 All right, thank you. How are you guys doing? OK, well, Pete said my name. My name is Alex Lee. I'm very talk you guys about Darwin and just sort of about history of evolution in general and kind of explain how these three words are all sort of related together. Just a little quick bit about myself. I actually got my degree in evolution and ecology from UC Davis. Dose it now at the California Academy of Sciences. We were there on the third Saturday or on some Thursday nights. I'll be there. And I can't emphasize enough how much I love invertebrates and how much they love me. And by the way, I don't even drink and you could get me to do things like this. And history of evolution, I mean, evolution is no small idea. I mean, we're talking about something that's going back with life about three and a half billion years and has sort of been with us since, in fact, in all aspects of life and creating beautiful things such as these colorful nudibranchs here and also creating really hideous things too since it's almost Halloween. This guy here is a parasitic isopod now occupying the mouth of this poor fish here. And usually when we think about the history of evolution, we usually just think about Charles Darwin. He went on this five year around the world voyage. And at some point, he stopped by the Galapagos Islands and found these interesting finches that somehow inspired him to think about evolution. And just like to add, this is the delightful, oops, delightful vampire finch. It actually consumes blood. Yes. But this beagle voyage is really just an incredible scientific voyage. I mean, I absolutely just love the stories from it. And I'm sorry to say, I'm not going to be talking about those stories. Sorry, I am a tease in that regard. I feel like we talk so much about the beagle, even though it's such a great adventure. We talk so much about the beagle. We just kind of ignore all these other great stories. I mean, Darwin had a really long life after he returned from the beagle voyage. What was he doing then? And also, there was this, a lot of people who were talking about evolution even before Darwin, believe it or not. So who are these people? There are a lot of great stories about that too. So I'm going to be focusing on that and kind of ask these two big questions. Is that who were these people who were thinking about evolution before Darwin? And why do we spend so much time talking about Darwin and not these other people, these other transmutationists? Now, this was before the word evolution was used. So people use the word transmutation. I just like saying that word just because it sounds hideous. And also, the other question is that after Darwin returned from his beagle voyage, it was for over 20 years before he actually published on The Origin of Species. And he was very clear that he was thinking about evolution just really early on. Why was he taking 20 years? I mean, was he sitting on the idea? What was he doing during those 20 years? Yeah. So just kind of back towards just evolution as kind of a topic again. I mean, evolution is an emergent property of life. It started with life. It's been going on for three and a half billion years. And you would think through the course of human history that people would have noticed something about evolution, something about its consequences, some evidence left behind for it, even if they necessarily didn't understand what it was that they were looking at. And as a turnout, when we look at human history, people weren't noticing signs of evolution. I mean, take, for example, the ancient Greeks. They were well aware of fossils for large extinct invertebrates. But the ancient Greeks being the ancient Greeks, they actually creatively reinterpreted these fossils as giants that were defeated by the almighty gods. And even Leonardo da Vinci was actually aware of something about evolution. He actually knew of fossil seashells actually found in the mountains in Italy just far away from the ocean. And Leonardo da Vinci, I mean, he didn't believe in superstitious explanations of the universe. But he couldn't, as brilliant as he was, he didn't know how to explain how clans would just suddenly decide to go rock climbing. And then we have this really interesting fellow during the Middle East, actually kind of during the Golden Age of the Islamic empires, during this period, quite a number of scholars came to this period who were really, really into things from ancient Greece. Al-Jahiz was, in particular, really interested in Aristotle's writings about biology and just worked on trying to greatly expanding upon that work. And one of his really fascinating contributions was that he very clearly understood that all life that is born from sea, birth, eggs, and whatnot, not all those that are born could actually survive. I mean, it sounds obvious to us, but it's not so then. I mean, the reason why this idea is so important is that this is actually one of the pillars of natural selection. And Al-Jahiz lived about 1,000 years before Darwin. And then things started getting really interesting and exciting around the 18th century when quite a number of Frenchmen, for some reason, I'm actually not so clear on the French history about this, but you could have a lot of French scholars, writers from this period who started talking about discussing how species could change, how transmutation could happen. But this was kind of kept on the download just because talking about those things was heresy. It could get you into a lot of trouble, and these people were actually called infidels for what they believe in. And so one of the interesting infidels that came out of this was Dennis Diderot, who was a encyclopedia writer. He also wrote about how species was changing over the course of millions of years, just imagining someone being in the 18th century talking about the earth as it was millions of years. Oh, it sounds pretty crazy. It sounded pretty crazy to the police who were also in charge of policing heresy. I mean, they monitored this guy, harassed him, and actually jailed him at least once that I've read. I mean, remember, this is not much more than 100 years after Galileo was talking about his crazy ideas about the universe and how much trouble he got into that. But of all these early transmutationists, I mean, I think one of the most important ones is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, another Frenchman. And he comes up with kind of an interesting mechanism of how these change in species could happen in that, for example, would take a giraffe that he envisioned that a giraffe a long time ago had a short neck and just trying to reach leaves that were just too high for it to reach by just using its neck, using its body parts, it could actually stimulate what he called the nervous fluid. And this nervous fluid would somehow cause their necks to actually grow. I mean, to grow within their lifetime. And they would acquire their new traits within their lifetime and then pass it on to their offspring. This is how Lamarck envisioned how evolution would happen. And this view is actually incorrect. However, the reason why Lamarck is actually, I think is so important, is that he was a well-known scholar, he was a well-known naturalist. He had other people from other parts of Europe, England in particular, visiting him, wanting to talk to this famous biology. He taught classes in Paris where he had lots and lots of students. He was influencing a whole new generation of scientists and got them thinking about evolution and transmutation and just keep them open to the idea about species how these species could change. Sorry, how these species could change. He had so many transmutations before Darwin, why do we sort of still talk about Darwin so much and what about these other people? I mean, there's so many of these people you could probably make several Robert Altman films like out of them, but one of the reasons why, which is kind of a very obvious one, is that Darwin had the most robust theory, the most sophisticated and just light years ahead in its accuracy and sophisticated than all the other people before him. I mean, he proposes his theory of natural selection, which much more accurately than Lamarck explains how species change could happen that different individuals, some can just survive better than others and those are the ones that can live to mate for another day, but another sort of very key thing that Darwin sort of recognized that in order for natural selection to work, you need a lot of variation, variation today that we call mutations. Mutations is the feel of natural selection. Those are the things that natural selection is selecting on and Darwin recognized that change and variation was not just happening, but it had to be extraordinarily common, which is something he observed and it had to be extraordinarily common for it to work. I mean, this is over 100 years before proper genetics came along to help us confirm that. I mean, just to give you guys an idea of how common variation and mutation is, I want all of you to look at the person next to you, preferably a loved one. The person you're looking at is a mutant. Every single one of us are born with mutations our parents didn't have and all our children will have mutations that we won't have. I mean, that's how common it was. I mean, most of them are really minor, most of them actually don't even do anything, but Darwin over 150 years ago was able to recognize this. And another actually great innovation that really put Darwin ahead of his other predecessors was he came up with the idea of the evolutionary tree. Lamarck and others came with this idea that an animal, for example, going back to the example of the draft would start with a short neck and over time, time going up, they would become the long neck draft in this linear fashion. Darwin recognized that species could start as one species, oops, down here at the bottom and over time, split into two completely different but related species. So in case for drafts, you have the common ancestor, a draft and the Ocopy, which is their most living relative now, but they shared in a common ancestor. So as species continue to branch off and branch off you get these really complex evolutionary trees. And this is actually from a notebook from actually the Charles Darwin wrote. Notice at the top, he writes, I think, and then he proceeds to draw this evolutionary tree diagram here. This is the first evolutionary tree diagram ever drawn. And he does this, draws this in 1837. This is less than a year after he returns from the origin of species. I mean, I love this notebook. I mean, this is such a powerful idea that connects us with every single thing that has ever lived and will continue to live on Earth. And it's so understated with, I think, but less than a year after he comes back from the view of what he's not only thinking about evolution but having a very sophisticated ideas about evolution. This is no small matter here. This is a very, he's already thinking about it in very complex sophisticated ways. So why does it take him, coming back from the Beagle voyage, he draws that diagram, but it doesn't take him for over 20 years before he gets the origin of species. What was he doing during that time? It's a long time to just sit on the idea and it's kind of a complicated question. I won't be able to go over all the factors, but I'll just go over just a few of the very interesting ones. I mean, for one thing, Darwin sort of recognized that he just couldn't find one or two examples of evolution. He just couldn't say, just point to Finch's. He knew that in order to demonstrate something in science, you'd have multiple lines of evidence. So he looked at pigeons. He was looking at mathematics and statistics. He was looking at geology. That was much later, actually, but grapes. And research actually took a long time, but compounding this was that surely after returning from his voyage of the Beagle, he started getting chronically ill. I mean, we're talking about nausea, vomiting, upset stomach, tiredness, gas. I mean, he had various combinations of all these symptoms, waxing and waiting for the next 40 years. I mean, he was miserable for 40 years of his life. And this, I mean, it really affect how he worked. It affected the way he worked. I mean, some days he couldn't even get out of bed. So he had a lot of work to do, but his illness, and his illness is actually still a mystery to us today, although there's quite a number of different hypotheses. I mean, his illness really slowed him down, but fortunately for Darwin, there was something else that was mutating at the time. So this here is what's called the Black Penny. It's the first postage stamp ever issued. This came about during, actually, during part of the Industrial Revolution where you started to get the expansion of not only railroads, but you also got mail that was hitchhiking on that too. It got this enormous expansion of rail. So by the middle of the 19th century, over 600 million letters were being delivered each year by tens of thousands of mailmen. I mean, you could sometimes expect several deliveries in a single day where a mailman will give you a letter. He'll wait outside while you read the letter inside and compose a response, and then you just hand the letter back to the mailman. Darwin, and so Darwin, this was something that Darwin took great advantage of at his peak. He was writing about 1,500 letters a year, and he had about 2,000 correspondence around the world. I mean, he spent a equivalent about what was then about 20 pounds worth of postage and stationery, which is almost $2,000 today for a single year. I mean, and the reason why he was spending so much on postage, because his illness prevented him from traveling much. He sometimes could even travel to London, which was actually a relatively short ways away to be able to talk to other scientists, pick their brains, get their expertise, their opinions, go to meetings and talks, or even visit museums to visit samples. He couldn't even really do that. He was home-stricken, vast majority of the time. So when he couldn't travel, his letters did it for him. And in addition to just sending and receiving letters, instead of just not just the power of the word, he was receiving packages. He would ask for seeds, fossil bones, animal hides, specimens he wanted to look at to sort of see if he looked for certain characteristics to support some of his ideas that he was developing. So, and he in the mail actually received lots and lots and lots of barnacles in the mail. This was something he specifically requested. So why was Darwin getting so many barnacles, this lowly invertebrate? Well, we had to step back a little bit about this. Actually, right around this time, Darwin was actually better known as a geologist. I mean, we think of him as this great naturalist biologist, but when you look at his research note from the origin of species, most of the time he was actually talking about rock formations, layers in rocks on exposed cliffs, his sedimentation patterns, and Darwin even developed actually a really great theory of actually a correct theory on the formation of archipelagos in the Pacific from based on some of the observations of evidence that he gathered actually on the Beagle voyage. So if you're gonna go change biology, I mean, literally take our understanding of life and just completely rewrite it. You also have to understand life. And Darwin didn't quite have that background. He had incredible amount of skill at this point, but he didn't have quite the naturalist biology background as some of his other peers. So he really essentially need to develop his biology cred and his entryway into that was actually barnacles. So in this time, barnacles was considered this really strange and very ignomadic group of invertebrates. I mean, things that people, that naturalists thought they knew about barnacles were actually discovering at this time were incorrect. People thought that barnacles were thought that they were muscles like clams, but they had recently found out during this time period that they're actually not muscles or clams, but were actually crustaceans, much like lobsters, even though they look anything lobster like at all. And another great naturalist, Leonard Jennings, actually considered that's how there's so much history surrounding life and just so much how strange barnacles were. He thought that an extensive study of barnacles could actually reveal much to our understanding of life. Well, little did he know. Darwin actually sides to bark on this barnacle study and he starts with this barnacle here. This guy is actually only a few millimeters big. Darwin found him on a, or her actually on the beach in Chile, named them Mr. Arthur Galanus. This is just some of the barnacles that Darwin did. This is actually straight from his manuscripts that he did on barnacles. So you have the acorn barnacles. You find those very commonly encrusted on rocks. So he's cataloging all the different variations and the patternings on their plates. And of course, on their right, you have the stock barnacles. Mr. Arthur Galanus actually didn't belong to any of these two. It actually belonged to a group known as the Boring Barnacles, not because they're boring, because they actually drilled themselves into rocks and shells. Actually, Mr. Arthur Galanus was the first Boring Barnacle ever discovered. And just to show you the amazing diversity of barnacles, this was one barnacle that Darwin was not aware of at the time he was doing this research. This is a crab, but if you look inside the crab, you see this network of root-like tendrils throughout his entire body. That is a barnacle. That is a parasitic barnacle. It's funny, I can't stand horror movies, but I really love stuff like this. It's almost Halloween. I have to scare the daylights out of some of you. And Darwin ends up getting just a number, more than the finches. Like I may have said before, we think of Darwin and think of finches. I think barnacles were far more even important than the finches in just the amounts of insight that he got about evolution, one of which is homology. And this is kind of one homology that we can sort of all relate with. We have the human arm here, skeleton of the human arm, dog leg, bird wing, and whale flipper. But notice that they all have the exact same sets of bones, four different animals, four different purposes. But why would you do completely different things with the same bones? Well, it's because we all shared a common ancestor. And we just all happened to inherit these same sets of bones from our common ancestors. They're granted with lots of heavy modifications over the past 200 plus million years, but this homology, the similarity in these bones, reveals to us our past evolutionary relationship. And this was something that Darwin got to intimately study with barnacles. So in barnacles and in their elder crustacean relatives, do you have something, do you actually have this forked appendage called the Byramus appendage? I mean, we're talking about their legs, their antennae, their swimmerettes. This is various examples from several different crustaceans, how we get the forks here, right here and right there. And in barnacles, they don't look like a lobster at all, but if you look at, but you've ever seen barnacles underwater, they have these appendages, they're sticking out and pulling in, sticking out and pulling in, and they're using that to capture food. And you look at those appendages very closely, they also forked same homology with all their other crustacean relatives. And this and numerous other characteristics that Darwin studied revealed to him probably far more about evolution than the finches, really ever did. And Darwin actually spent eight years working on barnacles. I mean, we're talking, I mean, he spent five years on the Beagle voyage, one month on the Galapagos, but eight years just working on this one group of invertebrates. And during that time, you know, he asked children and all of his children know that daddy ever does. When daddy wasn't miserably sick, was that he would work on barnacles and his son, Francis, you know, visit a friend's house and actually ask his friend, you know, where does your dad work on his barnacles? Don't all fathers work on barnacles? But I'm sort of gonna conclude this, talking about Darwin's family, I already mentioned his son. I can't really do his family's justice. I just love his family stories. There's so many great stories about it, but Darwin actually marries his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, of, you know, Wedgwood Pottery. And remember, this is during the time when it was perfectly fine to go to a family reunion and hit on your cousin. This was still very common and very acceptable, although Darwin actually really secretly thought that there were negative consequences to this. You know, he went and married his cousin anyway. Yeah, yeah, and with Emma, they actually fathered a lot of children, 10 children, seven survived to a delta. This was also during the time period where it was not a surprise at all. If you were having 10 children, you're gonna expect a few not to make it. I mean, even though people would expect, or expecting that to happen, it really hit everyone hard. It really hit Charles and Emma really hard every time, you know, when their children died, you know, first married, then Annie, then Charles Warring. But you know, Darwin loved being a husband. He loved being a father. He spent quite a bit of time with them. He was at home all the time. He was a stay-at-home dad. He was home a lot, and he was doing research a lot, so of course he was gonna, of course he was like any good scientist, he was gonna mix the two together. So I'm just gonna end this. Okay, I did mention that he'd sometimes subject to his parents with experience. No, he did not harm his children in any way. It was more like they were just observational experiments. I'm just gonna end this with this one experiment that Darwin did. It's actually one of my favorite Darwin family research stories. He did very late in his life. Very late in his life, you know, he was just really fascinated, became really fascinated by earthworm. He was fascinated lots of things. He got into orchids. He got into how plants grew. He got into tendrils on grapes, and you know, he had this really big earthworm period. He wanted to know what earthworms were doing in the soil, how were they behaving? How they were responding to the different stimuli, and one of the stimulus that he was really interested in was sound, because you know, he knew that not all animals could hear. You know, he wondered, could earthworms hear? How would they respond to sound? So this was the experimental setup that Darwin had. So his wife, oops, his wife, Emma, was on the piano. Son, Francis was on the bassoon. His grandson, Bernard, was on the whistle. His daughter, Bessie. I could not find a picture of Bessie, Darwin. So we have to settle with this. So Bessie was just shouting. And you could just, and they were just all collected together in the family's drawing room. And you could just imagine this cacophony that they were just racket, they were just making, because there was this flower pot just right in the center with some dirt and some earthworms. And while his family was making all these noises, Darwin was just kind of sitting up right in there in the middle of his entire family, observing, seeing if earthworms could, were doing anything with all that sound. And as it turned out, the earthworms didn't care for pianos, bassoons, whistles, or shouting. So it was a negative result in this experiment, but it still sounded like they were having a lot of fun. But even though the result, it is a negative result out of the countless experiments and research that Darwin did in his life, I don't think this would really affect this reputation too much. But thank you so much. I got into this because eight years ago, I took a class on Darwin and like a good drunk, I just never stopped reading about him, about his letters or anything. So I have some books that I would recommend. If any one of you are interested in this, I mean not just Darwin, just any science history stuff. It's just really cool. So are there any questions? Yeah. Yeah. Well, partly because he wanted to accumulate all that evidence, but actually one of the triggers, he was actually already starting to work on his book by the late 1850s, but one thing that really sort of kicked him in the ass was a man named Alfred Russell Wallace. He was another naturalist. He was actually in the middle of Malay, acupallical at the time, and they were sort of sending letters back and forth to each other. And Darwin had mentioned two wallets that, oh, I'm working on a theory of species change without really saying anything. And Wallace writes back saying, oh, I have this idea too. And he goes ahead and starts describing natural selection. And this sort of freaks Darwin out, because Darwin has been working on this for 20 years. So he had already been working on his book on this, but this sort of really sort of kicks his ass and that sort of, he accelerated his book schedule actually. But at the same time, he didn't want Wallace to go unrecognized, so he actually helps arrange for that both him and Wallace will get their papers presented a couple months later at this one talk in London. So Wallace would end up getting some recognition, although Wallace has been unfortunately been forgotten too. All right, yeah, you? Two things, inheritance. He had a very wealthy father. Another thing was that his father really taught him really well on how to invest in land and in various farms and businesses. So he actually had a very steady income without having to leave the house. So, I mean, remember, this is in the area of Victorian science where you still had a lot of researchers who were like the gentlemen scientists. They were people of a means, so they could support themselves because science wasn't really much of a paid occupation at this time. Yeah, there's a couple. The one that I personally favor and actually these two sets of biographers, they wrote these two epic Harry Potter-esque Darwin biographies. They're massive volumes and they're fantastic. I mean, I just absorbed them. But anyway, they favor, as long as I, as well, that these were psychologically stress-induced elements that he was just very prone to anxiety. Because thinking about evolution was believed to have made him really stressful and his wife was actually really religious and was not fond of his ideas at all. Although his wife was actually like a, you know, they were a really good husband and wife to each other. They were very supportive to each other, even though she was not fond of his ideas about evolution at all. And I think part of that, and part of knowing that when he publishes, he's gonna get a lot of blowback from people, could have caused stress, so that's one of the hypotheses that this was anxiety psychologically induced from stress. Another one, which one that I'm not gonna favor, but I'm not gonna try to bias this too much, is that was that we know from his notes that he's probably bitten by an insect known as the kissing bug when he was in South America and kissing insects transmit a disease called Chaga's disease. Some people believe that he was chronically suffering from Chaga's disease, but the reason why I don't favor that hypothesis too much is that if he had Chaga's disease, he would have died a lot sooner, I think, of heart failure. Yeah, you in the back? Yeah, so David in the back. He asked what sort of other societal political pressures would have affected him at the time when he was starting to publish his ideas? I mean, I think part of the reason why he waited so long was he was really nervous about that, about how people was gonna react, but actually there was one story that I was forced to omit from this talk because it was getting a little long that sort of talks a little bit about that, and that is that the society as a whole was actually somewhat interested actually in this topic by the time Darwin published in part because there was a man named Robert Chambers who anonymously published a book talking about evolution as well before Darwin, but Robert Chambers, he did this anonymously, he wasn't assigned to it, so his science was really sloppy, but he got the public really excited about the scandalous, exciting idea of species change, so the public was already somewhat primed to this at the time. By the time Darwin came along, sorry, one more question? You, sir, what's your name? Hunting and eating habits, actually I can't recall off the top of my head about his eating habits, although he did eat something very interesting in South America because in South America he had heard stories from local cowboys of, because there was this Rhea, basically a relative of the ostrich that was well known there, but these local cowboys were telling of the smaller species of Rhea, and Darwin really wanted to see this Rhea, wanted to shoot, got a specimen of it, and send those bones back to England for them to examine, and he searched far and wide and he couldn't find it, and his friend Conrad Martins, who was an artist on the Beagle voyage, he comes along and says like, oh, why don't you just have dinner with us? I just shot this bird, we'll just make the stew. So Darwin was in the middle of eating the stew, and then for some reason at this point he realized, oh my God, this is this other species of Rhea that I've been looking for, so he asked everybody to tear the bones off the meat that they were eating, and he collected all the bones and all the feathers, no one fortunately didn't throw away the feathers and sent it all back, and in terms of hunting, Darwin was actually a very good marksman, because his father was really rough during an early part of his life, he was a little bit of a playboy in the sense that he kind of didn't care that much was going on, he went out, hunted a lot, he really honed down but his hunting skills quite a bit, so he was very good at shooting birds, because this was still a common era where unlike today we were more likely to just wait for a bird to die before we collected for a museum specimen. Back then the people were still shooting them and this was one of the things he did. Yeah, oh yeah, one more thing, Beagle Boy, she actually did hunt meat for the crew also, so he was actually quite helpful to the crew. All right, thank you.