The Blackback Gold, Herring Gold and the other goals of the North Atlantic are described as different species. But in fact, in some circumstances, they can hybridize together. In that particular case, you've got a remarkable situation where we have a bird called the lesser Blackback Gold in Britain, and then we go around the North Pole. The adjacent species of golds around the North pole can actually hybridize with each other to some extent, so they're not really species. So what shows you evolution in action? As they were moving around the Northpole, as the ice retreated, they were changing, evolving and adapting. When they closed the circle, the two at the extreme
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, ideas and legacy of the pioneering Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: "Tell him I know no greater man on earth".
The son of a parson, Linnaeus grew up in an impoverished part of Sweden but managed to gain a place at university. He went on to transform biology by making two major innovations. He devised a simpler method of naming species and he developed a new system for classifying plants and animals, a system that became known as the Linnaean hierarchy. He was also one of the first people to grow a banana in Europe.
With
Staffan Muller-Wille
University Lecturer in History of Life, Human and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge
Stella Sandford
Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London
and
Steve Jones
Senior Research Fellow in Genetics at University College, London
Producer Luke Mulhall