You might know him from his greatest hits: natural selection, Galápagos finches, and eating lots of the animals he studied… it’s Charles Darwin! This week, we’re talking about this famous biologist and some of the weirder science he did. What kind of books did he write after he published On the Origin of Species? Why was he so disgusted by fish spitting out seeds? And was it normal to write a letter to a scientist friend and ask detailed questions about barnacle sex?
Sources:
[Truth or Fail]
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x38gj/darwins-monsters-parasitoid-wasps
[Fact Off]
Seeds & fish:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1683&viewtype=text&pageseq=1
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-1681.xml
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/11/17/darwin-bird-vomit/#.XBlv3c9Khxw
https://academic.oup.com/botlinnean/article/161/1/20/2418329
Barnacles:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574338/
[Ask the Science Couch]
Darwin’s understanding vs. ours:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20141017-how-flowers-conquered-the-world
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-darwin-didnt-know-45637001/
https://www.wired.com/2014/12/fantastically-wrong-thing-evolution-darwin-really-screwed/
http://www.esp.org/books/darwin/variation/facsimile/contents/darwin-variation-chap-27-i.pdf
http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/449/Soft%20Inhertance/Geison%20-%20Pangenesis.pdf
[Butt One More Thing]
Darwin bark spider:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151126-the-worlds-biggest-spider-web-can-span-an-entire-river
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011234