The Red Notebook

I’ve been having great fun lately familiarising myself with my new macro lens:

Dandelion clock

It’s harder than you’d expect. Especially with moving targets.

See also: More of my macro shots.

It is a source of continuing regret to me that I never got to send any of the fan letters I began writing to the late Stephen Jay Gould. They weren’t good enough, and I didn’t want to waste his time.

One of my unsent letters was on a subject which Gould said was in his top-three for reader feedback. In his essay Left Snails and Right Minds (published in his book Dinosaur in a Haystack), Gould wondered why old engravings of snails often show their shells spiralling the wrong way (the vast majority of snail shells have right-handed spirals; the old engravings often showed them left-handed). Some years after first reading the essay, I came across the following letter in Volume 5 of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, which caused me to start drafting another unsent letter to Gould:

Charles Darwin to James de Carle Sowerby, 21st January, 1851

My dear Sir

I am much pleased with the Plates.— […] Only one figure will require a weighty alteration, viz P. rigidus. Nevertheless, I hope that you will loook [sic] over your Figures carefully for I saw a good many little blemishes; & the Plate is not very clean.—

The few reversed figures are unfortunate.— […]

Your’s Sincerely
C. Darwin

Sowerby was artist to the Palaeontographical Society and was preparing the engravings for one of Darwin’s barnacle books, Fossil Cirripedia (1851). From earlier letters, it is quite clear that Darwin was extremely frustrated with Sowerby’s slow progress. In contrast, a few reversed figures seemed relatively unimportant—although I thought Gould would have been amused that his great hero also suffered from reversed engravings.

By a strange co-incidence, shortly after reading Gould’s essay, I read a chapter in Richard Dawkins’s (then) latest book, Climbing Mount Improbable, which also dealt with shells. In it, Dawkins explained how the shapes of all shells can be recreated on a computer using just three parameters (or ‘genes’), which he named flare, verm, and spire. This time, I actually did write to the author:

Richard Carter to Richard Dawkins, 8th August, 1996

Dear Prof. Dawkins,

I greatly enjoyed reading your recent, excellent book, Climbing Mount Improbable and, in particular, the chapter on shells. However, I think I may have spotted a small mistake: on page 153, when talking about what you have called the spire parameter, you state:

Spire has no limits: negative values trivially indicate an upside down shell.

Although it is hard to visualise, I reckon that, if you turned this “upside down” shell the right way up, it would actually be spiralling in the opposite direction to a shell with a positive spire (anti-clockwise, as opposed to clockwise). Although this is hardly earth-shattering, I would argue that it is not trivial – after all, your favourite sparring partner, Stephen Jay Gould, dedicated an entire chapter to anti-clockwise snail shells in his recent, equally excellent, Dinosaur in a Haystack. […]

Yours sincerely,
Richard Carter

To my great delight (and my dad’s: he has boasted about it ever since), Dawkins emailed me straight back, confirming the error:

Richard Dawkins to Richard Carter, 15th August, 1996

Dear Mr Carter

Thank you for your letter of 8th August.

Yes, you are correct that the computer shell with a negative spire would beanticlockwise, and it is certainly not trivial. If I had thought of this,it would have saved me the trouble of building in a separate gene forhandedness. Damn! […]

With best wishes

Yours sincerely
Richard Dawkins

(Let it not be said that Richard Dawkins never admitted to making a mistake.)

Then, yesterday, I spotted another interesting example of reversed images, which, bearing in mind the subject matter, I’m sure would also have amused Gould. While re-reading my recent Red Notebook post The Expression of Emotions in Darwin, I suddenly realised that the photograph of Darwin that was the subject of the piece also appears on the covers of two books I have recently read—but in mirror image:

Original image of Darwin

Books showing reversed image

A quick check of the buttons on Darwin’s waistcoat on a higher resolution version of the image confirmed that the photograph of Darwin on the left is shown the correct way round, whereas the photographs appearing on the covers of the two books are shown in mirror image.

Plus ça change, as we say in Yorkshire.

We Brits live on a small, crowded island. With the exception of some of the remoter parts of the Scottish highlands, there is no true wilderness left. Over thousands of years, our ancestors tamed it. Gone are the wolf packs, wild boar, bears, aurochs and inappropriately named Irish elk. Our swamps have been drained and turned into pasture. The wild wood has been felled to build houses and ships, and to make room for fields. We live on what is still one of the most beautiful islands on the planet, but it is a safe, domesticated island: the sort of place where a hobbit might feel at home.

As with the (still largely accurate) stereotype of its people, the wildlife of Britain is somewhat reserved and understated. We don’t go in for the brash, showy displays—which tends to make us think of our wildlife as rather plain and ordinary.

And yet, at this time of year, throughout the woodlands of Britain, there can be seen a natural wonder on a par with anything to be seen in the Amazon, Serengeti or Galápagos. In April and May each year, our woodlands turn blue:

A bluebell wood

While dipping into my copy of Volume 5 (1851–1855) of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin yesterday, looking for a quote about Darwin’s lawn experiment, I came across the following amusing snippet:

Charles Darwin to Joseph Dalton Hooker, 27th May, 1855

… You ask about my Photograph; I have been done at the Club; but if I really have as bad an expression, as my photograph gives me, how I can have one single friend is surprising. My Brother has a large drawing of me, by Lawrence, of which he has had some photographs made & no doubt, if anyone really wished, others could be made.—

Hooker had evidently asked for a photograph of Darwin (the letter containing his request, as far as I can tell, does not survive), but Darwin didn’t much like his recent photograph—one of a series of photographs for the Literary and Scientific Portrait Club by Maull and Polyblank, who had also photographed Hooker—preferring a slightly earlier portrait in chalk by Samuel Laurence (not Lawrence).

Charlie ‘No Mates’ Darwin c.1855
by Maull and Polyblank

Darwin in 1853
by Samuel Laurence

I can’t say I blame him. The Maull and Polyblank photograph doesn’t do Darwin any favours: his expression is uptight, bordering on stern. Look at those glowering eyes! There’s a man who isn’t used to having his photograph taken. It’s the sort of photograph he might well have put on the mantelpiece to keep the kids away from the fire.

The Laurence portrait is far kinder to Darwin: although the trademark, ape-like brows are still there, the artist has captured a man deep in thought; a man who has worked out the meaning of life, but has told practically nobody about it yet. What on earth is going on inside that head?

Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that a man so worried about what the world would one day think of him should have cared two hoots about how he looked in a photograph, but I find it amusing that Darwin, like so many other people then and now, should have thought he didn’t photograph well.

Vanity, thy name was Darwin.

Female sparrowhawk over her kill

One of the local sparrowhawks [Accipiter nisus] made another kill in my garden on Thursday.

I managed to get quite close to her this time and fire off some photos. As usual, however, the sparrowhawk had taken its kill (a male blackbird) into a gloomy corner, and I was shooting into the sun, so severe photo enhancements (and cropping) were the order of the day.

Still, at least it wasn’t snowing this time.

See also: More of my sparrowhawk photos