Sexual arms race
The Natural History museum has a fascinating news story about sexual arms races in diving beetles. Apparently, every time male diving beetles evolve better suction cups on their feet to hold on to...
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Parr for the course
Martin Parr is one of my favourite photographers. He's a great capturer of Britishness, and has taken many wonderful photographs in two places very dear to my heart: the Wirral peninsula where I was...
View Article15th June, 1829: Darwin's delight
Starlings have their murmurations, toads their knots, weasels their sneaks. I always felt the collective noun for beetles should be a fondness of beetles, after JBS Haldane's reported response to a...
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Darwin's beetles
The University of Cambridge Zoological Museum has a rather wonderful box of beetle specimens collected by Charles Darwin when he was at the university. The young Darwin had an inordinate fondness for...
View ArticleWow! moment
Having had the good fortune to have been brought up in Britain, I was never short of excellent nature documentaries to watch on television. I must have seen thousands of them over the years. I've lost...
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Sexton bugs and rock 'n' roll
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on, While these...
View ArticleDarwin's Evolution Revolution Song
The Virtual School has created a video to celebrate Darwin Day 2013. This is exactly the sort of thing the internet was invented for: How very appropriate! As everyone knows, Darwin (and God,...
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Newsletter No. 20: ‘All observation must be for or against some view…’
19TH APRIL 2024 Dear Friend of Darwin, Today marks the 142nd anniversary of Charles Darwin’s death. As crappy anniversaries go, it’s certainly up there. But the more I read about Darwin, the more I’m...
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Newsletter No. 21: ‘A large body of facts’
6TH SEPTEMBER 2024 Dear Friend of Darwin, In the months and years immediately following the publication of On the Origin of Species, you can sense Darwin’s frustration at the number of clever people...
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