- Bees under lots of “sub-lethal stresses.” I know how they feel.
- Hadzabe, who have been doing it for thousands of years, to be trained in honey production.
- Chinese farmers to be taught law of diminishing returns.
- “Workers at the Egyptian Desert Gene Bank in Cairo harvest and grow threatened desert species in its laboratory before replanting them to their native soils, hoping to revitalize threatened desert species.”
- Lao National Nutrition Policy puts nutrition at the centre of development.
- Economic botany and architectural fripperies.
- Got milk?
Blogging the big birthday: Chickens of the world
I’d like to think Darwin might have had this poster, or something like it, in mind as he wrote the following words in the Domestication. But then he would have acknowledged it. He was meticulous about that.
As some naturalists may not be familiar with the chief breeds of the fowl, it will be advisable to give a condensed description of them. From what I have read and seen of specimens brought from several quarters of the world, I believe that most of the chief kinds have been imported into England, but many sub-breeds are probably still here unknown. The following discussion on the origin of the various breeds and on their characteristic differences does not pretend to completeness, but may be of some interest to the naturalist. The classification of the breeds cannot, as far as I can see, be made natural. They differ from each other in different degrees, and do not afford characters in subordination to each other, by which they can be ranked in group under group. They seem all to have diverged by independent and different roads from a single type.
The poultry of the world. Portraits of all known valuable breeds of fowl. Fifty-two types of identified chickens. Chromolithograph by L. Prang & Co., Boston, ca. 1868. From the Performing Arts Poster Collection at the U.S. Library of Congress. [PD] This picture is in the public domain. Downloaded from flickr.
Blogging the big birthday: Darwin the seed networker
Sure: “The Voyage of the Beagle,” “The Origin of the Species,” “The Descent of Man.” But also thousands of letters. Darwin corresponded widely, asking for information and opinions, checking facts. He was very scrupulous in giving credit, just look at the footnotes in his books. But actually the flow was not one-way. Yes, Darwin was a phenomenal networker. He would probably have had a blog.
His passion for networking extended to seed. He carried on a correspondence for some years with a Mr James Torbitt, a spirit merchant of Belfast. Torbitt had the idea that potato late blight might be overcome by using true seed. He wrote a treatise explaining how, and sent it to Members of Parliament and prominent landowners. With each pamphlet was a packet of 9,000 potato seeds. And he put an ad in The Times:
EXTINCTION OF POTATO DISEASE, with doubled or trebled crops – Modus operandi – Grow from seed. Exposure of plants to full force of infection. Destruction of those which succumb. Propagation of the by the sett. (In all places some plants will repel the attack of the parasite: in some, all). Seed supplied Address Robertson, Brooman and Co.; 150 Fleet Street, London. Or James Torbitt, Belfast, Ireland.
Torbitt asked Darwin for advice. Was he doing the right thing? Darwin assured him that he was.
Torbitt’s project illustrated in practice the idea of selection, which was a controversial issue among naturalists from the time of the publication of On the origin of species in 1859, and of the advantages of cross-breeding, hence Darwin’s … interest.
He allowed his name to be used in connection with the initiative, and pledged financial support: “between March 1878 and May 1881, through Darwin’s initiative, Torbitt received £410 from Darwin’s friends and relatives.”
Research on true potato seed continues. Darwin would have approved. And maybe even sent some money.
Blogging the big birthday: Darwin’s last hurrah
Jacob van Etten’s contribution to the birthday celebrations…
“Darwin must die,” writes Carl Safina on the occasion of the man’s 200th birthday. Darwin shouldn’t take it personally. Safina means to say that Darwinism stands in the way of fully appreciating the value of modern biology.
“Darwinism†implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. Our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism.
I agree. And there is more.
Darwin’s biographer, Janet Browne, illuminates another aspect of Darwinian science. ((Janet Browne. 2002. Charles Darwin. The Power of Place. pp. 11-12.)) Darwin collected much of his data by writing letters, many letters. He requested information from all kinds of people, fellow naturalists, but also farmers, breeders, civil servants and army officers. Some 14,000 of the letters Darwin wrote or received have been stored in libraries, and many more may have been lost. What Browne describes is something that verges on systematic exploitation.
The flow of information [Darwin] initiated was almost always one-way. Darwin regarded his correspondence primarily as a supply system, designed to answer his own wants. There was no doubt the legitimacy of this one-way arrangement. After all, he occupied an assured place in the intellectual elite, at the heart of an expanding scientific and social meritocracy that in turn lay at the hub of one of the most powerful and systematically organised empires known to history.
Darwin’s 200th birthday is a good occasion not only to do away with Darwin, but also with the whole idea of Big Man science. So, kill Darwin, and Vavilov, too. Make science a collaborative, reciprocal learning effort. Welcome Science 2.0. Each farm is an evolutionary biology lab. Everybody is a scientist.
Blogging the big birthday: Beans and selection
Given that he wrote an entire book on The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Charles Darwin offers us a rich seam to mine. ((Made easier by the existence of Darwin online.)) I was particularly struck by a phrase I thought I heard Professor Steve Jones use in the recent special series of In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, when he referred to Darwin’s garden at Down House as, I think, the Galapagos of Bromley. His point was that Darwin’s experimental work and observations in his garden informed his ideas no less than his journey.
There is a good deal in The Variation … about how plants change in their characteristics, from presumed differences among the maize varieties of New England and Canada to the northward progress by “thirty leagues” of the northern limit to growing maize in Europe, over a period of about 60 years. “[I]n Sweden,” Darwin writes, “tobacco raised from home-grown seed ripens its seed a month sooner and is less liable to miscarry than plants raised from foreign seed.”
These, and many others, are typical of the observations of others that Darwin accumulated and scrupulously credited. But he made his own observations too.
On the same day of the month [24 May], but in the year 1864, there was a severe frost in Kent, and two rows of scarlet-runners (P. multiflorus ((These days Phaseolus coccineus.))) in my garden, containing 390 plants of the same age and equally exposed, were all blackened and killed except about a dozen plants. In an adjoining row of “Fulmer’s dwarf bean” (P. vulgaris), one single plant escaped. A still more severe frost occurred four days afterwards, and of the dozen plants which had previously escaped only three survived; these were not taller or more vigorous than the other young plants, but they escaped completely, with not even the tips of their leaves browned. It was impossible to behold these three plants, with their blackened, withered, and dead brethren all round them, and not see at a glance that they differed widely in constitutional power of resisting frost.
Darwin doesn’t there make the point that the survivors of such a killing frost might give rise to more frost-hardy offspring in due course. And I have not been able to discover whether he asked his gardeners to save seeds from those that had survived. I like to think he did. In The Origin (p 142) he very clearly anticipated such an experiment:
[U]ntil some one will sow, during a score of generations, his kidney-beans so early that a very large proportion are destroyed by frost, and then collect seed from the few survivors, with care to prevent accidental crosses, and then again get seed from these seedlings, with the same precautions, the experiment cannot be said to have been even tried. Nor let it be supposed that no differences in the constitution of seedling kidney-beans ever appear, for an account has been published how much more hardy some seedlings appeared to be than others.
This last may be a reference to a sharp frost on the night of May 24th, 1836, near Salisbury, when “all the French beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) in a bed were killed except about one in thirty”.
There is much, much more in The Variation … to amuse and instruct anyone with an interest in agricultural biodiversity. What I find odd is that despite the prevalence of seed saving in mid-Victorian England, Darwin was not able to prove to his own satisfaction that the beans of his own era were in fact hardier than those of previous times. Today’s scientifically informed seed savers ought to find it easy. Have they?