I have written one of my rambling posts about the event over at the Beagle Project blog.

John Stevens Henslow
(1796–1861)

Today is the 213th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin’s great friend and mentor, John Stevens Henslow.

You can read more abour Henslow in this article which I wrote 9 years ago.

Nine years! Holy Crap!

One-hundred and sixty-five years ago today:

Charles Darwin to J.D. Hooker (11-Jan-1844):

Besides a general interest about the Southern lands, I have been now ever since my return [from the Beagle voyage] engaged in a very presumptuous work & which I know no one individual who w^d not say a very foolish one.— I was so struck with distribution of Galapagos organisms &c &c & with the character of the American fossil mammifers, &c &c that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact, which c^d bear any way on what are species.— I have read heaps of agricultural & horticultural books, & have never ceased collecting facts— At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Joseph Dalton Hooker was one of the first people Darwin confided in regarding his heretical evolutionary views. He chose his friends well. They had only been corresponding with each other for two months, but Hooker was to remain one of Darwin’s most staunch allies for the rest of Darwin’s life.

So, it’s finally here: 2009. Darwin Year. The year in which the world will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest men ever to draw breath, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

On thing’s for certain: we’re going to be hearing an awful lot about Charles Darwin over the next twelve months, ranging from the enlightening to the utter bollocks. Whenever there is a cause for celebration, there will always be party-poopers wanting to spoil things with their loud mouths and their Phil Collins collections.

There is an awful lot of nonsense talked and written about Charles Darwin by people with their own agendas. In this special double-anniversary year, I’m going to make one plea to you all: ignore the party-poopers. Don’t gratify them by rising to their bait. Darwin’s monumental achievements stand on their own merit, and nothing the party-poopers can say will take that away. Use Darwin Year to celebrate Charles Darwin and his legacy. There’s an awful lot there to celebrate. So why not enjoy yourselves and party like it’s 2009?

Have a great year. And keep it Darwin.

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

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

I made a minor goof. The other day, I wrote that it was the 157th anniversary of Darwin’s receiving news that there was a vacancy aboard HMS Beagle. I was wrong: it was the 157th anniversary of Henslow’s writing to Darwin with the offer of a place aboard HMS Beagle. Darwin was geologising in North Wales at the time, and didn’t receive the news until 29th August, 1831 (i.e. 157 years ago today).

Glad to have cleared that one up.

Post script: Oops again! Tony Sidaway points out that I got my maths wrong, and that it is actually 177 years since Darwin received Henslow’s letter. I made the mistake in my original piece about Henslow’s letter two years ago. (Double-maths ‘A’ level, don’t you know?)

This is exactly how myths get perpetuated!

One-hundred and fifty years ago today, Charles Darwin first went public with his theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection, when his friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker read out a hastily compiled paper to the Linnean Society. The recent death of his youngest son prevented Darwin from attending.

Darwin was finally forced into publication as a result of a letter he received from Alfred Russel Wallace, who was exploring the Malay Archipelago. Confined to his tent with a fever, Wallace had independently come up with the same idea as Darwin. Unlike Darwin, who had kept his great idea secret, and had spent the last twenty years gathering evidence in support of it, Wallace dashed off a quick letter to Darwin, explaining his idea in full. Darwin was devastated: Wallace was about to scoop him.

At this point, conspiracy theorists are in the habit of claiming that Darwin did the dirty on Wallace by going quickly to press before Wallace could return to Britain. Some have even gone so far as to claim that Darwin stole Wallace’s idea—a claim which is manifestly bollocks. Wallace himself later expressed complete satisfaction in how he had been treated.

Lyell and Hooker, who both already knew about Darwin’s great idea, urged their friend to publish. They suggested a joint paper, based on an earlier draft of Darwin’s theory and the text of Wallace’s letter to Darwin. They read it before the Linnean Society on 1st June, 1958 under the snappy title of On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection.

Nobody at the Linnean Society batted an eye-lid. It was an almost a total non-event.

I’m not going to get bogged down in a detailed analysis of the Darwin-Wallace paper, other than to say that Wallace’s contribution to it is a wonderful piece of prose which reads far more clearly than Darwin’s. It contains one particularly haunting section which sent shivers down my spine the first time I read it:

Perhaps the most remarkable instance of an immense bird population is that of the passenger pigeon of the United States, which lays only one, or at most two eggs, and is said to rear generally but one young one. Why is this bird so extraordinarily abundant, while others producing two or three times as many young are much less plentiful? The explanation is not difficult. The food most congenial to this species, and on which it thrives best, is abundantly distributed over a very extensive region, offering such differences of soil and climate, that in one part or another of the area the supply the supply never fails. The bird is capable of a very rapid and long-continued flight, so that it can pass without fatigue over the whole of the district it inhabits, and as soon as the supply of food begins to fail in one place is able to discover a fresh feeding-ground. This example strikingly shows us that the procuring a constant supply of wholesome food is almost the sole condition requisite for ensuring the rapid increase of a given species, since neither the limited fecundity, nor the unrestricted attacks of birds of prey and of man are here sufficient to check it.

Wallace could not have chosen a more poignant example of an immense population of animals impregnable to the attacks of birds of prey and man: fifty-six years later, the very last passenger pigeon died in Cincinnati Zoo.

Her name was Martha.

See also: Books – Alfred Russel Wallace, a life

On this date in 1833, whilst in the Falkland Islands, Capt. Robert FitzRoy bought a schooner to accompany HMS Beagle:

Captain FitzRoy’s Journal: 9th March, 1833

At this time I had become more fully convinced than ever that the Beagle could not execute her allotted task before she, and those in her, would be so much in need of repair and rest, that the most interesting part of her voyage—the carrying a chain of meridian distances around the globe—must eventually be sacrificed to the tedious, although not less useful, details of coast surveying…

I had often anxiously longed for a consort, adapted for carrying cargoes, rigged so as to be easily worked with few hands, and able to keep company with the Beagle; but when I saw the Unicorn, and heard how well she had behaved as a sea-boat, my wish to purchase her was unconquerable…

FitzRoy’s decision to buy Unicorn, which he promptly renamed Adventure, was to earn him a sharp, long-distance reprimand from the Admiralty. This reprimand was probably a factor in FitzRoy’s subsequent nervous breakdown later in the voyage.

But FitzRoy’s unapproved purchase of the schooner meant that he was indeed able to achieve far more surveying work during the Beagle voyage.

The father of the man,
Charles Darwin in 1816, age 7

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth

One-hundred and ninety-nine years ago today, Charles Darwin was born at his parents’ home, The Mount, Shrewsbury. Today, no doubt, his familiar, elderly, bearded face will grace many a news site and weblog. As a rapidly aging, beard-wielding Darwin groupie, I thoroughly approve.

But birthdays, as the name implies, are celebrations of people’s births. Several decades were to pass between Darwin’s birth and the sprouting of his iconic beard. In the intervening time, the young Darwin went to school, collected rocks, dabbled with chemistry, went to university, learned taxidermy, combed the sea-shore, collected beetles, ate a dead owl, took up geology, made friends, did an awful lot of reading, and embarked on the most important voyage in the history of science. All of which—with the possible exception of the owl—would ultimately contribute in one way or another to the development of his theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection.

Darwin never lost his child-like curiosity with the natural world. Indeed, his childhood years were extremely important to his personal development. So, on this day of celebration, why not remember the young Darwin? And, if you get a chance, spare a few moments to kindle the imagination of one or more children with some interesting natural curiosity.

Oh, and even if you don’t get a chance to inspire some children personally, why not pop over to the Beagle Project website and make a donation so that they will one day be able to inspire whole shiploads of future scientists.

On Darwin Day, why not sew a few good seeds?

One-hundred and sixty-four years ago today:

Charles Darwin to J.D. Hooker (11-Jan-1844):

Besides a general interest about the Southern lands, I have been now ever since my return [from the Beagle voyage] engaged in a very presumptuous work & which I know no one individual who w^d not say a very foolish one.— I was so struck with distribution of Galapagos organisms &c &c & with the character of the American fossil mammifers, &c &c that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact, which c^d bear any way on what are species.— I have read heaps of agricultural & horticultural books, & have never ceased collecting facts— At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Hooker was one of the first people Darwin confided in regarding his heretical evolutionary views. He chose his friends well. They had only been corresponding with each other for two months, but Hooker was to remain one of Darwin’s most staunch allies for the rest of Darwin’s life.

After having been twice driven back by heavy southwestern gales, Her Majesty’s ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain Fitz Roy, R. N., sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831.

As opening lines to great adventure stories go, it’s one of the best.

Although nobody could have known it at the time, HMS Beagle was about to enter the history books. Now, those awfully nice chaps and chapesses at the Beagle Project are trying to recreate a little bit of history. 2008 is going to be a very big year for them. Why not make it one of your New Year’s Resolutions to lend them your support?

William Thomson,
Lord Kelvin
(1824–1907)

Today is the 100th anniversary of the death of the brilliant physicist and engineer William Thomson (a.k.a. Lord Kelvin).

As one of the great minds behind the Laws of Thermodynamics—the second of which is almost certainly the most important law in the whole of science—Thomson knew a thing or two about temperature, devising the absolute temperature scale which still bears his chosen aristocratic name.

It was Thomson’s expertise in thermodynamics which led to his crossing swords with supporters of Charles Darwin. In 1863, he published a paper entitled On the Secular Cooling of the Earth in which he calculated the age of the earth at 98 million years (later revised downward). He did this by working backwards from the earth’s current temperature, assuming that it had cooled according to the Laws of Thermodynamics. The amount of time that the earth would have been hospitable to life would have been considerably less than this.

Darwin knew that this was a serious, potentially fatal, objection to his theory: life on earth as we know it needed much more time to have evolved through Natural Selection. Darwin and his supporters expended much effort trying to overcome Thomson’s result, but Darwin went to his grave having never done so satisfactorily. This is hardly surprising as Thomson’s calculations were pretty sound, according to the known laws of science at the time.

But Thomson’s calculation made a number of assumptions which later turned out to be incorrect. Perhaps the most significant of these was his stated assumption that there were no unknown sources of energy providing additional heat to the earth. Thomson reckoned without radioactivity.

It wasn’t until 1904 that, in one of the great dramatic moments in the history of science, Ernest Rutherford announced to the Royal Institution that a new source of energy had been found. The announcement was dramatic because the elderly Thomson (now Lord Kelvin) was sitting in the audience. As Rutherford later recounted:

I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and cock a balefule glance at me! Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the earth, provided no new source (of energy) was discovered. That prophetic utterance refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold! the old boy beamed upon me.

Although Kelvin never publicly acknowledged that radioactivity was a missing factor in his calculation of the age of the earth, he is said to have acknowledged in privately to his colleague and (sur)namesake J.J. Thomson. If so, Kelvin must have gone to his own grave a few feet from Darwin’s in Westminster Abbey knowing that the other grand old boy of science had been vindicated after all.

On this date in 1832, Charles Darwin made a rather important discovery at Punta Alta, near Bahia Blanca, South America. He recorded the find in his Beagle diary:

Sunday Sept: 23rd [1832]

A large party was sent to fish in a creek about 8 miles distant; great numbers of fish were caught. — I walked on to Punta alta to look after fossils; & to my great joy I found the head of some large animal, imbedded in a soft rock. — It took me nearly 3 hours to get it out: As far as I am able to judge, it is allied to the Rhinoceros. — I did not get it on board till some hours after it was dark. —

Megatherium fossil

The bones were eventually shipped back to Blighty, where the great anatomist Richard Owen identified them as belonging to an extinct giant ground sloth, Megatherium.

Megatherium‘s close relatives, the tree sloths, still live in South America. In later years, Darwin realised that the fact that surviving species were often found in the same locations as closely related extinct ones suggested a geological succession of organic beings. This realisation helped convince him of the concept of descent with modification: a key element of his theory of evolution.

On this date in 1835, Charles Darwin first set foot on the Galápagos Islands. He recorded the event in his Beagle Diary:

Sept: 16^th

The next day we ran near Hoods Is^d & there left a Whale boat. — In the evening the Yawl was also sent away on a surveying cruize of some length. — The weather, now & during the passage, has continued as on the coast of Peru, a steady, gentle breeze of wind & gloomy sky. — We landed for an hour on the NW end of Chatham Is^d. — These islands at a distance have a sloping uniform outline, excepting where broken by sundry paps & hillocks. — The whole is black Lava, completely covered by small leafless brushwood & low trees. — The fragments of Lava where most porous is are reddish & like cinders; the stunted trees show little signs of life. — The black rocks heated by the rays of the Vertical sun like a stove, give to the air a close & sultry feeling. The plants also smell unpleasantly. The country was compared to what we might imagine the cultivated parts of the Infernal regions to be. —

Not a particularly auspicious start for the Galápagos Islands’ most famous visitor. But the rest, as they say, is history.

One-hundred and forty-nine years ago today, if his own account of events is to be believed (which has been questioned by some), Charles Darwin received the biggest bombshell of his scientific career. Having delayed publishing his theory of evolution by means of natural selection for many years, he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, who was in Ternate on the Malayan Archipelago (modern day Indonesia), indicating that he was about to be scooped: in bed with a tropical fever, Wallace had independently come up with the theory of Natural Selection.

Wallace’s letter no longer survives (which is wonderful for conspiracy theorists), but we do still have the letter Darwin immediately wrote to his friend and confidante, Charles Lyell:

My dear Lyell

Some year or so ago, you recommended me to read a paper by Wallace in the Annals, which had interested you & as I was writing to him, I knew this would please him much, so I told him. He has to day sent me the enclosed & asked me to forward it to you. It seems to me well worth reading. Your words have come true with a vengeance that I sh^d be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views of “Natural Selection” depending on the Struggle for existence.— I never saw a more striking coincidence. if Wallace had my M.S.

170 years ago today, on 31st March, 1837, at the Geological Society in London, Charles Darwin presented a paper On certain areas of elevation and subsidence in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as deduced from the study of Coral Formations. It was the first occasion on which he described his theory of coral reef formation. The key passage from the Proceedings of the society reads:

The theory which Mr. Darwin then offered, so as to include every kind of [reef] structure, is simply that as the land with the attached reefs subsides very gradually from the action of subterranean causes, the coral building polypi soon again raise their solid masses to the level of the water; but not so with the land: each inch lost is irreclaimably gone:—as the whole gradually sinks, the water gains foot by foot on the shore, till the last and highest peak is finally submerged.

Darwin observed that coral polyps can only survive at shallow depths, but that the waters around coral reefs are very deep. Coral atolls, he argued, originally formed around volcanoes which rose above the sea, but which gradually sank below the waves. As the volcanoes sank, the polyps continued to build new coral on top of the earlier corals that sank with the volcano. It is a wonderfully simple theory, and similar reasoning can explain all the different types of coral reefs. And the clever thing was that he devised his theory aboard HMS Beagle, before he ever set eyes on a coral reef.

An Enewetak Angel yesterday

In a foretaste of what was to follow with Darwin’s theory of evolution, many contemporary experts rejected his theory of coral formation. Indeed, it wasn’t until the early days of the Cold War that direct evidence was obtained of volcanic rock beneath atolls. In preparation for atom bomb tests on the Pacific atoll, Enewetak, U.S. geologists dug a 1411 metre deep borehole into the coral and eventually hit basalt. The delighted scientists immediately erected a small sign next to the borehole which read “Darwin was right”.

One of Enewetak’s geological cousins, which was also used for atom bomb tests, lent its name to an item of clothing that was supposed to have an impact not unlike a nuclear explosion. If history had been a little different, perhaps we might never have heard of Bikini Babes, and might instead be admiring Enewetak Angels.

It has a certain ring to it.

Note: I am currently reading Steve Jones’s new book Coral, from which I obtained much of the information for this post.

I just spent a couple of highly enjoyable hours (I know, I really should get out more) surfing Darwin Online. It really is a stonking resource. Someone should give John van Wyhe and his colleagues a medal.

For some bizarre reason, it had never occurred to me before to see if Darwin’s original Red Notebook—the one from which this weblog takes its name—is available on the site. It is, of course.

Editor Sandra Herbert’s excellent introduction puts Darwin’s Red Notebook in context, explaining how he began it towards the end of the Beagle voyage—before he was a believer in evolution—where he used it as a field notebook. On returning to England, however, he turned the book through 90 degrees (for ease of writing), and began making his first notes on transmutation.

Herbert makes a convincing case for supporting the chronology recorded retrospectively in Darwin’s personal ‘Journal’, which states:

In July [1837] opened first note Book on “transmutation of Species”. — Had been greatly struck from about month of previous March on character of S. American fossils—& species on Galapagos Archipelago. — These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views.

The notebook referred to by Darwin was not his Red Notebook, but one of the two books which immediately followed it—his first notebook dedicated to transmutation. But Darwin’s first notes on transmutation begin on pages 129—130 of the Red Notebook (my emphasis added):

Should urge that extinct Llama [Macrauchenia patachonica, collected by Darwin during the Beagle voyage] owed its death not to change of circumstances; reversed argument. knowing it to be a desert. — Tempted to believe animals created for a definite time: — not extinguished by change of circumstances:

The same kind of relation that common ostrich bears to (Petisse. & diff kinds of Fourmillier): extinct Guanaco to recent: in former case position, in latter time. (or changes consequent on lapse) being the relation. — As in first cases distinct species inosculate, so must we believe ancient ones: [therefore] not gradual change or degeneration. from circumstances: if one species does change into another it must be per saltum — or species may perish. = This inosculation representation of species important, each its own limit & represented. — Chiloe creeper: Furnarius. Caracara Calandria; inosculation alone shows not gradation; —

Darwin had a long way to go. At the time he made these preliminary notes—in all likelihood, 170 years ago this month—he had only just begun to believe in evolution. He was yet to have his eureka moment and work out the mechanism for evolution (Natural Selection), believing that transmutation must occur per saltum—through leaps—an idea he was later to reject. Furthermore, he did not yet believe that species could become extinct through change of circumstances. But this Red Notebook entry does mark a key moment in Darwin’s life: his first tentative step on the road towards On the Origin of Species.