In a perverse way, though, the sheer number and quality of nature documentaries on television inevitably means that some of the Wow! factor has gone. When David Attenborough first sat amongst the gorillas, my whole family, and an entire nation, watched spellbound. But nowadays you can catch up-close-and-personal documentaries about gorillas pretty much any week on one channel or another. We’ve seen it all before.

But, this week, sitting watching yet another BBC Nature documentary with my dad, I experienced a true Wow! moment. I mean it literally: both my dad and I actually said “Wow!” We saw an animal neither of us had ever seen in action before do something truly amazing. I was, quite frankly, shocked (and a little embarrassed) that I had not known about its remarkable behaviour. And, to top it all, it was a British animal (although, it turns out, there are numerous species which perform this remarkable feat)…

Fortunately, the BBC has made the clip in question available online. [Postscript: The video is not available outside the UK, apparently. This YouTube video covers the same subject matter.]

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be Wowed! I give you the sexton beetle [Nicrophorus vespilloides]:

It is famously said that God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. I don’t know about that. But I do know that the sexton beetle is now officially my favourite member of that inordinately vast order.

The films describe two fictitious conversations between Charles Darwin and the real-life London Soho barber William Willis, with whom Darwin really did converse on the subject of dog-breeding. Although the conversations are fictitious, the events described in them are pretty accurate.

The conversations, as you will see, take place immediately before two key events in Darwin’s life:

Charles Darwin: A Genius in the Heart of London:

Part 1: Saved by a Soho Barber

 
Part 2: A Final Journey to the Abbey

Bizarro!

Who says the reporting of science in the media has gone downhill?

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!

 
Feel free to embed it in your own blog posts.

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.

Ten out of ten!

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.

Vote to send GrrlScientist to Antarctica.

While I was there, I managed to take a short video (observe Michael Barton making an appearance in the background):

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?

The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews can be purchased from the official Dawkins website.

[Hat-tip to Nada Cabani for the link.]

Postscript: More on the Times website