Santa: evolved.

Thanks to Colin Purrington from Swarthmore College for the doctored image. Colin has posted some great evolution outreach images, along with some subversively good Charles Darwin has a posse artwork.

Tags: charles darwin,
hms beagle

The Beagle Project at big school...

we're featured in the December edition of Nature (registration needed). Talk among yourselves while I pop outside, punch the air and shout 'Oh yeah baby!'

hms beagle replica, nature

Charles Darwin's Beagle diary entry

Christmas eve 1831:

"A blank & idle day." (The Beagle was in Devonport unable to start her voyage due to contrary winds.)

Christmas eve 1832, Tierra deo Fuego, close to Cape Horn:

Great black clouds were rolling across the sky & squalls of rain & hail swept by us with very great violence: so that the Captain determined to run into Wigwam cove. — This harbor is a quiet little basin behind Cape Spencer & not far from Cape Horn. — And here we are in quite smooth water; & the only thing which reminds us of the gale which is blowing outside. — is the heavy puffs or Whyllywaws, which every 5 minutes come over the mountains, as if they would blow us out of the water. —

From Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary on the Darwin Online site.

Tags: voyage of the beagle, Charles Darwin, christmas eve.

Mammoth season's greetings...

from all at The Beagle Project. Click here for the mammoth.

Tags: hms beagle replica, wooly mammoth

G'day

(sorry!) to our Australian supporters. In case you haven't received it, or are new to The Beagle Project, you can download a pdf of our Australian Newsletter here. All feedback welcome, unless it includes the words 'cricket', 'ashes' and 'whitewash'.

Tags: hms beagle replica, australia, voyage of the beagle

Welcome Inklings.

A web science magazine edited by two talented young women. Backstory: they are 66% of the popular science website Inkycircus. Based in London, they wanted to open a mostly-for-women accessible science mag, just the kind of thing science-shy Britain needs. So what did our far-sighted Home Office do?

Chucked 'em out. Not rich enough, and strangely unprepared to marry any old passing Brit to be allowed to write a science mag here. Off to Canada they went, and here it is: tap your trackpads and click your mice to welcome Inkling Magazine ('on the hunch that science rocks'). And at first reading, it's good. Like the science it has a hunch about, it rocks, and rocks a fat one.

Congrats to the UK rejects Anna Gosline and Anne Casselman. Dung-throwing monkeys to the Home Office, please.

Tags: science magazine, science journalism

Morning Beagle mindboggle

Just when you thought you'd heard it all, an email comes in to the Beagle Project. An offer to help translating into Yahganian, the language spoken by Jemmy Buttons.

Jemmy (for those whose 19th century Tierra Del Fuego history is hazy) was one of the Fuegians kidnapped by Commander Robert FitzRoy after some Fuegians helped themselves to one of Beagle's boats. One, O'run-del'lico was renamed Jemmy Buttons aboard the Beagle. (This was on the voyage before Darwin's.) Not finding it convenient to return them, he sailed off to England with three Fuegians aboard with the idea of civilising and converting them to Christianity, then returning them Tierra del Fuego to carry on the good work.

FitzRoy's good intentions backfired: there has been some suggestion of a sexual scandal in London requiring them to be returned to South America sharpish. Hence the 1831 trip: half a surveying trip, half a deportation oh-and-lets-have-this-young-chap-Darwin-aboard.

The Fuegians were returned to Tierra del Fuego with Christianity, donated linen and tea services, but it seems none of these things lasted long. They soon returned to their former accustomed lives and in 1859 Jemmy was reported to have boarded a Patagonian Missionary Society boat and killed all aboard.

There are few Yaghanian speakers left alive, but it will be useful to be able to reassure them that this Beagle comes with no intention of taking them anywhere against their will.

Tags: hms beagle replica, hms beagle
, voyage of the beagle, Charles Darwin, Robert FitzRoy, Tierra del Fuego

Housekeeping notices

the directors are opening a bank account, and once the paperwork is in the Beagle begging bowl goes out: we'll have a paypal donate button on the website and will be starting our corporate fundraising campaign. My ambition is this: that supporters of science all over the world will make small donations to see this icon of evolution built. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln share a birthday (12 February 1809). Both men's portraits grace banknotes: the British £10 and the American $5.

Our first fundraising milestone will be £100,000 to pay our shipwright to approve the plans at Germanischer Lloyds. That's 10,000 Darwins or 40,000 Lincolns.

Reasons to build a Beagle no. 2

New Scientist looks into the lab which is experimentally trying to uphold 'intelligent design' which as we know is creationism in drag. It may be risible and doomed to failure but as a para in the NS article points out, there is value beyond the so-called research:

"Ronald Numbers, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied creationism, views it in a different light. The lab's existence will help sustain support within the anti-evolution community, he says. "It will be good for the troops if leaders in the ID movement can claim: 'We're not just talking theory. We have labs, we have real scientists working on this.'"

All the more reason to build a replica Beagle, use it as the focus of a science mentoring programme and as part of the pro-science, pro-evolution educational movement.

Tags: hms beagle replica, intelligent design, evolution

From where the light don't get...

the blog Deep Sea News. In 1832 Darwin improvised a net and trawled the North Atlantic:

"1832
January 10th
....I proved to day the utility of a contrivance which will afford me many hours of amusement & work. — it is a bag four feet deep, made of bunting, & attached to semicircular bow this by lines is kept upright, & dragged behind the vessel. — this evening it brought up a mass of small animals, & tomorrow I look forward to a greater harvest.

11th
I am quite tired having worked all day at the produce of my net. — The number of animals that the net collects is very great & fully explains the manner so many animals of a large size live so far from land. — Many of these creatures so low in the scale of nature are most exquisite in their forms & rich colours. — It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose."

From Darwin's Beagle Diary at the absolutely magnificent Complete works of Darwin online website.

Pop over and have a trawl of the Deep Sea News blog. They're standing on the shoulders of a real giant.

Tags: hms beagle replica, hms beagle, Charles Darwin

Welcome...

Stacey Klaman, who has agreed to become a Trustee of the Beagle Project. Stacey studied agronomy, biology, and English Literature. She has 18 years of educational publishing experience specializing in social studies and science. She has written for Scholastic and National Geographic School Publishing. Ever since reading The Voyage of
the Beagle, Stacey, an amateur naturalist, has dreamed about reconstructing the Beagle and retracing Darwin’s journey with an all-women crew. A native New Yorker, Stacey now lives in San Diego where she is the Director of Publishing for Sally Ride Science.

Another reason why we need a Beagle:

articles like this. An excellent rebuttal of intelligent design by the Guardian's science correspondent James Randerson. It's not the article (which is good) but it's that Mr. R. feels the need to write at all. It was worth a wider airing to I sent the URL to PZ Myers at Pharygula.

Darwin posted his first copies of On the Origin of Species in 1859, and since then the evidence for evolution has piled up by the year. But still the creationists and their recent, slightly evolved offspring the intelligent designers are trying to argue that these beliefs are worthy of equal airtime in classrooms.

They aren't. Our modern world is created and sustained by applied science. We need to sustain science as a profession. Well, our replica will play a part in that, allowing some young scientists to do some inspirational fieldwork: how about sail a square rigger to Brazil, do some field work there. And those who can't be there hauling ropes will be able join in through an interactive website. And it'll be an icon around which the pro-Darwin, pro-science, pro-evolution movement can coalesce and can USE.

Now get in touch and help us build the damn thing.

Tags: hms beagle, hms beagle replica, intelligent design

We officially exist

...the Beagle Project is now a UK registered limited company no 6025736 with our registered office at The Stableyard, Lawrenny, Pembrokeshire, SA68 0PX. That means we can now start fundraising, and donors can be confident that we can be audited and accountable. Many thanks to our company secretary John Lloyd for his guidance through the paperwork of setting up a company.

The HMS Beagle project Wales is a not-for-profit company, and we will shortly be applying for charitable status. Right now we're preparing for our first meeting of our board of directors, so more after that.

Listen to the words of the great man

...Darwin's Beagle Diary is book of the week on BBC Radio 4. You can get the broadcasts live on 92-95 fm at 0945 or 0030, or click over to the Book of the Week page and listen again for up to 7 days after broadcast. Yes, that's 7 days. Not six and a day of rest.

Lack of posts (n)

where n is a very number tending toward wild annoyance. This time it was a four day internet outage because? Well as far as technical support could tell me because it was windy. Meanwhile, welcome to a new arrival: New Zealander Lloyd Spencer Davis with his book and accompanying blog Looking for Darwin. Do click over and have a look. We shall look forward to having him aboard for some grog and maybe a sail when we land in New Zealand as Darwin did, recalled in Chapter 18 of The Voyage of the Beagle.

Saturday notes...

I spent the day filming myself for Bigwave TV's promotional film about the Beagle Project which is going to convince the BBC to commission an eight part series about us. Now, I spent a morning at their studios having this very thing done, but they decided the 'promo' needed some footage of yr humble svt looking a self-conscious idiot rugged in the great outdoors.

This TV thing isn't as easy as they make it look. First of all my 'cameraman' had eaten some dodgy mussels last night and couldn't leave his bathroom for a morning standing on a gale-blown pier filming my kite against the backdrop of the North Sea. And I doubt David Attenborough suffers overweight day-trippers wandering between the camera and him, eating endangered cod and chips. In an attempt to get out of the wind, I went and sheltered under some cliffs. And had to move sharpish when they started falling down around my ears. Then the battery on the camera ran out, along with my temper.

On a brighter note, we have a letter of support from Andrew Davis, the Welsh Minister for Enterprise, Innovation and Networks, of which more later.

Tags: hms beagle replica, cod