1. NOVA: Darwin’s Darkest Hour
EEB464 Fall 2017
Brian O’Meara
NOVA: Darwin’s Darkest Hour

2. Learning objectives
Understand background of Darwin Coral reef formation theory as example of gradual thinking Scooping in science

3. Charles Darwin

4. 1825 (age 16): Summer as an apprentice as a doctor with his father
1809 (age 8): Mother died
1825 (age 16): Summer as an apprentice as a doctor with his father
1825 (age 16): Starts at University of Edinburgh Med School
1825 (age 16): Begins learning taxonomy from John Edmonstone (a freed slave)

5. 1825-27 (age 16-18): Darwin does poorly in med school
1827 (age 18): Darwin pulled from med school by his father
1828 (age 18): Goes to Christ’s College, Cambridge for a Bachelor’s, with plan to become a clergyman
Darwin couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Also, this is 20 years away from the invention of anesthesia
1828 (age 19): Becomes friendly with John Henslow, a botany professor. Becomes more deeply interested in natural history

6. 1831 (age 22): Begins learning geology from prof. Adam Sedgwick
1831 (age 22): Graduates (places 10/178 graduates). Plans to visit Tenerife.
1831 (age 22): Tenerife plans fall through when his friend dies.
Think of this for a minute: a guy, around your age for many of you, and historieans pore over everything he did in college. What he did with his free time, girlfriend, plans for future.

7. 1831 (age 22): Darwin invited to be naturalist (and captain’s companion) on 2-yr (turns into 5-yr) surveying voyage
For companion, think of it like Dr. Who companion: someone to talk to, a friendly face, not someone in the hierarchy like the rest of the crew. Previous captain killed himself out of loneliness and depression. Unlike UT, there’s no 946-CARE line at sea in the nineteenth century. Fitzroy much later killed himself. 6 x 8 cabin. Here’s the route of the trip. Note Darwin’s extensive travels on land. Partly due to awful seasickness, partly due to need to explore, he traveled a lot on land.

8. Darwin collected extensively all over the voyage
Darwin collected extensively all over the voyage. He was most struck by variation in species as you go from place to place, even for things that are the same species. He also found fossils that were giant versions of smaller extant species.
BBC Galapagos

9. 1836 (age 27): Ends Beagle voyage
1831 (age 22): Begins Beagle voyage. FitzRoy gives him Vol 1 of Lyell’s Principles of Geology
1836 (age 27): Ends Beagle voyage
1837 (age 28): Seriously thinking about evolution
1839 (age 29): Marries cousin Emma Wedgwood. Given money by parents allowing them to live quite comfortably off investment income.
1839 (age 30): Darwin’s book on the Beagle voyages appears

10. 1847 (age 39): Book on coral reefs published
(ages 28-50): Darwin refines ideas about evolution, gathers evidence (letters to breeders, naturalists, etc.; raising pigeons; work on barnacles; many experiments)
1847 (age 39): Book on coral reefs published
Darwin works for twenty years getting evidence. Wallace letter. Wallace had come up with many of the same ideas as Darwin, knew Darwin was interested in this sort of thing, but Wallace was in Malaysia, Darwin in England and better able to communicate, so Wallace asked him for help. Didn’t realize he was scooping Darwin. Darwin gave letters to his friends, asking them to deal with it (Darwin’s son was sick and died 10 days later)

11. Darwin’s idea for reef formation was based on lots of time
Darwin’s idea for reef formation was based on lots of time. Differed from theory of Lyell, one of his idols (thought of atolls on craters) but Lyell immediately thought Darwin’s made more sense

12. Barrier/Atoll reefs
Fringing reefs

13. 1858 (age 50): Darwin receives letter from Wallace asking him to communicate Wallace’s essay on “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”.
1858 (age 50): Darwin and Wallace writings read at meeting of Linnean Society in London
Darwin works for twenty years getting evidence. Wallace letter. Wallace had come up with many of the same ideas as Darwin, knew Darwin was interested in this sort of thing, but Wallace was in Malaysia, Darwin in England and better able to communicate, so Wallace asked him for help. Didn’t realize he was scooping Darwin. Darwin gave letters to his friends, asking them to deal with it (Darwin’s son was sick and died 10 days later)

14. 1859 (age 51): Origin of Species published and becomes best-seller
: Darwin writes other books on insectivorous plants, human evolution, expression of emotions, orchids, and earthworms
1882 (age 73): Darwin dies. Popular and elite pressure leads to him being buried in Westminster Abbey, 20 feet from Isaac Newton
Note that evolution was initially quite controversial,but over the next twenty years, became generally accepted

15. Summary of Origin (adapted from Wikipedia)
Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce the population would grow (fact).
Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
Resources such as food are limited and are relatively stable over time (fact).
A struggle for survival ensues (inference).
Individuals in a population vary significantly from one another (fact).
Much of this variation is heritable (fact)
Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and leave their inheritable traits to future generations, which produces the process of natural selection (inference).
This slowly results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species (inference).
Summary of Origin (adapted from Wikipedia)

16. Origin of Species, first edition
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Origin of Species, first edition