Evolution (Biology) -- History. |
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 |
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 -- Knowledge and learning. |
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 -- Childhood and youth. |
Daerwen, 1809-1882 |
Darvin, Čarls, 1809-1882 |
Darvin, Charlʼz, 1809-1882 |
Darvin, Tsharlz, 1809-1882 |
Darwin, Carlos R., 1809-1882 |
Darwin, Charles Robert, 1809-1882 |
Darwin, Karol, 1809-1882 |
Dāwin, 1809-1882 |
Sdar-win, 1809-1882 |
Sdar-win, Char-le-si Ro-sbe-thi, 1809-1882 |
Ṭārvin̲, 1809-1882 |
Ṭārvin̲, Cārlas, 1809-1882 |
דארווין, צארלס, 1809-1882 |
דארווין, טשארלז, 1809-1882 |
דרוין, טשרלס, 1809-1882 |
داروين، چارلز، 1809-1882 |
達爾文, 1809-1882 |
Animal evolution |
Animals -- Evolution |
Biological evolution |
Darwinism |
Evolutionary biology |
Evolutionary science |
Origin of species |
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Summary
Summary
James T. Costa takes readers on a journey from Darwin's childhood through his voyage on the HMS Beagle where his ideas on evolution began. We then follow Darwin to Down House, his bustling home of forty years, where he kept porcupine quills at his desk to dissect barnacles, maintained a flock of sixteen pigeon breeds in the dovecote, and cultivated climbing plants in the study, and to Bournemouth, where on one memorable family vacation he fed carnivorous plants in the soup dishes.
Using his garden and greenhouse, the surrounding meadows and woodlands, and even taking over the cellar, study, and hallways of his home-turned-field-station, Darwin tested ideas of his landmark theory of evolution with an astonishing array of hands-on experiments that could be done on the fly, without specialized equipment.
He engaged naturalists, friends, neighbors, family servants, and even his children, nieces, nephews, and cousins as assistants in these experiments, which involved everything from chasing bees and tempting fish to eat seeds to serenading earthworms. From the experiments' results, he plumbed the laws of nature and evidence for the revolutionary arguments of On the Origin of Species and his other watershed works.
Beyond Darwin at work, we accompany him against the backdrop of his enduring marriage, chronic illness, grief at the loss of three children, and joy in scientific revelation. This unique glimpse of Darwin's life introduces us to an enthusiastic correspondent, crowd-sourcer, family man, and, most of all, an incorrigible observer and experimenter.
Includes directions for eighteen hands-on experiments, for home, school, yard, or garden.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Charles Darwin is best known as a great theorizer of ideas on the origin of species, human evolution, and a wealth of other topics that have stood the test of time, but Costa (Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species), professor of biology at Western Carolina University, demonstrates that he was an equally remarkable experimentalist. Costa combs through Darwin's notebooks and letters as well as biographies of him to present an impressive array of experiments that Darwin conducted (each chapter concludes with experiment instructions for readers). According to Costa, whether Darwin was working to elucidate the phylogeny and reproductive biology of barnacles, the construction of beehives, the nature of plant pollination, or the biology of earthworms, his "mind was always churning, turning out remarkable insights from the grist of simple observations." In every case, Darwin was collecting data to support his broad evolutionary ideas and to "solidify [his] evolutionary vision of a truly universal Tree of Life." Costa also uses Darwin's experimental work to make a broader point about the methodology of science and the importance of data relative to opinion. Costa nicely explains what Darwin discovered, discussing those rare cases where he got something wrong and using the findings of modern science to extend Darwin's conclusions. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* So much more than a biography, this engaging account of Charles Darwin and his lifelong experimentising combines well-documented research, replicable science experiments, and charming anecdotes to illustrate how, despite ongoing personal illness and family drama, Darwin continuously observed, documented, and shared his groundbreaking scientific investigations. He enlisted the assistance of his wife, Emma, their seven surviving children, various governesses, nurses, maids, butlers, extended family, friends, colleagues, and an array of revered contemporary naturalists to help prove multiple hypotheses (or not, including some of his own self-acknowledged fools' experiments, such as suggesting fish create chalk). Witty and occasionally irreverent chapters consider his work with orchids, barnacles, vines, bees, the sex life of plants, frogs, and his beloved earthworms, and they document his simultaneous, copious correspondence; publications; defenses; and endless revisions. Each chapter concludes with step-by-step directions for backyard experiments that replicate his original efforts. Readers are warned that these are not intended for children; many require sophisticated equipment and materials plus meticulous attention to detail and documentation. Devoted scientists, neighborhood naturalists, and Darwin devotees will all find inspiration within these pages, whether from his carefully documented scientific methods, cheerful perseverance, or personal insights pulled from family letters. This is accessible and fun stuff from a popular author, so expect high demand.--McBroom, Kathleen Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
For readers, Charles Darwin, born in 1809, apparently never gets old. Books by Darwin number 25. Books about Darwin, according to the global library catalog WorldCat, number about 7,500, with production ever rising. This cascade started with 22 books about Darwin published in 1860, the year after his "On the Origin of Species" appeared, averaged about 30 a year for almost a century, ballooned to almost 50 a year after World War II, and reached 100-plus in the 1980s. Currently we get about 160 a year - a Darwin tome every 2.3 days. Even with a book population so large, most years bring notable additions, and so it is in 2017. This year's offerings include a friendly takeover attempt in the biologist J. Scott Turner's PURPOSE AND DESIRE (HarperOne, $27.99), which argues that today's mechanistic neo-Darwinism needs to find room for the "agency" - the desire - that Türner insists drives every organism and, by extension, evolution itself. I'm not buying, but it's a good read and a strong pitch. Books closer to Darwin's work also abound. James Costa's entertaining DARWIN'S BACKYARD (Norton, $27.95), for instance, draws on the often untidy experiments Darwin carried out at Down House (bees and barnacles, potatoes and pigeons) to show how he built his theory of natural selection - and to suggest DIY home experiments for the reader; a messy win. Further afield, the geologist Matthew J. James's COLLECTING EVOLUTION (Oxford University Press, $34.95) recounts a 1905-6 Galapagos visit in which the legendary field naturalist Rollo Beck, wielding shotgun, burlap bags and camera, made observations that provided crucial support for Darwin's work in those islands. And further afield still, Rob Wesson's darwin'S first THEORY (Pegasus Books, $29.95) dares, thank goodness, to work some of the rare Darwinian territory that is actually underexplored. Tracing the young Darwin's tracks on the 1831-36 Beagle circumnavigation, Wesson relates how Darwin hatched his first, favorite, and most overlooked substantive theory, on the origins of coral reefs. In both method and vision - imagining forms changing slowly over time in response to changing conditions - this precocious, even audacious idea anticipated and possibly inspired the theory of evolution Darwin would publish two decades later. But it's another of Darwin's theories, his least appreciated (at least to judge by popular books), that is his most seditious - and that this year finally gets the thorough defense it deserves. A little over a decade after he published "On the Origin of Species," in which he described his theory of natural selection shaped by "survival of the fittest," Darwin published another troublesome treatise - "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relationship to Sex." This expanded on an idea he mentioned only briefly in "Origin." Sometimes, he proposed, in organisms that reproduce by having sex, a different kind of selection occurs: Animals choose mates that are not the fittest candidates available, but the most attractive or alluring. Sometimes, in other words, aesthetics rule. Darwin conceived this idea largely because he found natural selection could not account for the ornaments seen in many animals, especially males, all over the world - the bright buttocks and faces of many monkeys and apes; the white legs and backside of the Banteng bull, in Malaysia; the elaborate feathers and mating dances of countless birds including bee-eaters and bell-birds, nightjars, hummingbirds and herons, gaudy birds of paradise and lurid pheasants, and the peacock, that showboat, whose extravagant tail seems a survival hindrance but so pleases females that well-fanned cocks regularly win their favor. Only a consistent preference for such ornament-in many species, a "choice exerted by the female" - could select for such decoration. This sexual selection,as Darwin called it, this taste for beauty rather than brawn, constituted an evolutionary mechanism separate, independent, and sometimes contrary to natural selection. To Darwin's dismay, many biologists rejected this theory. For one thing, Darwin's elevation of sexual selection threatened the idea of natural selection as the one true and almighty force shaping life - a creative force powerful and concentrated enough to displace that of God. And some felt Darwin's sexual selection gave too much power to all those females exerting choices based on beauty. As the zoologist St. George Jackson Mivart complained in an influential early review of "Descent," "the instability of vicious feminine caprice" was too soft and slippery a force to drive something as important as evolution. Darwin's sexual selection theory thus failed to win the sort of victory that his theory of natural selection did. Ever since, the adaptationist, "fitness first" view of sexual selection as a subset of natural selection has dominated, driving the interpretation of most significant traits. Fancy feathers or (in humans) symmetrical faces have been cast not as instruments of sexual selection, but as "honest signals" of some greater underlying fitness. Meanwhile, the "modern synthesis" of the mid-1900s, which reconciled Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, redefined evolutionary fitness itself not in terms of traits, but as the survival and spread of the individual genes that generated the traits. Genes, rather than traits, became what natural selection selected. And so things largely remained until now. This summer, however, almost 150 years after Darwin published his sexual selection theory to mixed reception, Richard Prum, a mild-mannered ornithologist and museum curator from Yale, has published a book intended to win Darwin's sex theory a more climactic victory. With the evolution of beauty (Doubleday, $30), Prum, drawing on decades of study, hundreds of papers, and a lively, literate, and mischievous mind, means to prove an enriched version of Darwin's sexual selection theory and rescue evolutionary biology from its "tedious and limiting adaptationist insistence on the ubiquitous power of natural selection." He feels this insistence has given humankind an impoverished, even corrupted view of evolution in general, and in particular of how evolution has shaped sexual relations and human culture. As Prum knows, he's in for a fight. The biologists who most militantly defend the adaptationist Darwinian view of evolution, such as Richard Dawkins, do not gladly suffer dissent. But true to his argument, Prum seeks to prevail less through brute force of attack than by making his case with clarity, grace and charm. Like a bowerbird arranging its display for potential mates, he seeks not to best his chesty, chattering rivals, but to persuade the openminded. The result is a delicious read, both seductive and mutinous. Richard Prum is first and foremost an obsessive birder. Having personally seen over a third of the world's 10,000 known bird species, he draws on his observations and wide reading to defeather and gut the adaptationist view that beauty is an "honest signaling" of evolutionary fitness. His attention never strays far from nature, and his writing in these bird passages is minutely detailed, exquisitely observant, deeply informed, and often tenderly sensual. When describing, say, the "throbbing" display of the lavishly decorated argus bird, he delivers a feathery brush of the erotic. Prum is also an expert on the evolution of feathers, and he writes of them with the insight and appreciation one hears in the funnest art critics - think Kenneth Clark crossed with Sister Wendy. Prum makes an elegant, plausible argument that rather than having evolved for flight, feathers may actually have first evolved as a decorative surface for sexual display: fitness as a downstream benefit of beauty. The art-critic overtones come not by chance. Prum considers birds artists. Manakins (Prum's study group) carefully choreograph their dances. Bowerbirds mastered perspective in their bower building eons before human painters grokked it during the Renaissance. Bowerbird males provide Prum some of his most convincing examples. These remarkable birds woo their potential mates by constructing circles, cones, or maypolelike structures out of twigs, then ornamenting both the structures and the ground within and around them with stones, shells, beetle cases, colorful fungi and other found art. Both the architecture and the male's behavior invite the female to observe and consider while leaving her both the space to do so and a clear escape path. In some bowerbird species the male laboriously arranges and rearranges his display, examining it from various angles and making small fixes, writes Prum, with the care of a "fussy florist." The males of several species observe the female examining their work while half-hidden behind a tree or some fencelike part of the bower. If she likes what she sees, she stretches her neck and raises her tail in invitation, and the male comes to mate. (This takes only seconds, and the two will never meet again.) If she doesn't, she leaves. Prum believes these and similar courtship appeals in other species have arisen from a long, multigenerational, co-evolutionary conversation between mating partners. The male's aesthetic and social qualities are repeatedly tested, judged and (through selection) modified according to whether they please potential mates. Thus the females' individual preferences, says Prum, help drive evolution. Like all selection, this is not intended to reach any particular goal; it just unfolds according to the demands of either fitness, or in this case, beauty. A trait selected for its beauty, of course, might create problems by selecting for ornaments that work against fitness. But, most crucially in the end, and often offsetting these problems, this "aesthetic" courtship, says Prum, creates an environment, temperaments and rituals - a sort of culture - that give the female sexual choice, autonomy and safety. (As noted, she doesn't get everything; once she and the male mate and part, she raises the offspring by herself.) Prum sees such aesthetic choices as driving a gradual "aesthetic remodeling" - an evolutionary reshaping of mating behavior, and even of male social behavior more widely, by the civilizing pressure of female preference. Prum stresses this is not about emasculating males, or dominating them; it's simply about selecting for males who allow females autonomy and choice. By this point in the book, Prum, having made his case so well in birds, turns to the implications of sexual selection for Homo sapiens. He nimbly mines both the animal and human literature to show how, for one human trait after another, adaptationist explanations miss the mark while aesthetic explanations hit home. His catalog of Things Natural Selection Can't Explain but Sexual Selection Easily Can includes homosexuality, a tendency toward monogamy, both sex's taste and capacity for sex outside of female fertility periods, the deweaponization of the human male through the evolutionary shrinkage of almost every body part except the brain and the evolution of human paternal care, which is highly unusual among our fellow apes and close primate cousins. To name just a few. Consider, for instance, this handful of well-known distinguishing human traits: our constant interest in sex, permanent breasts, big penises, and, last but hardly least, women's orgasms. Except for constant sexual interest (and possibly female orgasm) in bonobos, none of these traits evolved in our fellow ape species. Prum argues that they evolved in humans because they help women evaluate men's prosocial-pleasure potential. When sex offers orgasm at relatively low pregnancy risk, it provides a way not just to reproduce but to assess potential mates' attention to female desires, tastes and choices. Essentially, Prum says, humans evolved to negotiate and have sex as a sort of display ritual. The boudoir is our bower. One of Prum's takeaways is that, given all this, we have choices to make. All sexual selection, he says, is shaped by conflicts between male and female anatomy, physiology, and agendas. Prum argues that sexual species tend to evolve toward one of two responses to this conflict. One evolutionary response is for males to use greater size to control or coerce the female and curb her power over whether, with whom, and how often she will mate and reproduce. This approach is common in many duck species and gorillas, whose dominant males use the threat of force to command exclusive mating access to the females in their groups and often murder the offspring of their predecessors. The other evolutionary answer is the aesthetic route - the resolution of differences between male and female needs and desires by behaviors and rituals that respect the other sex's priorities and their decisions about how to pursue them. Prum proposes that we humans have evolved along the latter path, and that, given our powers of thought, conscience and agency, we can accelerate that aesthetic and social evolution. This, he asserts, is why beauty should not be seen as merely the stamp of quality assurance that conventional evolutionary theory thinks it is. Beauty, rather, forms the foundation of an entire, complex evolutionary dynamic - one that can influence how we treat each other. ?
Choice Review
This engaging biography focuses not on Darwin's most iconic accomplishments--his voyage on the Beagle or publication of On the Origin of Species, for example--but on the many lesser-known experiments he conducted at home, all in pursuit of uncovering the mysteries of the natural world. Small as they were, these were not the frivolous hobby of a country gentleman but real attempts to test hypotheses. Darwin was a first-rate investigator who carefully designed his experiments, conducting them in the gardens of his country estate and surrounding woods and meadows. Costa (Western Carolina Univ.) thoughtfully examines why and how Darwin developed these studies; he often involved fellow naturalists, friends, family servants, and especially his children, nieces, and nephews to help him carry out his research. Darwin's small experiments were eclectic, from growing barnacles and studying their differing morphologies to observing the "buzzing place" of bees to developing a weed garden for testing the hardiness of various seedlings. As an added feature, Costa encourages readers to follow in Darwin's footsteps and create their own experiments, supplying step-by-step directions after each chapter. This book will appeal to naturalists and historians of biology as well as to general readers. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Joel S. Schwartz, emeritus, CUNY College of Staten Island, Professor emeritus
Kirkus Review
An instructive and entertaining look at Darwin's "experimentising" and how it can be readily duplicated using mostly simple household tools.Costa (Biology/Western Carolina Univ.; Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species, 2014, etc.), the executive director of the Highlands Biological Station, presents not just a how-to, but also a profile of Darwin in his time and place as he connected with other scientists and relied on them and on friends and family for assistance in his fieldwork. Darwin's enormous curiosity about how nature works and how adaptations arise from natural selection led him to constantly examine his surroundings with a careful eye. Costa shows him investigating the anatomy of barnacles, honeycombs of bees, dispersion of seeds, reproduction techniques of orchids, behavior of carnivorous plants, twisting of vines, and earth-moving capacity of worms. Occasionally, Darwin called on other naturalists for help in gathering specimens, and he relied on the labor of his own children, who apparently were enthusiastic assistants. In each chapter, Costa describes a specific area of Darwin's work and includes a materials list and a step-by-step procedure that demonstrates how to set up a related experiment, what to look for, and how to record one's observationsin other words, how to think like a scientist. What makes this more than a textbook is the full portrait of Darwin that emerges. We see him as an inquisitive youngster; a beetle-collecting college student; a hardworking naturalist who endured seasickness and other obstacles during his years on the Beagle; a husband and family man, enduring the illnesses and deaths of three of his children; and always as a man consumed with curiosity about the natural world and finding many of the answers in his own backyard. While casual readers may not be tempted to perform the experiments, the insights Costa provides into Darwin's thinking and his revelations about the great man's working life make this a worthwhile read. A perfect resource for biology teachers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Most readers will be surprised to learn of the incredible amount of field research, observation, and experimentation that Charles Darwin did in the many years after his famous voyage. Costa (biology, Western Carolina Univ.; Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species) argues that those experiments are not only foundational but also educational: they explain evolution better than any classroom lecture. To that end, each chapter focuses on a different obsession of Darwin's, from orchids to seed migration, and is followed by an experiment that demonstrates a principle of evolution. These examples are of the quick and simple variety, and a well-equipped high school science class could perform them easily. Costa's secondary goal is to place Darwin in the context of his family and friends, many of whom he deputized to help with his observations; in this, the author is less successful. Although there are frequent mentions of Darwin's children, only rarely do their own voices or inclinations shine through. VERDICT For students or teachers of biology or for readers looking for another side of Darwin.-Cate Hirschbiel, Iwasaki Lib., Emerson Coll., Boston © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Preface | p. xi |
1 Origins of an Experimentiser | p. 1 |
Experimentising: Going to Seed | p. 35 |
2 Barnacles to Barbs | p. 40 |
Experimentising: Doing Your Barnacles | p. 78 |
3 Untangling the Bank | p. 83 |
Experimentising: A Taste for Botany | p. 113 |
4 Buzzing Places | p. 118 |
Experimentising: Bees' Cells and Bubbles | p. 144 |
5 A Grand Game of Chess | p. 149 |
Experimentising: Getting Around | p. 173 |
6 The Sex Lives of Plants | p. 182 |
Experimentising: Darwinian Encounters of the Floral Kind | p. 220 |
7 It Bears on Design | p. 227 |
Experimentising: Orchidelirium | p. 258 |
8 Plants with Volition | p. 262 |
Experimentising: Feed Me, Seymour! | p. 288 |
9 Crafty and Sagacious Climbers | p. 295 |
Experimentising: Seek and Ye Shall Find | p. 326 |
10 Earthworm Serenade | p. 336 |
Experimentising: Get Thee to a Wormery | p. 370 |
Acknowledgments | p. 375 |
Notes | p. 379 |
Further Reading and Resources | p. 399 |
Bibliography | p. 403 |
Index | p. 419 |