The Red Notebook

Last week, I spotted a book in my favourite TOP SECRET second-hand bookshop and, from the title on the spine alone, I knew that I had to make it mine:

Popular Scientific Recreations, Profusely Illustrated

The book’s full title is, rather magnificently:

POPULAR SCIENTIFIC RECREATIONS

IN

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, ASTRONOMY, GEOLOGY, CHEMISTRY

ETC., ETC., ETC.

Translated and Enlarged from “Les Récréations Scientifiques”

OF

GASTON TISSANDIER

Editor of “La Nature”

PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED

An advertisement in the back of the book indicates that it was published in October, 1882—just six months after Darwin’s death, although the text already refers to the late Charles Darwin. The book is indeed profusely illustrated, and contains many wonderful (and sometimes amusing) insights into the state of science and engineering towards the end of the Nineteenth Century.

I plan to publish selected extracts from the book on a fairly irregular basis over the next few weeks.

Watch this space.

I’ve finally posted a mini-review of Granta 102: The New Nature Writing. More »

I’ve just finished reading Beechcombings by Richard Mabey. More »

I’ve just finished reading Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin.

It’s a good book. More here.

Last week, I finished reading volume 7 of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, which deals with the years 1858–1859 (i.e. the lead-up to the publication of On the Origin of Species). As with all the other volumes in the series, it is a magnifient piece of research work, and a must-buy for any Darwin groupie.

Expect several posts over the next few weeks inspired by this fantastic book.

A nice little haul.

On my way back from my Sedgwick pilgrimage last week, I drove past a second-hand bookshop which hadn’t been there the last time I visited the area. I cannot resist a second-hand bookshop, so I popped inside.

It was fantastic.

I spent half an hour in the ‘Collectors’ section, drooling over numerous, old science books before plumping for a copy of The Student’s Elements of Geology by Charles Lyell. Then I went upstairs to find an entire section labelled simply Darwin. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. In the end, I bought:

• HMS Beagle: the ship that changed the course of history by Keith S. Thomson
• Extreme Measures: the dark visions and bright ideas of Francis Galton by Martin Brookes
• Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey that changed the way we see the world by Gerard Helferich
• The Naming of Names: the search for order in the world of plants by Anna Pavord
• The British Journal for the History of Science (BJHS), vol. 24, part 2, no. 81 (June 1991): ‘Darwin and Geology’

As I handed over my cash, I complimented the bookshop owner on his Darwin section, explaining how I am ‘a bit of a Darwin groupie’.

“Ah!” You should see these, then!” he said, drawing me over to the locked glass cabinet containing the Darwin rarities.

Get ye behind me, Satan! I somehow managed to resist. Apart from the cuddly Charles Darwin I spotted on the way out, that is. The one which was entirely anatomically accurate—apart from the unopposable thumbs.

And, before you ask, no, I’m not about to tell you where the bookshop is. Do you take me for some sort of idiot?

As I explained to the bookshop owner, I’ll be back!

A kestrel hunting behind my house

More kestrel photos »

No, not the latest album by The Fall; I’ve just started reading The Eye: a Natural History by Simon Ings. On page 28, I came across the following fascinating snippet:

Even with their superb visual acuity and excellent colour sense, extending well into the ultraviolet, kestrels find it hard to spot the drab voles which are their favourite food. Happily for the kestrels, however, voles communicate by leaving trails of urine—indeed, they pee almost continuously—and mole urine reflects ultraviolet light. For kestrels, hunting voles is simply a matter of following the arrows.

Amazing.

I must admit, I was initially irked by Ing’s use of the word happily to describe what appeared clearly to be a marvellous hunting adaptation evolved by the kestrel. But not so: all birds can see into ultraviolet wavelengths, apparently; so kestrels can’t have evolved their ultraviolet vision specifically to hunt voles. The apparent adaptation turns out to be a lucky coincidence, which the kestrel has put to good use—possibly refining it over time.

Ultraviolet mole piss detection isn’t so much an adaptation as an exaptation, it would seem.

When I first got into science and history (and the history of science) during my teens, I bought and devoured a number of lavishly illustrated coffee-table books on the subjects: Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, James Burke’s Connections, Magnus Magnusson’s The Vikings, Michael Wood’s In Search Of…. In addition to being great reads, all of these books had one thing in common: their smell. It’s a smell that’s impossible to describe, other than by saying it’s the smell of lavishly illustrated coffee-table books.

The Great Naturalists has that same smell. It’s a wonderful book which explains how our understanding of natural history developed through the centuries. It does this by describing the lives and works of a few dozen great naturalists, from classical times to the end of the 19th century. This is a massive subject area, so, understandably, the potted biographies are rather brief, but they do at least introduce you to most of the key players in the history of natural history. And the illustrations are utterly magnificent.

Trust me, you really should buy this book.

• Buy from Amazon.co.uk (hardback)
• Buy from Amazon.com (hardback)

Please note: Any referral fees received for linking to other websites will be sent to my preferred charity, Amnesty International.

I’ve just published a review of The Evolutionists: American Thinkers Confront Charles Darwin, 1860–1920 by J David Hoeveler.

Of more interest, perhaps, to American readers.

I’ve just finished reading The Flight of the Iguana by David Quammen, which was kindly sent to me by Michael Barton, FCD, of The Dispersal of Darwin. And a damn fine read it was too.

Glad to hear the tenner arrived OK, Michael.

I’ve just finished reading HMS Beagle: Survey Ship Extraordinary by Karl Heinz Marquardt. It really is one for the nerdy Darwin completist, but magnificent nevertheless.

I had hoped the book might settle a question that I have wondered about for a number of years: did HMS Beagle have a figurehead? Sadly, Marquardt is unable to answer the question categorically:

The question of the figurehead is another unresolved matter. One school of thought asserts that the utilitarian character of those small brigs, without real embellishment anywhere, warrants only a scroll whilst the other suggests a carved figurehead. Both opinions have their merits and can be documented with surviving models of the 18-gun Cruizer class brig. While C Martens’ watercolours and pencil drawings are too sketchy to get a clear indication of a figurehead, the O Stanley watercolour of HMS Beagle in Sydney Harbour and P G King’s longitudinal sketch suggest an animal, probably a dog.

It’s strange that Marquardt doesn’t go on to point out that, if the suggested figurehead were indeed a dog, it would almost certainly be a beagle. Although I’m probably reading far too much into this omission, it makes me suspect that Marquardt really might think the feature shown in the pictures looks like a dog, and that he isn’t simply wishfully (and wistfully) imagining a dog, based on the ship’s name. If so, the fact that the ship’s name was Beagle would seem to corroborate Marquardt’s guess at a dog—and lend support to those who say the ship would have had a figurehead!

But that’s probably just wishful (and wistful) thinking on my behalf.

I’ve just finished reading Janet Browne’s book Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species: a biography. Apart from a couple of howlers with dates, it is a thoroughly good read. One passage I particularly enjoyed:

Darwin called this shorter book [On the Origin of Species] ‘one long argument’. And what an argument it was. Few scientific texts have been so closely woven, so packed with factual information and studded with richly inventive metaphor. Darwin’s literary technique has long been noted for its resemblance to Great Expectations or Middlemarch in the complexity of its interlacing themes and his ability to handle so many continuous threads at the same time. Hardly daring to hope that he might initiate a transformation in scientific thought, he nevertheless rose magnificently to the occasion. His voice was in turn dazzling, persuasive, friendly, humble and dark. His imagination soared beyond the confines of his house and garden, beyond his debilitating illnesses and the fragile health of his children. At his most determined, he questioned everything his contemporaries believed about living nature, calling forth a picture of origins completely shorn of the Garden of Eden and dispensing with the image of a heavenly clockmaker patiently constructing living beings to occupy the earth below. He abandoned what John Herschel devoutly called the ‘mystery of mysteries’ and replaced Paley’s vision of perfect adaptation with imperfection and chance. Animals and plants should not be regarded as the product of a special design or special creation. ‘I am fully convinced that species are not immutable,’ he stated in the opening pages.

I think that summarises Darwin’s masterpiece rather well.

The next time some idiot tries to tell you that On the Origin of Species is not very well written, why not refer them to the above passage?

HMS “Beagle”: Survey Ship Extraordinary
Amazon UK|US
(Or, better still, order it from your local bookshop.)

My copy of HMS Beagle: Survey Ship Extraordinary by Karl Heinz Marquardt has just arrived through the post. Many thanks to Peter at the Beagle Project for the tip off.

The book is really aimed at model-makers, and might come in handy to that end when I retire, but it’s also packed with research and illustrations of great interest to us Darwin groupies. My partner Jen shook her head in resigned disbelief when she saw what I’d ordered, and went off to do a Sudoku.

Oh, and it could also come in extremely handy if you were—oh, I don’t know—planning to build a working replica of HMS Beagle, or something truly magnificent like that.

I’ve just finished reading Carl Zimmer‘s excellent book, Parasite Rex. By the time you get to the end of it, you’re left pretty much convinced that parasite-host arms races might be one of the major forces behind evolution.

I’ve always suspected that sexual selection is a lot more important than it is generally given credit for, but parasites are behind that too, it seems. The need to create greater genetic diversity to combat parasitic infections might be the reason why organisms started having sex in the first place; and the need to prove to potential mates that their owners are good at fighting parasitic infections might be the reason for many anatomical features associated with sexual selection, such as the peacock’s tail.

But, to me, the most interesting section of the book is where Zimmer describes how parasites evolve and speciate as their hosts evolve and speciate. In one particularly interesting example, Zimmer describes how tetrabothriid tapeworms are found only in certain marine birds such as puffins, and certain marine mammals such as whales. It is unlikely that these birds and mammals got their tapeworms from fish, because the tetrabothiids’ nearest living relatives are found in certain reptiles, not in fish. So, it would seem that the birds and mammals were originally infected by tapeworms which lived at least part of their lifecycles inside reptilian hosts. The most likely candidates for reptilian host species are pterosaurs and icthyosaurs, which went extinct 65 million years ago. The birds’ ancient ancestors presumably caught the reptiles’ tapeworms while the tapeworms were living part of their lifecycles inside intermediate fish hosts. Much later, the whales were similarly infected by related species of these tapeworms.

All of which got me thinking (albeit whimsically): Charles Darwin famously predicted the existence of a species of Madagascan moth (since aptly named Xanthopan morgani praedicta), based on the shape of the nectaries of a species of orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale). Might it not be possible to take a leaf out of Darwin’s book and make similar deductions retrospectively? Could parasitologists not study tetrabothiids and other modern parasites, and make deductions about their extinct ancestral hosts’ lifestyles?

It wouldn’t be easy, but it’s a fascinating idea.