Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

02/07/2015

Estimates of the number of different species vary from six million to 100
million.
Nearly 200 different kinds of monkeys, for example and 315 hummingbirds
Nearly a thousand bats and beetles at least 350,000 species of them.
A quarter of a million different kinds of flowering plants.
English woodland, you might see four or five different kinds of finches.
200 years ago, a man was born who was to explain this astonishing diversity
of life. In doing so he revolutionized the way in which we see the world and
our place in it. His name was Charles Darwin.
This book, the Holy Bible, explains how this wonderful diversity came
about.
On the third day after the creation of the world, God created plants. On the
fifth day, fish and birds, and then on the sixth day, mammals, and finally
man. That explanation was believed, literally by pretty well the whole of
Western Europe for the best part of 2,000 years, and generations of painters
pictured it for the faithful.
This view of mankinds superiority still stood when, in 1831, a British
surveying ship, the Beagle, set off on a voyage around the world.
On board, as a companion to the captain, was the 22-year-old Charles
Darwin. They crossed the Atlantic and made landfall on the coast of Brazil.
There the sheer abundance of the tropical nature astonishes the newcomer,
as I discovered when I retracted Darwins steps 30 years ago.

Darwin, as a boy, had been a fanatical collector of insects and here he was
enthralled, almost to the point to the point of ecstasy.
In one day, a small area, he discovered 69 different species of beetle.
As he wrote in his journal, Its enough to disturb the composure of the
entomogists mind to contemplate the future dimension of a complete
catalogue.
They went south, rounded Cape Horn and so reached the Pacific.
And then, in September 1835, after they had been away for almost four
years, they landed on the little-known islands of the Galapagos. Here they
found creatures that existed nowhere else in the world.
Cormorants, that had lost the power of flight. Lizards that swam out through
the surf to graze on the bottom of the sea.
Darwin, who had studied botany and geology at Cambridge University,
collected specimen of the animals and plants, and as usual, when he went
ashore to investigate, described what he found in his journal.
My servant and self were landed a few miles to the northeast, in order that
I might examine the district mentioned above.
as resembling chimneys. Volcanic chimneys, presumably.
The comparison would have been more exact if I had said, the iron
furnaces near Wolverhampton.
The British resident in the Galapagos claimed that he knew from the shape
of a giant tortoises shell, which island it had come from. It came from a
well-watered island, where it fed on lush ground plants.

If it had a rounded front, it came from a well-watered island, where it fed on

lush ground plants.
Whereas one from a drier island had a peak at the front, which enabled it to
reach up to higher vegetation.
Were these tortoises, each on their separate islands, different species? And if
so, was each one a separate act of divine creation?
The differences that Darwin had noticed amongst these Galapagos animals
were, of course, all tiny, but if they develop, wasnt it possible that over the
thousands or millions of years a whole series of such differences might add
up to one revolutionary change?
On his voyage home, Darwin had time to ponder on these things. Could it be
that species were not fixed for all time, but could, in fact, slowly change?
On his return, he sorted out his specimens and sent them off to relevant
experts so that each could be identified and classified.
Most of the mammal bones and fossils he sent to Richard Owen. Owen, was
one of the most brilliant zoologist of his times. He was the first to recognize
the dinosaurs, and indeed had invented their name, and he would later
become the cretor and firdt director of the Natural History Museum in
London.
Many of the specimens that Darwin collected are still preserved and
treasured here among the 70 million other specimens housed in the museum
that Owen founded. Its obviously the lower jaw of some great animal , and
when Darwin discovered it, it had bits of skin and hair attached to it, so that
at first it was thought to be remains of some unknown living species. But
now we know that it is a species that was extinct for some 10,000 years, a
giant ground sloth. Owen examined it in great detail and eventually
described it and gave it the name of Mylodon darwinii, in honor of its
discoverer. But the mutual respect between two great men of science was
not to last.
Soon after his return from his voyage, Darwin made his home here, in Down
House, in Kent. Here he wrote an account of his travels and worked on
detailed scientific treatises about corals and barnacles and the geology and
fossils of South America. But he also pondered deeply on what he had seen
in the Galapagos and elsewhere. Maybe species were not fixed.

Everyday, he took a walk in this small spinney that he had planted at the
end of his garden. And it was here that he came to pondr on the problems of
natural history, including that mystery of mysteries how could one species
turn into another. He noted that most, if not all, animals produce many more
young than live to breed themselves. This female blue tit, for example, may
well lay a dozen eggs a year perhaps 50 or so in her lifetime. Yet only two of
her chicks need to survive and breed themselves to maintain the numbers of
the blue tit population. Those survivors, of course, are likely to be the
healthiest and best suited to their particular environment. Their
characteristics are then inherited. So perhaps, over many generations, and
particularly if there are environmental changes, species may well change.
Only the fittest survive, and that was the key. He called the process natural
selection.
That would explain the differences that he had noted in the finches that he
had brought back from the Galapagos. They were very similar, except for
their beaks. This one has a very thin, delicate beak which it uses to catch
insects. Bird which came from an environment where there were a lot of
nuts, has a big heavy beak which enables it to crack them. Over the
vastness of geological time, and particularly if species were invading new
environments, those changes would amount to very radical changes indeed.
Darwin drew a sketch in one of his notebooks to illustrate his idea, showing
how single ancestral species might give rise to several different ones, and
then wrote above it a tentative I Think.
Now he had to prove his theory, and he spent years gathering abundant and
convincing evidence. He was an extraordinary letter writer. He wrote as
many as a dozen letters a day to scientists and naturalists all over the world.
He also realized, that when people had first started domesticating animals,
they had been doing experiments for him- for centuries. All domestic dogas
are descended from a single ancestral species the wolf.
Dog breeders select those pups that have the characteristics that happen top
please them.
Nature, of course, selects those young animals that are best suited to a
particular environment, but the process is essentially the same, and in both
cases it has produced astonishing variety.

In effect, many of these different breeds could be considered different

species because they do not, indeed they cannot, inter-breed. For purely
mechanical reasons, theres no way in which a Pekingese can mate with a
Great Dane.
Of course, its true that if used artificial insemination, could get crosses
beteween almost any of hese breeds, but thats because human beings have
been selecting between dogs for only a few centuries.
Nature has been selecting between animals for millions of years-tens of
millions, even hundreds of millions of years, so what might have started out
as we would consider to be breeds have now become so different they are
species.
Darwin, sitting in Down House, wrote to pigeon fanciers and rabbit breeders,
asking all kinds of detailed questions about their methods and results. He
himself, being a country gentleman and running an estate, knew about
breeding horses and sheep and cattle. And he also conducted careful
experiments with plants in his greenhouse.
But Darwin knew that the idea that species could appear without divine
intervention would appal society in general, and it was also contrary to the
beliefs of his wife, Emma, who was a devout Christian.
Perhaps for that reason, he was keen to keep the focus of his work scientific.
He made a point of not being drawn in public about his religious beliefs, but
in the latter part of his life, he withdrew from attending church.
On Sundays, he would escort Emma and the children here to the parish
church in Down, but while they went into the service, he remained outside
and went for a walk in the country lanes.
Perhaps because he feared that his theory would cause outrage in some
quarters, he delayed publishing it years after year. But he wrote a long
abstract of it, and then on July 5th 1844, he wrote this letter to his wife.
My dear Emma,
I have just finished this sketch of my species theory..
Written in case of sudden death, that you will devote to its
publication
He then goes on the list his various naturalist friends who would be asked to
edit it and check it, and he ends the letter charmingly, CR Darwin

He continued to accumulate evidence and refine his refine his theory for the
next 14 years.
In June 1858,22 years after he got back from the Galapagos, here in his
study in Down, he received a package from a naturalist who was working in
what is now Indonesia.
His name was Alfred Russell Wallace. He had been corresponding with
Darwin for some years.
It contained an essay that set out exactly the same idea as Darwins of
evolution by natural selection.
The idea had come to Wallace as he lay in his hut, semi-delirious in a
malarial fever.
But although his idea of natural selection was the same as Darwins, he had
not spent 20 years gathering the mountain of evidence to support it, as
Darwin had done.
The senior members of the Linnean Society decided that the fairest thing
was for a brief outline of the theory from each of them to be read out, one
after the other, at a meeting of the society, here I Burlington House in
London.
The Linnean, then as now, was the place where scientists studying the
natural world held regular meetings to present and discuss papers about
their observations an thoughts.
The one held on July 1st 1858 was attended by only about 30 people.
Neither of the author were present. Wallace was 10,000 miles away in the
East Indies, and Darwin was ill and devastated by the death a few days
earlier of his infant son, so he was still at his home in Kent.
Darwin spent the next year writing out his theory in detail. Then he spent
the manuscript to his publisher, John Murray, whose firm then as now had
offices in Albermarle Street, just off Piccadilly in London.
Murray was the great publisher of his day and dealt with the works of Jane
Austen and Lord Byron, whose first editions still line these office walls.
Darwin regarded his work as simply a summary, 400 pages. It was published
on November 24th 1859.

1st edition of 1,250 copies sold out immediately, for a reprint.

What scandalized people most, it seems, was the implication that human
beings were not specially created by God, as the book of Genesis stated, but
were descended from ape like ancestors a notion that provided a lot of scope
for cartoonists.
The leaders of the Church, headed by the Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of
Oxford, attacked it on the grounds that it demoted God and contradicted the
story of Creation as told by the Bible. That Mr. Darwin should have
wandered from this broad highway of natures works into the jungle of
fanciful assumption is no small evil.
I have read your book with more pain than pleasure..
It is the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas.
fails, utterly
Darwins theory implied that life had originated in simple forms, and had
then become more and more complex. He knew perfectly well that the whole
idea of evolution raised a lot of questions. But in his own time, many
distinguished scientists raised what seemed to be insuperable difficulties.
And foremost among them was Richard Owen, the man who 20 years earlier
had named the extinct ground sloth in honor of Darwin.
Over the years, the two men had developed a deep personal dislike of one
another and had quarreled frequently.
Owen was a deeply religious man. He had, after all, ensured that his
museum, which could display the wonders of creation, echoed in its design
the great Christian cathedrals of medieval Europe. And Owen knew about the
diversity of life. Indeed he had spent his whole career cataloguing it. He
refused to believe that a species could change over time.
He and other pioneer Victorian geologists, as they established their
comparatively new science, recognized that the outlines of the history of life
could be deduced by examining the land around them.
Rocks in northern Scotland. We know that from fossils that are associated
with them that they are very ancient. And they are sand stones. Compacted
sand that was laid down at the bottom of the sea, layer upon layer.

So a fossil species, if it comes from a particular layer, is of particular age.

And if you can recognize each one, then you can begin to piece together this
outline of lifes history.
Micraster, the ability to identify fossils and place them in their geological time
zone was still essential skill when I was at university a century later.
Owen did not deny the sequence in which all these different species
appeared. But he believed that each was separate, each divinely created.
Darwins theory, however, required that there should be connections not just
between similar species, but between the great animal groups.
If fishes and reptiles and birds and mammals had all evolved from one
another, then surely there must be intermediate forms between those great
groups.
And then, just two years after the publication of The Origin of Species,
Richard Owen himself purchased the most astonishing fossil for his museum.
It had been found in this limestone quarry in Bavaria. The stone here splits
into flat, smooth leaves that have been used as roofing tiles since Roman
times. When you split them sometimes blank and sometimes they reveal a
shrimp or a fish.
It is still one of the greatest of the treasures that are stored in the Natural
History Museum. And this is called the archaeopteryx. It ahs unmistakable
feathers on its wings and down its tail. So Owen had no hesitation in calling
it a bird. But it was unlike any other bird that anyone knew of, because it
had claws on the front of its wings, and as was later discovered, it didnt
have a beak, but jaws with teeth in it. And a line of bones supporting its tail.
So it was part reptile, part bird. It was a very poor flyer.
The hoatzin nests in the swamps of tropical South America. There are
cayman in the water beneath, ready to snap up any chick that might fall
from its nest, so an ability to hold on tight is very valuable. And the nestlings
have a very interesting way of doing that.
The young still have claws on the front of their wings, as archaeopteryx did.
Creature alive today that represents a link between the great animal groups,
a descendant of a group of reptiles that took a different evolutionary course
and evolved not feathers, but fur the platypus.

When specimens of this creature first reached Europe from Australia at the
very end of 18th century, people refused to believe their eyes.
The platypus is the most extraordinary mixture of different animals. Its part
mammal and part reptile. And so it can give us some idea of how the first
mammals developed. In its nest deep in a burrow, It lays eggs. Platypus as
the most primitive living mammal.
The earliest known fossils in Darwins time came from a formation called the
Cambrian, and there were two main kinds these which look like fretsaw
blades and are called graptolite, and these, like giant woodlice, which are
called trilobites.
Oldest rocks in the world, older even than the Cambrian.
1957, a school boy found something remarkable the remains of a living
creature. Charnia, impression of a living organism. It has a central stem, and
branches on either side. Something like seapens.
The Victorian geologists had already concluded that the earth must be
millions of years old.
A polish woman working in paris, Marie Curie, discovered some rocks
contained an element called uranium that decays overtime at a steady rate
through a process called radiation. A century after she made her
extraordinary discovery, the method of dating by measuring changes in
radioactivity has become greatly refined.
Frogs one was that they might have floated across accidentally on rafts of
vegetation,