The Second Book of General Ignorance Read Online Free PDF Page B

Darwin’s nose indicated laziness. Charles later noted that ‘I think he was afterwards well satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely’.
    The story goes that, during the voyage, Darwin noticed that finches on different islands in the Galapagos had distinctive beaks, which led him to guess that each type had adapted for a specific habitat and evolved from a common ancestor. It’s true that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection originated aboard the Beagle , but it had nothing to do with finches. Though Darwin did collect finch specimens from the Galapagos, he showed very little interest in them until years later. He was no ornithologist in those days and wasn’t even aware that the finches were of different species. It wouldn’t have helped much if he had been, because he didn’t label them to show where they’d been caught. He mentioned them only in passing in his journals and they are not mentioned once in On the Origin of Species (1859).
    The mockingbirds were a different matter. Intrigued by the variations between the populations on two nearby islands, Darwin took careful note of every mockingbird he encountered. Gradually, as his journals show, he began to realise that species were not immutable: they could change over time. Out of that insight all his subsequent theories on evolution grew.
    Because the finches are a perfect example of Darwin’s theories in action, later scientists assumed that they must have been the birds that inspired him. One of these was the evolutionary biologist David Lack (1910–73) whose 1947 book, Darwin’s Finches, fixed the idea (and the term) in the popular consciousness.

    Darwin’s book on the voyage of the Beagle was an immediate best-seller, and the trip made the captain’s name too. Robert Fitzroy (1805–65) went on to become a vice-admiral, Governor General of New Zealand and the inventor of weather forecasting – one of the sea areas in the Shipping Forecast is named after him.
    The finches got famous, too, as we know. The fifteen species of Geospizinae are still popularly known today as Darwin’s Finches – although it turns out they’re not finches at all, but a different kind of bird called a tanager.

Where’s the most convenient place to discover a new species?

    In your own back garden.
    You can cancel that expensive (and possibly dangerous) trip up the Amazon.
    In 1972 an ecologist called Jennifer Owen started to note down all the wildlife in her garden in Humberstone, a suburb of Leicester. After fifteen years she wrote a book about it. She had counted 422 species of plant and 1,757 species of animal, including 533 species of parasitic Ichneumon wasp. Fifteen of these had never been recorded in Britain, and four were completely new to science.
    Suburban gardens cover 433,000 hectares (well over a million acres) of England and Wales. If so many new species can be found in just one of them, this must be true of others. Between 2000 and 2007, the Biodiversity in Urban Gardens in Sheffield project (BUGS) repeated Dr Owen’s work on a bigger scale. Domestic gardens account for some 23 per cent of urban Sheffield, including 25,000 ponds, 45,000 nestboxes, 50,000 compost heaps and 360,000 trees. These present, as Professor Kevin Gaston, BUGS’ chief investigator, put it ‘175,000 separate conservation opportunities’. One of BUGS’ discoveries was what may be a new, minuscule species of lichen, found in the moss on an ordinary tarmac path.
    To more or less guarantee discovering a new species, all you need is a garden, a lot of time and patience, and a lot of expertise. In the words of the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White (1720–93), ‘In zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.’ In 2010 London’s Natural History Museum found a new species of insect in its own garden. They are baffled by what it is, as it doesn’t match any of the more than 28