Classroom@sea

Here's what they say about themselves: Classroom@Sea aims to bring real marine science into the classroom. To help us do this, we recruit teachers to work alongside a scientific team on a UK research ship and report back to the Classroom@Sea website. This means that you get to see exactly how we do our science, through the eyes of people who know exactly how to explain it to you...no mad professor science talk! And because the website is updated daily during the cruises, you get to see how the science unfolds as it happens. But there's more...to help you understand and find out more about the science on board the ship, there's a wealth of background information on the website, covering all sorts of marine science topics.

Their research vessel James Cook is currently exploring the geology of the mid Atlantic ridge using sonar and drilling. Their website is excellent.

Darwin: busy bee, not scaredy cat.

Charles Darwin first outlined his theory of natural selection in 1842, but didn't announce it until 1858. Until recently it was believed that Darwin was scared of being marmalised by his peers in Victorian Britain so heretical was his thinking. Not so, says Dr John van Wyhe, the genius behind the Darwin Online project at Cambridge. Dr van Wyhe says that Darwin was too busy (BBC report) with other things to get round to completing and publishing his theory. Guardian story about it is here.

Credits: The Darwin puppet was courtesy of science blogger Miss Prism, and was won in her bring and blog auction in aid of Beagle Project funds by an humble woodcutter.

Intelligent design: it's not even wrong.

First, a confession. I lifted this zinger of a title from a refreshingly mindful statement by a US Representative (that'd be Rush Holt of the 12th Congressional district of New Jersey), and also from Peter Woit's excellent physics blog Not Even Wrong.

Plagiaristic tendencies aside, the title does get right to the point. For while it may be true that intelligent design isn't right, more catastrophically for its pretensions as a scientific alternative to evolution, intelligent design is not even wrong. After all, science is about 1) standing on the shoulders of giants and using their foundational theories to make predictions about the outcomes of future experiments, then 2) doing the experiments, and then 3) forcing the scientific community to eat a big fat slice of humble pie if your results suggest the theories were wrong. What happens next usually involves the front cover of Science or Nature.

In short, valid scientific theories are falsifiable (spectacularly so) and intelligent design is not.

So why all this flurry about intelligent design on the Beagle Project blog? Well, it turns out that Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus might be coming to a big screen near you, all proceeds to the Beagle Project. And how appropriate, too, since the Beagle will be a vehicle for science outreach, the improvement of which is what this film is all about. All we need is a venue. Any suggestions? Better yet, any offers?

More blogrolling.

Thanks Greg Laden, who is sound on many matters other than his support for the Beagle Project: his blog's strapline: "Evolution, not just a 'theory' anymore." Greg's blog is a model of lucid science writing, and his most recent post is a real thought-provoker. If you think sea level change is always a gradual process, think again. Constructing a Beagle Project blogroll is one of the first jobs when my clone gets out of the tank.

Following in Darwin's footsteps...

three scientists chart an island's flora. Bill Cary from Lower Hudson Online reports:Combining a mix of old-fashioned plant collection techniques from the days of Charles Darwin with state-of-the-art Web technology, three scientists from the Lower Hudson Valley have just returned from a 10-day trip to the Caribbean that allowed them to map out the complete flora of the island of Saba. They collected about 1,000 specimens, including mosses and lichens, on the 5-square-mile island in the Netherlands Antilles and created a Web site with photos and descriptions of each plant. It's the first such comprehensive plant catalog for a Caribbean island. Read the full piece here.

Exactly the kind of thing we aim to do with Beagle.

We're a cool website

according to aboutdarwin.com. Go pay him a visit.

Hold up an apple for evolution (the fruit, not the computer)

Although an Apple Mac would be appropriate: after all, Darwin did think different. This is a pretty cool project. Spread the word and inundate him with apple pics.

Whale on the nose.

Slightly off topic, but worth an airing. A five million year old fossil whale skeleton has been found in a vineyard in Tuscany, Italy. Now that was a phrase that didn't feature in my Linguaphone Italian course: 'Excuse me sir, there is a whale in my vineyard'.

Of course there is a Darwin link: in The Origin of Species Darwin wrote: In North American the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with a widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist on the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.

This became something of a gift for quote-mining opponents of evolution (where are the intermediate fossil forms?), but a stirring defence came from the late Stephen Jay Gould in Hooking Leviathan by its past (from his book Dinosaur in a Haystack), an essay which traces the fossil lineage of whales. It's a wonderful story of palaeontology across years and continents and at the end Gould declares the case for the quadruped ancestry of whales 'open and shut' and the verdict 'sustained in spades, wine and roses'. So, find a bottle of Tuscan red, pop the cork and while savouring the bouquet wonder if there's a little fossil whale on the nose. The vineyard was at Castello Banfi, check out their website here, but be prepared for a pic of an Italian hilltop castle that will make you gnash your teeth and possibly rend your garments with envy at the beauty of it all. The vineyard's press release about the whale is here.

Beagle Project in the media...

BBC Radio 4 has commissioned a series about us. Check out their other (usually excellent) science programmes here. And if you're new to the Beagleblog, we've had plenty of other media here, but it's nothing compared to the coverage we will get when we launch the replica and when she sails into the Galapagos archipelago.

And while I'm in a ranting humour..

What about the original Beagle? HMS Beagle, the ship that singleboatedly changed intellectual history almost certainly lies under five metres of mud, mud, glorious mud in the River Crouch near Paglesham in the English County (and once Kingdom) of Essex.

Shouldn't a proud, self confident, scientifically advanced, fourth largest economy in the world country (Britain) be thinking about excavating and raising this icon of adventure, courage and above all scientific progress to mark Darwin's 200th? So in that spirit, and to the tune of What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor:

A min
What shall we do with the sunken Beagle?
G
What shall we do with the sunken Beagle?
Amin
What shall we do with the sunken Beagle?
Dig the bloody thing up!

Amin
Shift mud and up she rises
G
Shift mud and up she rises
Amin
Shift mud and up she rises
Raised on Darwin's birthday.

Arrrrr. Feel free to contribute new verses in comments. We'll have a fundraising MP3 on iTunes yet.

And it'd get so far up creationist noses, because have they found the Ark? No, no, I don't think so Tim, oh really? and finally an island of sanity at Talk Origins' Ark debunking page.

Recent developments...

•the big potential funder has asked us to put together an education and public outreach programme around the Beagle build and launch
• two TV companies came a courting recently, and we hear that the British Broadcasting Corporation is not utterly deaf to the idea that a build and launch (to say nothing of our recreation of Darwin's voyage, a mere bagatelle, that) of a replica of the Beagle during Darwin's bicentenary might be an exciting televisual event. Lest we forget: one of the most most significant ships in modern history (which happened to the British) which happened to carry the most significant biologist of natural times (which happened to the British) who happened to then propose one of the most important scientific theories of modern times (I know a theory can't be British, but it was fomented, written, announced and published here, in Britain). And then we sail her round the world, crewed by young people. Across the Atlantic oceans, around Cape Horn, across the Pacific, to Australia, to Africa and back up those Atlantics. And sorry, the young crew won't be nicking cars, dancing on ice or trying to be next boy or girl band, they'll be going aloft in storms to shorten sail, helming through phosphorescent seas under moonless, starlit skies, making the same landfalls as Darwin and looking at how climate, society and biodiversity has changed since Darwin's time, carrying our original experiments, making real scientific breakthroughs. If you can't find some broadcasting excitement in that well go and (add invective in comments, which are moderated).
• We have interviewed a very high-protein young lady to provide administrative support. Which is a good thing.

Welcome...

to another relative of the original Beagle crew. Patrick Musters has contacted us after reading about his relative Charles Musters on the Friends of Charles Darwin Red Notebook weblog.

Charles Musters sadly did not survive the voyage, about which FitzRoy wrote: 'The boy Jones and Mr. Musters were taken ill, soon afterwards, in a similar manner; but no serious consequences were then apprehended, and it was thought that a change of air would restore them to health. Vain idea! they gradually became worse; the boy died the day after our arrival in Bahia; and, on the 19th of May, my poor little friend Charles Musters, who had been entrusted by his father to my care, and was a favourite with every one, ended his short career.'

Our present day Mr Musters lives in Essex, co-incidentally where the remains of Beagle are thought to lie under five metres of finest River Crouch mud. We very much hope Mr Musters will be in Wales to see her replica launched in 2009.

Thank you

Sciencepundit for the post and putting the support The Beagle widget on his site. Go give him some bloggy love.

Apologies for the radio silence..

been travelling to Wales to meet with two TV production companies very interested in making Beagle build and voyage programmes: one in particular has a very good pedigree in natural history film making. 9 hours and 400 miles on a train with coffee that tasted like creosote. Bad creosote. Report back on TV meetings later.

Galapagos in high definition

If you are in the USA, don't miss "Galapagos" on The National Geographic Channel, March 18th. Watching the trailer gave me goosebumps.

Science in school issue 4 is out.

Check out the website here. In their own words:

Science in School is a European journal to promote inspiring science teaching. It covers not only biology, physics and chemistry, but also maths and earth sciences, highlighting the best in teaching and cutting-edge research, and focusing on interdisciplinary work. The contents include teaching materials, recent discoveries in science, education projects, interviews with young scientists and inspiring teachers, book reviews, and European events for teachers.

Science in School is freely available. Online articles are published in many European languages and a print version is distributed in English.

Teachers are invited to help by:
· Submitting articles for publication
· Joining the reviewer panel and helping to decide which articles to publish
· Translating articles into their own language

I've read it, and it's a fantastic resource. I just wish my science teachers had access to something like it, rather than tossing Wigglesworth on Insects across the desk and leaving us to learn it before going to the prep room to abuse the ether.

Get the widget

Thanks to Adam Turinas of the sailing blog Messing about in sailboats for designing this blog/website Beagle support widget.

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If you'd like to support us by putting it on your blog or site the code is here.

For your diary

The Royal Society in London is hosting a lecture 'Whose Darwin is the real Darwin?' Friday 30 March 1pm. Details here.

This week in Westminster

A faint but unmistakable rumble was heard in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey at about 2am on Friday night. Passers-by stumbling home from the bars were flummoxed, and those who didn’t have the misfortune of picking up a copy of the Financial Times the next morning remained blissfully so.

For the sad few who happened to read the balderdash passing for a regular column in FT Magazine on Saturday, though, the reason for the seismic shiver the night before became painfully and immediately obvious: at the precise moment the column was published, Charles Darwin rolled in his grave.

Though the columnist, “Mrs Moneypenny”, begins by claiming a more than a superficial interest in Darwin, she then proceeds to contradict that statement throughout the rest of her column. "I fully subscribe to Darwin's theory of natural selection” she proclaims, and then goes on to write errantly and at length on “survival of the fittest”, something that for her involves regular sessions the South Moreton Boxing Club.

"I am getting fitter,” she proclaims, “so I should survive." Actually, if what Mrs Moneypenny is interested in is Darwinian fitness, perhaps she should spend less time at the gym and more time with Mr Moneypenny.

Then, astonishingly, it gets worse. "I am not sure why we need lists of endangered species” she complains. “If species are not fit enough to survive, then surely they should be allowed to become extinct? The Red List…has evaluated 87 varieties of parakeet…what is the point of a parakeet?" For Mrs Moneypenny's sake, I sincerely hope that the cure for incurable cynicism is not found in the poo of a rare parakeet species.

Quips aside, Moneypenny’s question raises an important point. After all, she is not alone in wondering why the variety (rather than just the sheer number) of organisms is important. In case you are wondering yourself, there are loads of resources on the services biodiversity performs for you, but the main thing to remember is that all living things, including us, rely entirely on the existence of complex (and therefore robust) natural ecosystems. Yet another message that the Beagle will take to the masses.

Mrs Darwin's diaries.

Darwin Online goes from strength to impressive strength, most recently with the publication of the diaries of Mrs Emma Darwin.

BBC online report here, and there was a discussion on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme* featuring Randal Keynes, Charles Darwin's Darwin's great great grandson and Dr John van Wyhe founder of the Darwin Online project. If someone does not honour Dr van Wyhe and his team for this incredible contribution to science and history (and do it soon), something is wrong in the state of Britain.

You can hear the interview using the BBC's 'listen again' feature on the Today website, the interview was after 8.30 pm. Maybe Today can be prevailed upon to post it as a discrete audio clip. I feel an email coming on.

That picture (2)

Dr Gordon Chancellor is an associate editor at the (said it before but will say it again) utterly brilliant Darwin Online site. More information on the Dr Gordon Chancellor pages here, where you'll see another painting of HMS Beagle engaged in what sailors call 'survival sailing' in a storm off Cape Horn. The painting is titled 'sorely tried'. For more information on John Chancellor's maritime paintings visit johnchancellor.co.uk.

Morning media monitoring

we're in the AAAS magazine Science, and the latest country to join the Beagle TV party: Germany. The way things are going the only country not commissioning TV programmes about the replica will be the land of Darwin's birth, education, whose Royal Navy took him round the world, whose scientific reputation burgeoned because of him, the shores of which he never left after his return from the beagle voyage and at the end of his life buried in him in the nation's cathedral Westminster Abbey (albeit against the poor chap's wishes, he wished to be buried in his local Parish churchyard in Downe, Kent.

And breathe. Sorry that's a long sentence, but I'm sure you get my meaning.

Beagle blogging...

hello to our new beagleblogger nunatak. Reading her first contribution, she's set a high bar for future contributions. More, please. Elsewhere the Llamabutchers blog hails the project as cool. AOB: if anyone wants 45 minutes of finest kind, accesible scientific broadcasting you should click over to the BBC website and listen to today's In Our Time. Subject: Microbiology - the story of the invisible masters of the universe. The contributor were: John Dupré, Professor of Philosophy of Science and Director of Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, at Exeter University, Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Advisor for Scotland and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at Aberdeen University, Andrew Mendelsohn, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College, University of London.

Louis Pasteur, I learned, was asked by Napoleon Bonaparte to investigate why wine carried by the French Navy was spoiling. This was having serious consequences for La Republique because its sailors, unable to have wine, mutinied. Pasteur examined the wine, and tried heating it until the mal-microbes were mort. Et voila. Pasteurisation. Half of our precious human DNA? Probably spliced in by viruses over the millenia. Percentage of the microbial world of which we are utterly ignorant? 99. The last 15 minutes deal with microbes and their implications for evolutionary biology. It's really, really worth a listen.

'I am afraid the ship's on fire', or why this isn't The Helen Project.

During his voyages abroad in the 19th century, a young, well-educated Englishman observed a world full of astonishing biological diversity. He developed an insatiable need to make sense of it all, so he kept meticulous records and stockpiled his specimens for further study back home. He drew inspiration from Charles Lyell, Alexander von Humboldt and Thomas Malthus. The combination of these experiences sparked his conception of natural selection as a mechanism for evolution.

His name was Alfred Russel Wallace and his ship was the brig Helen.

In 1848 at the age of 25, the year of this photograph, Wallace set out across the seas to do some naturalizing (as one did). After four years in the Amazon basin, he boarded the Helen with his specimens, and after three weeks at sea, the captain approached Wallace and calmly announced, 'I am afraid the ship's on fire. Come and see what you think of it.'

Though Wallace and the crew were rescued, Wallace's specimens were lost. Not to be put off, he trotted off on a second voyage, this time to the Malay Archipelago. It was here that he established himself as the "grandfather of biogeography" when he published his observations on the geographical line, later called the "Wallace Line" in his honor, that divides the fauna of Asia and Australasia. He also began to pull together a theory that explained the origin of the variety of species that he so energetically collected and recorded.

In the meantime, back in England, one Charles Darwin was sitting on the same theory, which he had hit on twenty years earlier but was keeping secret until he could amass the overwhelming amount of evidence he thought necessary to go public with such a blasphemous theory. When he received a letter from Wallace seeking his advice on publishing his (nearly identical) ideas on evolution, Darwin was spurred into action. In an admirable instance of scientific collegiality, Darwin and Wallace shared the limelight: their joint paper was presented at the Linnaean Society in the summer of 1858.

The paper was met with resounding silence. The president of the society wrote in his annual report that the year had not been marked by any discoveries which "revolutionize science". All of this changed in late 1859 when Darwin lit a public firestorm by publishing his eminently readable (if not readably titled) book On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. Wallace, on the other hand, shrank into relative obscurity, partly the result of his far-from-scientific dabblings in spiritualism which earned the disdain of "serious" scientists.

In other words, if it hadn't been for Darwin's stellar ability to communicate science to the masses, Wallace's penchant for for the supernatural, and a flaming shipwreck off the coast of Brazil, this might have been The Helen Project.

For more on Alfred Russel Wallace, visit the new Wallace Collection website at the Natural History Museum in London and learn a bit more about the man who might have been Darwin.

Darwin's transmutationism: 170 this month!

Richard Carter emails to point out that 170 years ago this month Darwin first broached the heretical idea that species might not be fixed. No point in me blathering on, Richard's done a boss write-up: Darwin's first tentative step: 170 years on, so click on over and have a read.

If only Darwin had taken...

Bile Beans! It's off topic, but some capricious morning winds blew this old advert into my front garden, and it's just too good not to share. Darwin was not a well man for much of his adult life: while writing The Origin of Species he was sometimes so ill that he barely managed an hour of work a day. Diagnoses vary (Chagas, Menieres disease and lactose intolerance among them) but it seems that there is nothing Bile Beans could not cure, including Fulness After Meals, Water Brash, Offensive Breath, Influenza and its After Effects (are you reading World Health Organization?), Spasms, Pimples, Biliousness, Impure Blood, Skin Eruptions, Female Weaknesses, Prostration, Constipation - just some of the ailments fettled by Bile Beans. This panacea for just one shilling one pence ha'penny, although the Wise Invalid would buy the two shillings and ninepence tin, which contained three times the amount. The advert was printed in Otley, just along Wharfedale from Ilkley, Yorkshire, where a shattered Charles Darwin retreated in 1859 to escape the furore in London caused by The Origin of Species, and from where he posted the first copies of The Origin. Not having Bile Beans to put him right, Darwin took daily rides up a track to a bath house on the flanks of Rumbold's Moor where he took 'hydropathic' treatment: cold baths.

The Friends of Charles Darwin

now has 914 members. Come on: we want 1,000 members, just 86 to go. Click yourselves over there and sign up.

London:

can't give away too much detail yet, but we had a very productive meeting with a big potential funder. They grasped the potential impact that a Beagle build and launch will have on the 2009 celebrations, and especially its value to science education and public outreach. Their ideas and ambition match ours almost perfectly. As soon as we can be more specific, we'll let you know.

John Chancellor: that picture.

You can keep your enigmatic smile, Mona Lisa. For me, this is one of the great pictures, which makes us all the more delighted that Gordon Chancellor and his mother Rita have given The Beagle Project permission to use 'The Beagle off the Galapagos' to help us build the replica. For the details of John's life, his love of the sea and fascination with ships under sail click over to the Davidson Fine Art website about him here.

I'm also a sailor and what strikes me every time I see that picture and the close-ups his son Gordon sent us was how beautifully he caught the sea in motion, the wind filled the sails and the postures of working men on a moving boat. I've seen and miserably failed to even photograph them all: John Chancellor painted them, freezing a moment in time with a beauty and imagined accuracy far better than any picture could have managed.

The Beagle off the Galapagos is a great moment: Charles Darwin was ashore coming to the end of a nine day collecting expedition, Commander FitzRoy was preparing to send a boat away to recover 'Philos' as FitzRoy called Darwin. You can see men up the mainmast reefing the maintopsail, and at the stern some of the crew are preparing to launch one of the ship's boats. On this return to the ship, Darwin's specimen bags would have contained finches which would later light the fuse for his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Speaking of originals, I spent today in the British Library reading 1839 originals of FitzRoy's account of the voyage of the Beagle. He is sometimes overshadowed in the Darwin/Voyage of the Beagle tale, but reading his journals, it is clear that he was a great seaman and in his own way no mean geologist and natural historian. However, what is clear from reading his writings at first hand and in first edition is that he was a great pioneering meteorologist and a superb commander of HMS Beagle: there is much good to be told about Robert FitzRoy in 2009, too.