Front page article in Ames Tribune 4 September 2008

1. Front page article in Ames Tribune 4 September 2008

2. The Ichneumonidae The Ichneumonidae are wasps that sting various other insects to paralyze them, then deposit their eggs inside their bodies for the wasp larvae to feed on when they hatch. “I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.” – Letter to Asa Gray, May 22, 1860.

3. The Huxley – Wilberforce Debate Where: Oxford University, a location unlikely to be receptive to Darwin’s ideas What: Annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science When: June 1860 – less than 7 months after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which was the talk of England Who: Thomas Henry Huxley, 35 years old Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, 54 years old

4. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805 – 1873) Son of the abolitionist William Wilberforce. A notable public speaker, known as “Soapy Sam.” A graduate of Oxford (first class in mathematics and second in classics). Became Lord Bishop of Oxford, a member of the House of Lords and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

5. The BAAS Meeting of June 1860 Saturday, June 30: Session on Darwinism and society; meeting moved to a larger room to accommodate 700 persons: clergy, undergraduate students, many brightly-dressed women. An American, Dr. Draper, from New York, droned on for about 90 minutes “On the Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin.” Three more men spoke but were shouted down in a matter of only nine minutes, and the crowd then demanded to hear Bishop Wilberforce, who had been prepared with attacks on Darwin by Richard Owen. Wilberforce attacked Darwin’s book as “unphilosophical,” said Egyptian mummies disproved evolution, and showed why man was very different from animals.

6. Continued … Wilberforce, in a good mood because of the support the clergy and students were giving him, ad-libbed, turning to Huxley and asking him whether he was descended from apes on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s. Huxley remarked to Sir Bejamin Brodie, sitting next to him, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.” Huxley rose to answer the bishop after the conclusion of his speech, saying he “had listened with great attention to the Lord Bishop’s speech but had been unable to discern either a new fact or a new argument in it – except indeed the question raised as to my personal predilection in the matter of ancestry.”

7. Huxley’s report of what he said next: “If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” Pandemonium broke loose among those who heard these words, and one woman reportedly fainted. Huxley said the audience listened very carefully to the rest of his remarks.

8. Caricatures of Wilberforce and Huxley (Vanity Fair)

9. The Wilberforce – Huxley debate led to great public discussion, with sharp divisions between those who insisted on the truth of revealed scripture and those who believe Darwin’s theory. The Bishop of Worcester reported back to his wife what had happened, since she was not present, and she is said to have replied to him: “Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.” Aside: Mark Twain once wrote that “God created man because he was disappointed in the monkey.”

10. The rest of the talks … Following Huxley, there were talks by several other noted biologists supporting Darwin: Joseph Hooker, John Stevens Henslow, John Lubbock. Then Admiral FitzRoy rose to attack Darwin’s ideas. The mathematician George Johnstone Stoney later wrote that FitzRoy stated that he had “often expostulated with his old comrade of the Beagle for entertaining views which were contradictory to the first chapter of Genesis,” and asked the members of the audience to believe revealed scripture instead of a person who was not present at the Creation. The biologist Julius Carus remembered to Darwin that “Admiral FitzRoy expressed his sorrows for having given you the opportunities of collecting facts for such a shocking theory as yours.” Finally, a number of younger biologists spoke in enthusiastic support of Darwin’s ideas, and the meeting was over.

11. Robert FitzRoy’s Career Entered the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth in February 1818, at the age of 12. Entered the Royal Navy in 1819. Had a brilliant academic career, becoming lieutenant in 1824 (still a teenager) with an unprecedented 100% score on the examination. Served during the next few years on the HMS Thetis and the HMS Ganges, where his talents were quite evident, then on the Beagle and other ships, eventually becoming a vice-admiral. Upon his return from the second Beagle voyage he married a very religious wife to whom he had been engaged – but he had never mentioned this to Darwin during the five-year voyage. FitzRoy became more and more of a Biblical literalist as the years went by, and regretted having brought Darwin on his ship.

12. Governor of New Zealand In 1841 the first governor of New Zealand, William Hobson, was appointed; previously, New Zealand was administered from Australia. When he died in later 1842, FitzRoy was appointed as the second governor. He served from December 26, 1843 to November 18, 1845. Despite being given little military equipment and personnel, he was supposed to maintain order and protect the Maori as British settlers poured into the New Zealand, wanting land. The only revenue he had came from customs duties. Earlier in 1843 the Maori had killed 22 settlers in the “Wairau Affray (or Massacre)” and FitzRoy had to investigate it. He did not punish any of the Maori responsible and became disliked by the settlers, who basically wanted the Maori exterminated, so FitzRoy’s term was short. FitzRoy was succeeded by Sir George Grey, who was given adequate military resources, and governed from 1845 to 1854 and again from 1861 to 1868.

13. FitzRoy the Meteorologist FitzRoy retired from active service in 1851, in part because of ill health. In 1854 he was made head of a new meteorological office in the Board of Trade for the purpose of collecting weather data at sea. This was the forerunner of the “Met Office” (Meterological Office), which is the United Kingdom’s national weather service.

14. FitzRoy invented several types of barometers for use by fishermen, and they continued in production into the 20th century, They were marked with “Admiral FitzRoy’s special remarks” – such as “When rising: in winter the rise of the barometer presages frost.

15. FitzRoy as meteorologist … On October 26, 1859 a great storm on the Welsh coast destroyed the steam clipper Royal Charter, returning from Melbourne, Australia to Liverpool. About 459 lives were lost, only 21 male passengers ad 18 male crew members surviving. FitzRoy then began developing charts to predict the weather, calling his system “forecasting the weather,” the name still used today by weatherpersons around the world. In 1860 he began providing gale warnings along the British coast, and in 1863 gathered a lot of information in his book, The Weather Book.

16. Death of Robert FitzRoy April 30, 1865 – FitzRoy, who was depressed, got up in the morning, went to the bathroom, and slit his throat with a razor. He had spent his whole fortune of £6,000 on public expenditures, leaving his wife and daughter destitute. However, friends convinced the government to pay back £3,000, Darwin added another £100, and Queen Victoria allowed his widow to live at Hampton Court Palace.

17. Named for Robert FitzRoy: • Mount FitzRoy, in Argentina and Chile, at the extreme south end of South America – an important tourist attraction. • Fitzroy River in northern Western Australia. • The conifer Fitzroya cupressoides of the cypress family, probably South America’s tallest tree (over 45 m high); a specimen in Chile was determined to be 3622 years old, the third oldest verified age on record for a tree. Fitzroya cupressoides

18. Darwin keeps working on natural selection Darwin enlisted the help of anyone he could, including his neighbor, John Lubbock (Lord Avebury): “I write now in great haste to beg you to look (though I know how busy you are, but I cannot think of any other naturalist who would be careful) at any field of common red clover (if such a field is near you) and watch the hive-bees: probably (if not too late) you will see some sucking at the mouth of the little flowers and some few sucking at the base of the flowers, at holes bitten through the corollas. All that you will see is that the bees put their heads deep into the [flower] head and rout about. Now, if you see this, do for Heaven’s sake catch me some of each and put in spirits and keep them separate.”

19. Darwin’s sons were intrigued by their father’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and quickly became young Darwinians. Darwin was astonished one day by Horace’s theory about adders: “Horace said to me yesterday, ‘If everyone would kill adders they would come to sting less.’ I answered, ‘Of course they would, for there would be fewer.’ He replied indignantly: ‘I did not mean that; but the timid adders which run away would be saved, and in time they would never sting at all.’ Natural selection of cowards.”

20. Henry Walter Bates (1825 – 1892) Born in Leicester, no formal education after age 12. Like William Smith, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Thomas Henry Huxley, Bates was an auto-didact.

21. Bates had various jobs, but read widely and studied nature. He met Wallace in Leicester and in 1847 they decided to go to the Amazon River, paying for the trip by sending specimens back to England and having an agent sell them. They traveled and collected together for a year, then split up to cover different ground. Wallace eventually returned to England in 1852 while Bates remained a total of 11 years, until 1859. Bates brought back 14,000 specimens, mostly insects, including 8,000 new species! He shipped his specimens back on three different ships, to avoid the calamitous loss Wallace had experienced, and all three returned safely.

22. Darwin persuaded Bates (who was extremely reluctant to write) to publish information about his travels and experiences, and Bates’ wonderful book, The Naturalist on the River Amazons [sic], was published in 1862 by John Murray (Darwin’s publisher) – a great naturalist travel book ranking with Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Shown on the right is Figure 32 of Bates’ book.

23. “I had an amusing adventure one day with these birds [curl-crested toucans]. I had shot one from a rather high tree in a dark glen in the forest, and entered the thicket where the bird had fallen to secure my booty. It was only wounded, and on my attempting to seize it, set up a loud scream. In an instant, as if by magic, the shady nook seemed alive with these birds, although there was certainly none visible when I entered the jungle. They descended towards me, hopping from bough to bough, some of them swinging on the loops and cables of woody lianas, and all croaking and fluttering their wings like so many furies. If I had had a long stick in my hand I could have knocked several of them over. After killing the wounded one, I began to prepare for obtaining more specimens and punishing the viragos for their boldness; but the screaming of their companion having ceased, they remounted the trees, and before I could reload, every one of them had disappeared.” – Bates, Chapter 12

24. Batesian Mimicry Bates is best remembered for having discovered the phenomenon called “Batesian Mimicry,” which is the evolutionary development in a species of characteristics which mimic those of a related species which is unpalatable to predators, so that the predators also avoid the mimic species. (There is another type of mimicry, Mullerian mimicry.) Bates discovered mimicry in butterflies, but it has since been observed in a wide variety of species, including other insects, snakes and birds

25. This is a plate from a paper by Bates published in 1862. The unpalatable species of butterflies are on the second and fourth rows, and the mimics are on the first and third rows. Batesian mimicry is an excellent example of evolution, as Darwin realized, which is why he supported Bates’ book.

26. 1862: Publication of Darwin’s The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects. Orchids were not just flowers of great beauty created for the enjoyment of human beings, but flowers of great complexity whose evolutionary history could be discerned by the study of how they were pollinated. Darwin carefully studied his orchids – and many he had collected and received from acquaintances.

27. Criticisms of Darwin’s Theory by Scientists In the early 1860s, following the publication of On the Origin of Species, attacks on Darwin’s theories began by real scientists, as opposed to criticisms by clergymen with little or no training in science. Some criticisms were by naturalists who had long believed in creationism and were loathe to change their opinion. Notable among these were the geologist Adam Sedgwick and anatomist Richard Owen in Britain and geologist/zoologist Louis Agassiz in America, but there were many others as well. Many scientists became convinced of the reality of evolution, but not of the role of natural selection. Then there were the physical scientists …

28. The Physicists Attack Darwin Some of the fiercest and most telling criticisms of Darwin – and the ones that worried him the most – came from the physicists and engineers. First, physicists were still very mechanistic and deterministic in those days, before the discovery of statistical processes like radioactivity and the development of quantum mechanics or even chaos theory. They did not like the apparently important role of randomness in natural selection. Second, physicists believed the earth’s age could not possibly be as old as geologists and evolutionists thought and needed, so that there was not enough time for the gradual processes leading to evolution of life on earth. Third, under the currently-accepted theory of blending inheritance (children’s characteristics a blend of those of their parents) mutations, however favorable to evolution, would disappear from the population.

29. The Age of the Earth Controversy In 1650 Anglican Archbishop Ussher estimated the age of the earth as 5654 years, created the night before 23 October 4004 B.C. 1779: the French naturalist Buffon (the Comte du Buffon) estimated the age of the Earth as 75,000 years – much older than the Biblical estimate. He obtained this age by an experiment using a small Earth-like globe and measuring its rate of cooling, and extrapolating to the real Earth. 1856: Hermann von Helmholtz estimates the age of the Earth as 22 million years, based on his estimate of the time it would take the Sun to condense to its present size from the original nebula of gas and dust. Simon Newcomb similarly calculated an age of 18 million years in 1892.

30. James Ussher (1581– 1656) Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland (1625 – 1656). Born to a prominent Anglo-Irish family in Dublin. A gifted and prolific scholar. Determined (1650 – 1654) that the world was created at nightfall preceding 23 October 4004 B.C.

31. Charles Lyell’s Opinion Charles Lyell always considered the Earth to be extremely old. As early as 1830 he had concluded that there must be a steady internal source of heat inside the Earth in order to account for the volcanic activity which had been occurring throughout the whole history of the Earth. He did not accept the concept of a gradually cooling Earth. Darwin’s theory of evolution required immensely long periods of time, much longer than any of the estimates of the Earth’s age during his lifetime, so he was favorably disposed towards Lyell’s arguments about the antiquity of the Earth.

32. Estimates by William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) 1862: William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) estimated the age of the Earth as between 24 million and 400 million years, by assuming that the Earth was originally a completely molten ball of rock (held together by gravitational forces), and then determining the time to the present from the Earth’s rate of cooling and present temperature. (He was unaware of heat being produced by radioactive decay processes, making the time much longer.) 1892: Now Lord Kelvin, he sharpens his estimate to 100 million years using thermal gradients, not realizing that the Earth’s highly viscous fluid mantle made his calculations erroneous. Later he revised his estimate to 20 million years.

33. William Thompson, Lord Kelvin – a photograph and a painting

34. William Thompson, Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) Irish physicist, noted for his work in Thermodynamics, but also in other fields of physics. Became a professor (of “natural philosophy”) at the University of Glasgow, where his father had been a professor of mathematics, in 1846, at the age of 22. Made Baron Kelvin in 1892, the River Kelvin being the river that passes through the campus of the University of Glasgow. Developed the absolute temperature scale named after him, the Kelvin scale (0 K is absolute zero).

35. Huxley’s attacks on Thomson’s calculation First, Huxley pointed out Thomson’s assumptions on which his calculation was based, and said they might be wrong. The theory of the sun’s heat – that it was an initial quantity being continuously dissipated – might be wrong, and there might be a continuous new source of heat inside the earth, perhaps some unknown chemical activities. Second, a smaller age of the earth was not necessarily fatal to the theory of natural selection, that biological change might be occurring faster than currently supposed. After all, the biological clock of evolution depended on the geological clock associated with sedimentary deposits – and that might be erroneous.

36. Huxley’s attacks on Kelvin’s calculation …. Third, impressive mathematics doesn’t automatically strengthen an argument: “I do not presume to throw the slightest doubt upon the accuracy of any of the calculations made by such distinguished mathematicians… But I desire to point out that this seems to be one of the many cases in which the admitted accuracy of mathematical processes is allowed to throw a wholly inadmissible appearance of authority over the results obtained by them. Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.” I.e, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

37. Other Estimates 1895: John Perry, modeling the Earth with a convective mantle and a thin crust, estimates the age of the Earth as 2 to 3 billion years. Darwin’s son, George H. Darwin (University of Cambridge), theorizing that the Earth and Moon had broken apart when they were molten, estimated that tidal friction would have given the Earth its present 24-hour day in about 56 million years. Not helpful to his father’s theory! 1899-1900: John Joly (University of Dublin) estimated the oceans as being 80 to 100 million years old, based on their current salinity and the rate at which they accumulated salt through erosion.

38. The Reputations of Lyell & Darwin Charles Lyell died in 1875 and Charles Darwin in 1882, at a time when the accepted estimates of the age of the Earth were so much shorter than their estimates based on geology and biology, that their reputations suffered. If their theories needed an Earth far more ancient than the Earth could possibly be, their theories must be wrong. Geologists decided the old theory of catastrophism gave a better explanation of geological changes in the past, and biologists, while generally believing in evolution, were mostly reluctant to accept Darwin’s ideas about natural selection and gradualism. Kelvin was considered a greater scientist than either Lyell or Darwin in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

39. Radioactivity and Radioactive Heating of the Earth Imply an Older Earth 1896: Discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel 1898: Marie and Pierre Curie discover the radioactive elements polonium and radium. 1903: Pierre Curie determines that a gram of radium produces enough heat in one hour to melt a gram of ice. 1903: George Darwin and John Joly point out that the heat generated by radioactivity would affect estimates of the age of the Earth, making it much older than the current estimates. Darwin’s son redeems himself!

40. Radiometric Dating The discovery of radioactivity eventually led to the concept of radiometric dating, that is, dating a rock sample by comparing the abundance of naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes in the sample with the abundance of its decay products, together with knowledge of the decay rates of the isotopes involved. Much of the early work was done by the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford, who taught at various universities in Canada and England, and his students. Ernest Rutherford in 1908

41. Rutherford measured the concentration of helium, from radioactive alpha decay in a rock, and determined its age as 40 million years, assuming that no helium escaped from the rock and that the decay rate of radium determined by Ramsay and Soddy was accurate. These assumptions were in error, as it happens, but radiometric dating became more precise in succeeding years. Giving a talk about his measurement and its implications for the age of the Earth, contradicting Lord Kelvin, he discovers that Kelvin has come to his talk. Rutherford reports: … continued

42. “I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye, and cock a baleful glance at me! Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said, 'Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the earth, provided no new source was discovered. That prophetic utterance refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium!' Behold! the old boy beamed upon me.”

43. Arthur Holmes (1890 – 1965) The difficulties of dating by radiometric methods, particularly after isotopes were discovered and complicated matters, caused many physicists to stop using the method. Arthur Holmes (1890 – 1965) persisted, focusing on lead isotopes, and in 1911 estimated the age of the earth as at least 1.6 billion years. In 1927 he published The Age of the Earth, estimating it as 1.6 to 3.0 billion years. Holmes was the author of some popular, well-known geological textbooks which touted the theory of continental drift (which led to plate tectonics) when no other geologists believed in it.

44. Claire Cameron Patterson The first really accurate determination of the age of the earth, the value currently accepted, was made by C. C. Patterson (1922 – 1995), who was born in Mitchellville, Iowa and educated at Grinnell College, the University of Iowa, and the University of Chicago. In 1956 C. C. Patterson, using lead isotope methods, produced an accurate age of 4.55 billion years, which has not changed significantly since then: the current range of estimates is 4.53 to 4.58 billion years. For this purpose he used meteoritic material from Arizona’s Canyon Diablo meteorite, formed at the beginning of the Solar System. Patterson was also famous for his work on lead in the environment.

45. Blending Inheritance In the days before anything was understood about genetics, little was known about inheritance other than that a child inherited characteristics from both of its parents, in equal or approximately equal amounts. The generally-accepted theory was that inheritance was a blend of the characteristics of the parents: children of two short parents were short, children of two tall parents were tall, and children of one short and one tall parents were intermediate in height, and so forth. A red-flowered plant crossed with a white-flowered plant would have pink flowers. Darwin seems to have thought that a favorable mutation – a mutation that gave an animal or plant some advantage in the struggle for survival – would increase in frequency over time (and, in fact, it does).

46. Fleeming Jenkin’s Criticism of Darwin Fleeming Jenkin (1833 – 1885) was a remarkable scientist who became a professor of engineering at several universities, including the University of Edinburgh. He was the inventor of the telpherage (the first aerial tramway) and played a key role in the laying of underwater cables in several parts of the world. He was also the first to draw a graph of economic supply and demand, in a paper presented in 1870. Jenkin, in a review of Darwin’s book published in The North British Review in 1867, pointed out that blending or “soft” inheritance would inevitably lead to the disappearance of favorable sports (mutations) in a population, suggesting that Darwin’s theory of natural selection was faulty. This criticism stung Darwin, who tried to save the situation with an odd and incorrect genetic theory.

47. Fleeming Jenkin at work in his laboratory. After his sudden death at the age of 52, his family had a memoir written by Robert Louis Stevenson.

48. Mendelian Genetics Today it is known that inheritance is not “soft” but “particulate.” Genes are inherited from both parents, and together the genotype (the set of a person’s genes) determines the phenotype (the characteristics of the individual), but generally in a complex manner. The particulate nature became evident in the genetic studies on peas carried out from 1855 to 1863 by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, presented at a scientific meeting in 1865, and published in 1866 in the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn, where they lay mostly neglected until rediscovery in 1900. No, he never sent his paper to Darwin, who supposedly left it unopened.

49. Above: Mendel. Left: Simple Mendelian inheritance

50. July 1868 – Visit to Isle of Wight Darwin’s daughter Henrietta convinced her father to take a vacation on the Isle of Wight at Dimbola Lodge, the home of Julia Margaret Cameron. He met Alfred Lord Tennyson there and was photographed by Julia Cameron; this photograph appears to have been his and his family’s favorite photograph.