Darwin's Manuscripts, Now Online

Friday, February 10 4:58 pm

A page from Darwin’s manuscript On the Origin of Species, the foundation text of evolutionary biology. (Cambridge University Library, DAR 185.109.f6r)

What better way to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 203rd birthday than by reading the famed naturalist’s scientific works in his own handwriting? You can do just that on Sunday, February, 12—also known as “Darwin Day”—and every day after on the Darwin Manuscripts Project website.

Free and available to all online, the Darwin Manuscripts Project is the most comprehensive catalogue of Darwin’s scientific manuscripts ever compiled. The project is based at the American Museum of Natural History and developed in close collaboration with Cambridge University Library, whose physical collection is the foundation of the new database, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library—represented by the Natural History Museum in London. This new tool will also include holdings from all other library—based Darwin collections globally.

The database at the project’s core—DARBASE (Darwin Union Manuscripts Catalogue)—includes some 45,000 Darwin documents, including writing from Darwin’s time aboard the HMS Beagle, early drafts of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, as well as his notebooks and botanical books. Read more »

Science at the Museum: Building the Trees of Life

Tuesday, March 01 12:10 pm

Walk a Tree of Life starting in the Hall of Vertebrate Origins. Photo: © AMNH/D. Finnin

To walk the fourth floor of the Museum — peering at the jagged “teeth” of armored fish Dunkleosteus, ducking under the 23-foot wingspan of the flying reptile Pteranodon, studying the long curved tusks of the elephant relative Mammuthus — is, in a sense, to walk the tree of life.

Each branching point represents the arrival of an evolutionary innovation — jaws, water-tight eggs, hooves, respectively — that unites one group of animals and distinguishes them from lineages that lack the feature. Known as synapomorphies, or shared traits derived from a common ancestor, these are the tracks of evolution.

Scientists have used trees to order life since before Charles Darwin first scribbled a spiky diagram in his notebook. In the 1950s, German biologist Willi Hennig formally proposed that trees of life should reflect evolutionary relationships among organisms, founding cladistics: a method for grouping organisms into ancestor-descendent clades, from the Greek word for “branch,” based on shared, derived features. But it took a Museum scientist, ichthyologist Gareth Nelson, to disseminate the idea among English-language biologists. Together with students and colleagues at the Museum — including another ichthyologist, Donn Rosen, paleontologists Eugene Gaffney and Niles Eldredge, ornithologist Joel Cracraft, and invertebrate specialists Norman Platnick and Randall T. Schuh – Nelson steadfastly argued the case for cladistics as the tool to test classification during academic talks, in research papers, and even on napkins over meals. Read more »

After Darwin: Scientist Slide Shows Bring the Field to the Web

Monday, October 04 11:14 am

After returning from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle, it took Charles Darwin three years to publish an account, Journal and Remarks, which later became known as The Voyage of the Beagle. But in today’s information age, readers can sometimes have a real-time window into a scientific expedition when researchers use the internet and satellites to relay their experience from remote corners of the Earth.

Earlier this year, Christopher Raxworthy, curator in the Department of Herpetology, inaugurated a new blog from The New York Times called “Scientist At Work: Notes from the Field.” And now — just a few months after his return from Northern Madagascar — you can hear Dr. Raxworthy talk about the expedition against a backdrop of stunning images.  The National Science Foundation created this audio slide show and funded the field research discussed.

After Darwin at AMNH: Ian Tattersall

Thursday, February 04 5:26 pm

Curator Ian Tattersall on Darwin’s Thoughts About the Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History continue to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species with a collection of vignettes describing expeditions and ideas with links to Darwin’s seminal work.

Below is an excerpt of a longer piece that Ian Tattersall wrote for Evolution: Education and Outreach in 2009.

Charles Darwin was curiously unforthcoming on the subject of human evolution as viewed through the fossil record, to the point of being virtually silent. He was, of course, most famously reticent on the matter in On the Origin of Species, … [and] this is true even of his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in which Darwin finally forced himself to confront the implications of his theory for the origin of humankind [but in which he barely managed even a passing reference to the Neanderthal fossil that by then was the subject of extensive scientific speculation.]

There were…many reasons why Darwin should have been disposed in The Descent of Man to shrink from any substantive discussion of whether extinct human relatives might actually be represented in fossil form. The fossil and antiquarian records were awash with fakes; any discussion of human ancestry was rife with social and political pitfalls; and anyway, by his own close colleague’s testimony, the record contained nothing that could have any relevance to ancient and now-extinct human precursors. Add to that Darwin’s innate suspicion of the distorting effects of incompleteness in the fossil record, and he may have felt that a large degree of discretion on the matter was mandatory.

The Feldhofer skullcap--the Neanderthal type specimen-- was discovered in a limestone cave in 1857 and is one of a handful of fossils that Darwin could have been aware of while writing The Origin of Species. The image includes an associated zygomaticomaxillary fragment that was discovered in the miners’ dump almost a century and a half later, in 1997. Credit: AMNH

None of this means, of course, that The Descent of Man has not exerted an immense influence on the sciences of human origins over the last century and a half. Just as it is easy for English speakers to forget how much they owe to William Shakespeare for the language they use daily, we tend to lose sight of the fact that much received wisdom in paleoanthropology has come down to us direct from Darwin. Darwin it was who proposed a mechanism for the structural continuity of human beings with the rest of the living world and who gave a detailed argument for human descent from an “ape-like progenitor.” It was Darwin who documented beyond doubt, in The Descent of Man, that all living humans belong to a unitary species with a single origin—which we now know, on the basis of evidence of which Darwin could never have dreamed, to have been around 200,000 years ago. He also had the inspired hunch that our species originated in the continent of Africa—and again, this guess has been amply substantiated by later science. Darwin’s perceptions on the behaviors of other primates and how they relate to the way humans behave were remarkably astute, particularly given the highly anecdotal nature of what was then known. Read more »

After Darwin at AMNH: David Hurst Thomas

Thursday, January 28 4:29 pm

Curator David Hurst Thomas Tests Darwin in Archaeological Sites

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History continue to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species with a collection of vignettes describing expeditions and ideas with links to Darwin’s seminal work.

Part of the St. Catherines archaeology team shucking oysters to determine the amount of energy (in calories) that people can retrieve in relation to the amount of energy spent collecting and processing. Credit: Lorann S.A. Pendleton.

Deer, clams, oysters, alligators: if you walked the length of St. Catherines Island off of Georgia, what would you pop into your mouth? David Hurst Thomas, curator in the Division of Anthropology at the Museum, uses optimal foraging theory to interpret the remains of thousands of meals left behind in archaeological sites across the island.

Optimal foraging theory puts an evolutionary spin on what people chose to eat. The assumption that individuals decide what to consume in a way that maximizes the total energy return and minimizes the energy they must spend to search for, collect, and prepare food items in their environment. This approach is known as the “diet breadth model,” a series of testable hypotheses about what an efficient forager will pick (and not pick) from the array of available food.

“Darwinian evolutionary ecology allows us to frame some concrete expectations about what a forager should choose to gather,” says Thomas. “Suppose someone dropped a pot of coins. Some would be selective, picking up only silver dollars, and others would rush to pick up everything. The diet breadth model allows us to distinguish between these strategies in archaeological sites.”

Thomas and his team have spent more than 30 years excavating different archaeological sites throughout the island’s 14,000-plus acres. Recently, the team conducted a series of foraging experiments that, as Thomas puts it, “hook theory to dirt archaeology” by mapping the most efficient strategies for harvesting the available foodstuffs. They harvested oysters, dug up clams, butchered diamondback terrapins, and drank periwinkle soup. For each food type, the archaeologists recorded the length of time and amount of energy expended for collecting and processing. These data were then compared to the amount of available energy gained from food to answer a key question: if I invest one hour in foraging, what is the energetic return on that investment? The result, expressed as kilocalories per hour, allows researchers to compare different food types. Read more »