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:
I’ve always admired Aubrey Manning‘s BBC television programmes about the making of the British landscape, but, to my eternal shame, I must admit that I never before took the trouble to find out who he is!
It turns out that Manning is an extremely distinguished biologist, who wrote the book on ethology.
Drawing my brief trawl of the web to learn more about Manning, I came across a wonderful five-part YouTube video conversation between Manning and fellow ethologist Richard Dawkins. The video takes the format of a cosy chat between two scientists who clearly have great respect for each other (warning: the video contains an unscheduled appearance by a cat):
This is wonderful television. Except that you tend not to get this sort of thing on television these days, because clever people talking to each other is no longer seen as good television.
I do so much prefer it when Dawkins talks about actual science like this, rather than pursuing his relentless god-bashing. I think he’s far more effective at getting his message across when he takes this approach. I suspect, from what he says in the video, Manning might agree.
Around this time of year, on my daily drive home from work, I am sometimes lucky enough to see one of Britain’s natural wonders: flocks of starlings wheeling in the sky above Chat Moss between Liverpool and Manchester. There are sometimes a couple of hundred of them. The displays can be pretty spectacular, but nowhere near as spectacular as in this remarkable video of starlings above Otmoor in Oxfordshire, filmed by Dylan Winter:
As Richard Dawkins explains in his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, the starlings’ remarkable aerobatic ballet results from each bird within the flock following a relatively simple set of rules. The birds’ wonderfully complex flight patterns emerge from the cumulative, simple actions of the individual birds, in a similar way to water’s wetness and turbulence emerging from the relatively simple interactions of individual water particles.
In my opinion, the fact that such complex behaviour can emerge from simple sets of rules does nothing to detract from the displays; indeed, if anything, I would say that it adds to the Wow! Factor.
The University of Cambridge Zoological Museum is currently displaying artist Tolly Nason‘s cast glass sculpture installation Seeing the Light: Finch by Finch, which is based on the beaks of Darwin’s Galápagos finch specimens. It’s pretty cool.
While I was there, I managed to take a short video (observe Michael Barton making an appearance in the background):
One of the more useful developments in podcasting in recent years has been the publication of full, unexpurgated versions of interviews as supplements to the podcasts in which they originally appeared in edited format. This gives people who were interested in the edited interview the opportunity to delver deeper into the subject.
I am glad to note that this very useful development is starting to be adopted with video interviews. Richard Dawkins’s official website recently published on YouTube full versions of interviews Dawkins conducted as part of his recent documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin. I have to say, I didn’t particularly enjoy the series, which was rather light on Darwin, and rather heavy on God-botherer bashing, but I found the following unedited interview with Steve Pinker very entertaining (despite my general disdain for evolutionary psychology):
Richard Dawkins scared of scorpions: who’d have thought it?
I was delighted to see a couple of brown hares boxing in the field in front of my house this morning. It’s something I haven’t seen since my childhood. My view wasn’t quite as good as this:
I am frequently asked if I know where to obtain a copy of the 1978 TV drama series, The Voyage of Charles Darwin. I do now: it’s on YouTube. Enjoy it while you still can!
One of my favourite TV presenters in my youth was James Burke. His wonderful series Connections did much to cultivate my interest in the history of science.
This morning, I came across a large collection of James Burke videos on YouTube. I have just spent 45 minutes enjoying episode 8 (Fit to Rule) of his 1985 series The Day the Universe Changed, which was all about the Darwinian Revolution and the subsequent hijacking of Darwinian theory by both Left and Right. The episode has been split into five parts, as follows:
Part 1: Linnaeus, the Romantic Movement, Buffon, The Great Chain of Being.
Part 2: Willam Smith, Cuvier, catastrophism, Hutton, gradualism, Lyell.
Part 3: Wallace, Darwin, archaeopterix, Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, Wagner, Haekel.
Part 4: Haekel, Himmler, Hitler, Sumner, Social Darwinism, Marx, Ulyanov (Lenin).
Part 5: Conclusion: how 1980′s political ideologies in both East and West were inspired by Darwin.
Those were the days: when television treated you like grown-ups and assumed that you still wanted to learn stuff. Come back James Burke!
I’m rapidly coming round to the conclusion that there aren’t enough dinosaurs in this blog. Dinosaurs are what bring the punters in, it’s a well-known fact. Especially dancing ones.
So, without further ado, I give you a nice little video mashup created by someone calling themself alargedog (if that is indeed their real name) of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s rather wonderful (if scientifically inaccurate) Smithsonian Institute Blues:
To paraphrase Antennae Jimmy Semens from said Magic Band, this is the song that’s going to make The Red Notebook fat.
Darwinian sexual selection is alive and kicking in the European countryside. German film-maker Tomer Eshed has been nominated for an award for his short film Our Wonderful Nature about the water shrew, which contains some amazing, never-before-seen, slow-motion footage:
CAM3 Media have kindly sent me a copy of their new DVD, The Young Charles Darwin. You can read my review here. I enjoyed it very much. You can order a copy via CAM3 Media’s website. They have also posted the following short appetiser on YouTube:
The Red Notebook is the blog of 
