The Red Notebook

CG animator Richard Spence recently uploaded a 3-minute sequence he created of Sir David Attenborough explaining the entire history of life on earth. You’ve probably seen the sequence before, but this version is in high definition, without an annoying YouTube logo in the corner.

The latest 15 editions of New Scientist, unopened since their stupid Darwin Was Wrong marketing hype.

They’re backing up like turds in a poorly maintained sewer. Ever since New Scientist published its stupid and irresponsible Darwin Was Wrong story in the midst of the Darwin bicentenary celebrations, this particular long-term subscriber just hasn’t felt like reading the damn rag. And, as with a sewage back-up, I’m not at all sure what to do about it.

Darwin was wrong, you see, because species aren’t really related to each other in a tree-like structure.

Meanwhile, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which has been amassing genetic sequences for three decades, recently published the largest phylogenetic tree ever constructed.

Yes, that’s right, a tree.

Do you think someone should tell the poor dupes that they’ve got it all wrong?

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See also:

• Hands off our tree!
• Dead trees

Sir David Attenborough contemplates a tangled molecule.

Last night’s Darwin bicentennial special on the BBC by Sir David Attenborough was every bit as good as we all knew it would be. You know where you stand with Sir David: a landmark television event is almost a given. We shouldn’t take such things for granted, but we do.

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life was wonderful, one-hour documentary in which Sir David brilliantly summarised Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection. But it was also a deeply personal programme, in which Sir David took us to his childhood geological haunts near Leicester, reminisced about learning to categorise fossils at Cambridge University, showed us his own copy of the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species bought second-hand when he was 18 years old, and drew on archive footage from his classic nature series. He even got to sit in Darwin’s study in Down House. As the greatest science communicator since (and possibly including) Darwin, he had every right to be there.

You might argue that Darwin’s great theory is worthy of a 52-week series of documentaries—and you would be right—but the one-hour format worked brilliantly: Sir David explained Darwin’s thinking, and the modern-day evidence that supports it in a single sitting. The viewer was able to see the whole picture, and understand the whole argument, without getting bogged down in details.

But the real reason we didn’t need a 52-week series of documentaries to explain Darwin’s great theory is that we have already had more than 50 years’ worth of wonderful documentary series courtesy of Sir David—every single one of which has celebrated nature’s grandeur as explained by Charles Darwin.

Darwin famously claimed that On the Origin of Species had been one long argument; Sir David Attenborough’s half-century body of work has been one long celebration of Darwin’s wonderful theory. By anyone’s standards, it is a magnificent achievement.

Letter to New Scientist:

Sir/Madam,

Compare and contrast:

“Nobody is arguing – yet – that the tree concept has outlived its usefulness in animals and plants… [I]t is still the best way of explaining how multicellular organisms are related to one another” [Graham Lawton, New Scientist, 24 Jan 2009].

“Darwin was wrong: cutting down the tree of life” [New Scientistcover, 24 Jan 2009].

I appreciate you need to hype up your headlines to sell more deadtrees, but I expected better of New Scientist – especially just oneweek after your own editorial vowed to strive to avoid sexing upheadlines in future. Do your marketing people think they’ve identifieda gap in the creationist market or something?

I presume, in future, whenever you show a clade diagram in one of yourarticles, its caption will come with the disclaimer, “Please Note:This is wrong”.

More science, less marketing hype please.

Richard Carter, FCD
The Friends of Charles Darwin
http://friendsofdarwin.com/
Charlie is our Darwin

I think so too!

*sigh*

The latest edition of New Scientist (my butler reads it) contains a very interesting, albeit irritating article entitled Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life, which asserts that, what with horizontal gene transfer and hybridisation and all that malarkey, life’s genealogy should not be represented, as Darwin said, by a tree, but rather by a convoluted web.

I say bollocks to that.

Yes, the history of life on Earth is indeed far more complex than even Darwin could have imagined. Life really isn’t that simple. It never is. Newton’s Laws of Motion are a wonderfully elegant set of equations that explain the motions of the heavens. They also, to Einstein’s great regret, happen to be flawed. But they were still good enough to get us to the sodding moon. Rutherford’s model of the atom is, we now realise, wrong, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to explain to young would-be scientists than fuzzy blobs which don’t seem to be able to make up their minds whether to be waves or particles. Such horrors are best held in reserve for unleashing on unsuspecting undergraduates. (I write from bitter personal experience.)

Darwin’s tree of life is still a pretty good approximation of the genealogy of species—whatever that word means in this hopelessly complex genetic age. It’s a useful metaphor that even young children can understand. It makes a great T-shirt and a damn fine fridge magnet.

Hands off our tree! Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.