Defining new art?

A while ago I found a video on youtube of a flash mob in Antwerp Central Station, in Belgium.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQLCZOG202k

For those that dont know, a flash mob is a relatively new phenomenon – someone sends out a text message or email, organising a time and a place – usually somewhere quite public – to all their friends, who send it on to their friends and so on. Everyone gathers at the site, performs some act, like a dance, or a pillow fight, and then suddenly leaves again. The idea is to provide a basic break from the mundanity of everyday life. Its completely pointless, but requires very little input effort, and brightens up everyones day just a little bit.

A little while ago, I came across an interesting definition for a piece of art: for something to be art, it has to have no other purpose other than itself. So something like a car – I’ll use the Farrari 250 GTO as an example – may be goppingly stunning to look at, and if you were 15 years old and had a picture of it, you might need to go to the lavatory to have some time alone with it, but it cant be art – because its a car and therefore has a purpose.

But could you then – using that definition – call a flash mob art? Some people do think of them as a form of performance art. Maybe they’re taking flash mobs a bit too seriously, maybe they only eat salad and have names like Jerome or Bridgette – I dont know. But a flash mob clearly has no other purpose other than itself. So has it – inadvertently – become art?

To be honest, I dont really blog for any other purpose other than itself. I think the same is possibly true for a lot of other people. An interesting thought then…

Petrol isn’t expensive…

I should point out right at the beginning of this – I dont own a car, and I never have. But seeing as practically the whole of human society has based itself of the commodity of fossil fuels, it might be worth having a little think about.

Back in the 1980’s, people jumped up and down when there was a bit of a shortage and things got a bit expensive. The same thing has been happening for the last few years.

What will happen when it gets too expensive? Collapse of global economy? Well, probaby yes. But I dont know if it’ll get that far – the global economy is so strongly dependent on fossil fuels, it will never get too expensive. If it gets to the point where its simply really really expensive, it will effect the economy in such a way as its made to be cheaper again. To put it crudely (excuse the pun), this is what Thomas Malthus was on about – oil has become the limiting factor in our population. Lower the amount of oil available, and the population will come down as well. Its fairly straightforward.

But what about now? Yes, hippies with beards are saying that its all very expensive, but if you think about it, its not. How does petrol get into your car? Someone has to go and find where it is, firstly. These are usually some sort of exploration geologist. That costs a fair bit. Then they have to figure out the best way of getting it out the ground. More money. Then get it out. More money. Then transport it to where it can be refined. More money. Then refine it into a form in which it can be used. More money. Then take it to the place where its needed. A lot more money. And back at the place where it was originally dug out the ground? There’s all sorts of laws and things these days that say you’ve got to put things back the way you found them before you leave. More money.

And its still cheaper – per liter – than some brands of mineral water. And – stop me if Im wrong – that effectively falls out the sky.

So? Stop complaining.

A sense of insignificance

This is the planet we live one. It would be nice to say that most of its inhabitance call it Earth. But they dont. In terms of stuff that we know of – discounting the huge number of plant, lichens, fungi, and algae species (which can all be thought of as living inhabitants) – there are around about 1 million species of insects. No other animal group is as big. In fact, virtually all taxa contains more species than the mammals – apart from the corals. Can I get a woot woot?

The planet itself has a massive range of variability. There are extremely diverse environments and ecosystems – polar tundras, forests, deserts, small islands, large continents, high altitude, low altitude, oceans, lakes, rivers and on and on and on. The planet and its moon even wobbles around a bit on its way round the sun, so we get summer and winter, high tide and low tide.

The solar system itself started around 4.6 billion years ago, when a mass of interstellar what-not collapsed inward to form the sun, and the planets around it. In another 5 billion years (give or take) it’ll expand hugely, and turn into a red giant.

I recently went up to the Karoo to do some field work. This kind of sunset happened pretty much every night.

But the Sun is just another star in the Milky Way Galaxy. Which is about 13.6 billion years old – nearly as old as the universe – and is about a million light years wide. And it contains somewhere between 200 billion and 400 billion other stars. Some of these have planets, some dont. Im quite sure that somewhere out there, with that many stars and that many planets, there must be some life. From a statistical point of view, its practically a certainty. And the milky way is just one of around 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Which itself is about 93 billion light years across – so if you’d could travel from one end of the universe to the other, at light speed, you’d have to be travelling for seven times longer than the universe has actually existed for.

So why did God make his ultimate creation so utterly insignificant?

Rice on a chessboard

There’s a story about the invention of the game of chess. It runs:

A Chinese peasant invented a board game which represented war – attacking, defending, tactics and strategy. Class differentiation – kings and queens at the back, surrounded by an army, pawns in the front to be sacrificed for the greater good. One side against another, one loser, one winner. It was so popular that soon everybody was playing it. The king became interested, and asked to be taught how to play the game by the man who’d invented it. Even after being told that he was only a peasant, the king persisted. The man was sought out, and brought before his master.

“Teach me this game, and I will grant you any wish you have,” said the king. The peasant thought for a while and eventually came up with his greatest wish. He asked that the king place a single grain of rice on the first square on the chessboard. Double it – two – and put that on the second square. Double that – four – and put it on the third square. Double the amount of rice each time you move up a square, and the amount of rice on the last square – the 64th one – that is what I ask for.

The king laughed at such a petty sounding request, and waved his hand dismissively. I would love to have been in the room at this point – some accountant or something in the background must have weed himself. But the peasant taught him the game nonetheless. When the king knew and understood the game, he had to pay up. As it turned out, the amount of rice the peasant had asked for was so much, it put the entire kingdom into debt.

Ive done some maths (well, to be honest, I pressed some buttons). The amount of rice the peasant would have gotten comes to 9223372036854780000. To put it another way, its nine quintillion, two hundred and twenty three quadrillion, three hundred and seventy two trillion, thirty six billion, eight hundred and fifty four million, seven hundred and eighty thousand grains of rice.

How much is that? After googling around a bit, I find the general consensus is that a single grain of rice weighs in at around 25 milligrams, or 0.0025 grams. Multiply it out, and you end up with 230584300921 tons (yes, tons) of rice. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, somewhere in the region of 678 million metric tons of rice was produced globally in the year 2009.

At that rate of production, that would mean we’d have to grow and store rice for 340 years (without eating it) in order to pay off the debt. Goodness me.

A Moral Dilemma – The Nuremberg Trials

If a man, found guilty of a crime by a court of law and executed, is later found to be not guilty, who killed him? The man in the court, with the robe and the wig, who sentenced him? Or the man with the gun who carried it out?

Long before Admiral Karl Donitz’s signature was dry on Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies, the question of “What do we do if we catch Hitler?” was asked. Interestingly, Churchill strongly advocated simply shooting him, along with any other high-ranking Nazi officials they could find. It seems a little rash and extreme in this day and age – but we have a twofold benefit on:

1. Not having just lived through the largest and most costly war of all time, that they (the Germans) clearly started.

2. Having a much better idea of what actually went on in Germany and the occupied countries than even the best informed members of the various Allied governments did in the middle of 1945.

There was also the unavoidable question of whether, rather than simply executing Hitler and his inner circle, putting them on trial. What would they be tried for? There’s no law saying war (either aggressive of defensive) is illegal. The fact that many of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials were sentenced for things like “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” also produces severe moral issues: these crimes were effectively invented for the purpose of the Nuremberg Trials. They did not exist beforehand. As a result, can someone be imprisoned, tried, sentenced and executed for a crime that was invented during the period of their incarceration? Yes, ignorance of the law is no excuse. But inventing a crime in order to sentence someone isn’t justice. As it was, before the trials got underway, one of the things Herman Goering – as head of the Luftwaffe – was going to be tried for was ordering the deliberate bombing of innocent civilians, especially during the London Blitz. This was quietly dropped when someone pointed out that the Allies had done exactly the same thing to the Germans.

Dresden 1945

By the beginning of 1945, plans for what would happen once the allies had won the war were well underway. In terms of the Nazi leaders, the British weren’t really keen on a trial – they didn’t really see much point. The Americans were still weighing up the pro’s and con’s of going one way or the other. Interestingly, it was the Soviets who were particularly keen on a trial and the proper administration of justice. But what, particularly, would be done with Hitler? Imprisoning and putting him on trial only to let him go later because you couldn’t pin anything on him was a distinct possibility. Indeed, he’d been put on trial before – in 1923, for his part in the Munich Putsch. While on the stand, he brilliantly turned the situation to his advantage – he received a five year prison sentence, and even then was let out after less than one. Luckily, the problems associated with putting him on the stand at Nuremberg were avoided, because he committed suicide a week or so before the Germans surrendered.

Another factor in what was now the impending trial was who would be the person in charge? Would they be British, American, Soviet or French? What about trying each defendant in the country in which the crimes had been committed? That was dismissed as being a logistical nightmare. Where would the trials happen? Most cities in that part of Europe were in some degree of ruin. London? Moscow? They were a bit far away. Paris was a possibility, but eventually Nuremberg was selected as it did have the necessary facilities, and had been something of a capital for the Nazidom before and during the war. But under who’s law would the criminals be tried? Each allied nation had its own laws, traditions and systems for sentencing criminals. Which was the best for the situation? Did you make up a completely new system? This was, after all, a completely new kind of trial – nothing like it had ever happened before. But could you do that in the extremely short amount of time allowed? Almost certainly not.

In terms of the crimes of the holocaust, again, it was difficult to pin anything significant on anyone present. After extensive interviewing and a mad review of available evidence, it seemed that the main perpetrators were Hitler, Himmler, Goebels and Eichmann. All were either dead or missing. It seemed that, using my previous metaphor, the firing squad, not the judge, would take the fall anyway.

Some were tried simply on the basis that the helped Hitler come to power. But at that time – around 1933 – who didn’t want him in office? Here was a new National Socialist party promising to bring Germany out from under the dark umbrella of the Versailles Treaty, and make it into a world power once more. And it was headed by a great orator – a visionary who captivated his audiences in a trance of passion. And to add to this, after he came to power, he took on the rare role of a political leader who actually delivered! He did what he’d set out to do – strengthened the German economy and its position in the World almost beyond recognition. When the men who assisted in his coming to power were asked why they didn’t simply resign, the defendants again found legitimate answers. Members and leaders of the Nazi party were effectively there fore life. You know it when you were offered the job, and the decision wasn’t taken lightly. Conservative government members then, as now, could step down from there posts. National Socialist members didn’t have that option. So trying those members for not stopping Hitler in his early years was difficult.

“So why didn’t you try stop him later, once the war had broken out?” Again, the defendants came up with good answers. First, apposing Hitler during the war wasn’t a good idea. It would probably result in – at the very least – dismissal from your post. Which would then be filled by someone else – quite possibly a potential extremist, appointed by Hitler himself. By staying silent, and remaining at you post, you at least prevented that from happening. Secondly, opposing Hitler might not get you simply dismissed. Arguably, Hitler’s greatest military asset, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, fell out with Hitler. He had disagreed with Hitler’s management of the Normandy invasion, but the last straw came when he was implicated in the July 20th plot. He was forced to commit suicide. This plot had been masterminded by Colonel Stauffenberg, and involved taking control of Berlin, imprisoning the important members of the Nazi government and setting up a new one – all in one foul swoop. It failed on one count: the bomb that was supposed to kill Hitler only injured him. Stauffenberg was caught and shot by a firing squad. Around 7000 other people were also implicated and imprisoned for their part in the plot. Most were executed.

It seems that the Nuremberg Trials were not about delivering justice to those who deserved it. Sure, many of the men and women who were sentenced had done some pretty horrific things, and got – at the very least – what they deserved. But that shouldn’t have been done by a court, effectively making up the law as it went along. The US Assistant Secretary of War, John McClow, put it very well. He said that the “trials were done to ‘raise international standards of conduct’ and preserve ‘the moral force behind the Allied cause’.” In short, the Nuremberg Trials weren’t about the proper administration of justice – they were about revenge.

A Western World?

Ive always been fascinated by the idea of a so called “Western Society”. Its mostly the name which I chuckle at – we call it Western, but it includes places like Australia and New Zealand, but they have similar longitudes to countries like China and Japan. So technically, they should be equally “Eastern”. Doing a bit of reading, I find that it doesn’t have much in the way of geographical connotations – rather, the expression refers to the spread of things like democracy, Christianity, colonialism, and, more recently, McDonalds and Microsoft.

Unfortunately, I think this also brings with it some pretty rampant xenephobia and even racism. I live in a country which prides itself on its racial and cultural diversity – even our president has five wives, with another two on the way. That’s his culture, and that’s fine by me. But I was struck by a friend of mine asking me the other day “would you ever date a black girl?” For me the answer is simple: why not? If Im attracted to her, and the feeling is mutual, I dont see what would stop me. But there’s a social attitude that thinks of those sorts of things as taboo or wrong. American’s made a big deal about their last election – they were going to have their first black president, or their first female president. What’s the big deal? Sorry, but loads of countries have had both (although Britain claiming Margaret Thatcher is a women is debatable).

Getting back to the polygamous thing – the social networking site, Facebook, is huge these days. There seems to be this idea that if you start dating someone, its not “official” until you change your status to “in a relationship” on facebook. More than that, facebook cant do polygamous relationships. Why not? Because it was invented in Massachusetts? Probably. If it had been invented in Thailand or Iran, what then?

Then there’s the age-old humdinger – one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter. Recently I re-watched the 2006 film by James McTeigue V for Vendeta, which addresses the question very well. If someone goes and blows up a building, or kills a lot of people, its very easy for people to jump up and down and wave signs and elect really really stupid choices into office, but no-one ever seems willing to ask the question “why did he do that?” Oh, because he’s from an Eastern society, and they’re all savages and heretics, and have different colour skin. If someone believes in an idea so much to lay down their life for it, who are we to say that they were wrong? Has a westerner ever done that? Im sure they have. In 1969, Jan Palach caused a bit of a stir when he set fire to himself in order to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Before he did it, the western world hardly knew it was happening. His act brought it into an international spotlight. Sure enough, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia fell just eleven months later.

Jan Palach's memorial in Prague

Its easy to just be a hippie and say things like “why cant we all just get along?” and then have another joint. But at the end of the day, I think its important to remember that there are far more people that live in the Eastern Societies. Do they care what we think? Probably not, because they’re already taking over the world just by ignoring us.

A sense of inevitability

Most of the stuff Ive been writing about recently has demanded a fair bit of research – most of it involves trawling through wikipedia articles. An interesting idea has arisen – it seems that most of human endeavour is inevitable. Everything from great inventions that have completely changed the way we live, great theories which have changed science, and even sporting achievements.

Alexander Graham Bell is widely credited with inventing the telephone. That gave us a communication age which has increased the flow of thought around the globe. If the whole system of wires, telephones, networks, satellites and the internet suddenly stopped working tomorrow, we’d have the first world asking countries like Mauritania for international aid. As it turned out, he actually bribed a patent officer into giving him the patent application of a man called Elisha Grey. But even before then, there were other men, notably Innocenzo Manzetti, Charles Bourseul, and Antonio Meucci, who came absurdly close. Heard of any of them? If you havn’t, it basically proves that, if nothing else, Bell was a good salesman.

At the beginning of July 1687, Isaac Newton published one of the most significant scientific works of all time: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Twenty years after Newton died, the French astronomer, geophysicist and general playboy, Alexis Clairaut, said that Newton had “spread the light of mathematics on a science which up to then had remained in the darkness of conjecture and hypotheses”. But Newton also famously said that he’d only seen so far, because he’d been standing on the shoulders of giants – colourfully saying that his theories would not have been possible without the work done by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler to name a few. Secondly, one of Newton’s greatest contributions was the invention of the integral calculus. As it turns out, Gottfried Leibniz came up with the same thing at around the same time. He was, of course, accused of plagiarising Newton. And because Newton’s techniques were much harder to understand, today we tend to use Leibniz’s methods and notations.

Even in sporting achievements, we can see something similar. My personal favourite example of this is Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. He did this on the 6th of May, 1954. Just forty six days later, his old rival, John Landy, broke it as well. Over the next few years, the mile record was steadily broken again and again. Currently, it sits at 3.43, held by Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj.

All of this points in a direction that the things we do – the big things, the things that matter – get done not because of a fantastic flash of insight, but because someone eventually gets round to doing them. When Ellen MacArthur was interviewed on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson remarked that “without people like you, the human race would simply not have become what it is”. It seems like everything will eventually get round to being done – advances in science, riding a bike really really fast or whatever. The vast majority of us would be happy to sit around in a cave and say things like “I’ll have another leg of mammoth for my tea”. But its the very few that get out and do the things that need to be done.

After the Origin

In 1866, a few years after the Origin of Species was first published, a German biologist called Ernst Haeckel arrived at Charles Darwin’s country home, Down House, and met with the now famous naturalist and a few of his friends; among them were Lyell and Huxley. Haeckel was very keen on Darwin’s theories, and did for Darwin in Germany what Huxley had done so successfully for him in Britain – he very strongly and openly supported the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Over the next few decades, natural selection was gradually applied more and more to people and society. An American Yale professor called William Sumner was particularly keen on it, and wrote an essay to tell people about it. He supported Darwin’s idea that life was a struggle. The struggle for survival was epitomised in the American way of life – the rich and successful became rich and successful because they worked at it. You didn’t deserve to have the great comforts in life unless you went out and got them. The struggle for doing just that weeded out the weak, meek, unfit, unhealthy and the uneducated. Unless you gave them help, like government aid or welfare. If you did, they would multiply, creating more of a burden for the government who was giving the aid, and drag the country down with them. In 1883, Sumner published a little essay in which he asked what the social classes owe each other. He came up with a very reassuring answer – nothing.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, Haeckel was promoting social Darwinism to anyone who would listen. At the time, Richard Wagner was at the top of the charts, and Teutonic ideas like war being good for the health and the natural supremacy of the Aryan race were highly fashionable. It was all perfectly logical: Darwin had proven that the fittest survive. Therefore, the superior Germans must be biologically superior to any losers. And they must be kept that way. Dont allow Germans to marry non-Germans, and create environments where like-minded Aryans can meet and eventually create more like-minded Aryans. Anything that might weaken the race must be removed from it. This list included criminals, the insane, the disabled, and democrats. They called it racial hygiene. Because man could now be classified as an animal (thanks to Darwin), there was now no basis for a monarchy – that is, you couldn’t say you deserved to rule a kingdom because it was your divine rite. If you struggled and fought your way to the top, now that was more like it.

Does all this sound familiar?

In order to get all this psuedo-scientific ho-ho across to the next generation, and into the 20th century, a youth movement was founded. The man who put it into operation was called Heinrich Himmler. He was absolutely head-over-heals about everything Haeckel had every committed to paper. And so was his friend, Adolf Hitler.

These ideologies which were on such an upward rise that they came to dominate politics in eastern Europe. Yes, they spread to the rest of the world, but it was here that things really led to the shape of the later half of the century. One cold Sunday, in April 1917, a Russian called Vladimir Ulyanov arrived at a train station on the Finland-Sweden border. It was the last stage of a long and dangerous journey that had been undertaken using secrecy, spies, and clandestine operations. Ulyanov had spent the majority of the Great War in Switzerland, and getting from there back to Russia in time to do his bit for the revolution was extremely difficult. The reason he wanted to get there so badly was simple: he was a protege of Karl Marx. He’d read his books, and understood his ideas. Though Marx was long dead, it was Ulyanov who took his teachings to Russia, and changed the course of history. He also changed his name – to Lenin.

Top Gear Drinking Game

For those that are fans of said show. Its really simply – everyone crowds around a TV or computer or whatever, put on an episode of Top Gear, and drink when something of the following happens:

–          Jeremy asks “How hard can it be?”

–          James is called “Captain Slow”

–          Richard is called “Hamster”

–          The word “Stig” is used

–          James says “Power!” with a constipated facial expression

–          A caravan is destroyed

–          A piano is dropped on a Morris Marina

–          Male and/or female genitalia are mentioned.

–          They enter a workshop and “que the music”

–          Something catches fire

–          Something sinks

–          Speed cameras are mentioned

–          A car is spun on the Hammerhead

–          There is a feature aptly dubbed a “Richard Hammond real world scenario”

–          Richard is called short, little, or irritating.

–          Jeremy is called fat, bald or old.

–          James is referred to as living in the 1950’s or similar.

–          A tooth whitening kit is mentioned.

–          Jeremy wins a Cool Wall argument by placing a card too high for Richard to reach.

–          A French car is called rubbish, or stupid.

–          Any one of the following are mentioned, with negative connotations: Germans, Mexicans, Koreans, French, Americans, Welsh, footballers, Communists, Scouts, pedestrians, John Prescott, the Catholic Church, lorry drivers, Scots, Malaysians, politicians, or any member of the royal family.

–          Italians are referred to as liars.

–          The Star in the Reasonably Priced Car spins on the Second-To-Last Corner.

–          Jeremy says “… in the World”.

–          James says “Hallo” to a girl.

–          Jeremy says “it’s just staggering”.

–          A car has a 0-60 mph time of less than 4 seconds.

–          You hear tyre squeal

–          James mentions the queen

–          James gets lost

–          Jeremy has a rant

–          Someone says “Jaaag”.

I think there’s strong potential here to add in some rules about making drinking rules, nominating, etc. If you really want to have a laugh, watch the episode on double speed – but have a bucket handy, because you’ll piss yourself.

The Evolution of Evolution

On the 27th of December 1831, a Cherokee-class 10 gun brig slipped out of Plymouth on its way to South America on a voyage of exploration. It was captained by Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, and it would become one of the most famous ships in history, rivalling the Titanic and the Victory. It was called the HMS Beagle.

FitzRoy was a navy man – he had spent most of his life at sea, starting at the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth at the tender age of 12. He passed with full marks, the first person ever to do so, was promoted to lieutenant. But in the upcoming voyage, the Beagles second, he was nervous of the stresses of overwork and loneliness – on the first voyage of the Beagle, the ships captain, Pringle Stokes, had suffered such severe depression that he’d shot himself. Fitzroy’s own uncle, Lord Castlereagh, had also suffered a nervous breakdown, and killed himself. Acutely aware of these facts, FitzRoy was naturally worried about the upcoming voyage, and he approached his friend Sir Francis Beaufort, asking him to find a suitable companion for the voyage. The man that was selected had recently completed a degree at Christ’s college, Cambridge, had a fascination in the field of geology, and he was similar to FitzRoy in class and age. His name was Charles Robert Darwin.

During the voyage of the Beagle – which was meant to be three years but ended up taking nearly five – Darwin made several forays ashore, to study the fauna, flora and geology of South America and later, the Pacific Islands. He collected and classified anything and everything, making enormous collections which he periodically sent home. This simple act gave him an important reputation in England, and he became something of a well-respected scientist. Funnily enough, he didn’t know it at the time, and only discovered his new-found glory when he finally returned home at the beginning of October 1836.

Before he had left, his father had been gently steering him towards a life in the clergy. After his return, this was hardly mentioned again, and his family accepted that he was going to spend his time as a gentleman scientist, since he had already made a name for himself. He set about this profession eagerly. However, there is a common misconception that he got off the Beagle, and spent the next twenty years writing his great masterpiece, the Origin of Species, delaying its publication because he was afraid of its implications and the repercussions it would cause. When he stepped off the Beagle he only had the merest fringes of an idea that species change over time. What he did was to spend the next decade or so making himself very widely known as a geologist, describing his important findings in South America. It was during this time that he first started developing his ideas of species transmutation. But, since he had no definite findings, he kept his theories secret, and barely gave anyone, even to his wife Emma, a hint of the directions of his thinking. Everything was kept safely in little notebooks, locked away in his study.

A photograph of Darwin's "Tree of Life" in one of his notebooks. He has tentatively written "I think" above the diagram.

There are many areas where he drew ideas and concepts from. Among these were political tensions of the time, such as the rise of liberal parties in England, and the Crimean war. There were writings of the political economist and demographer Thomas Malthus. These described that a population will grow exponentially, until it reaches some sort of threshold defined by the availability of resources, where it will stay. There was the principal of Uniformitariansim, put forward by the Scottish geologist James Hutton, but later refined by Charles Lyell, in his famous book Principals of Geology. As it happened, Darwin was a friend of Lyell, and had even taken a copy of Principals on the Beagle with him. This idea (usually applied in geology) explains that current geological events happen at more or less the same rate as they always have, and can be used to explain geological phenomena and events. It also implies that the Earth is much older than the Irish Archbishop James Ussher had calculated. He took literal readings from the bible, implying that the Earth was created on the Sunday the 23rd of October, 4004 BC. This implies two things, as Terry Pratchett and Niel Gaimen imply in Good Omens – that God likes to get things done early in the morning, and that the Earth is a Libra.

But joking aside, Darwin combined all of this with his own thinking, and came out with the idea of evolution – species changing over time in order that they become adapted to their environment. If the environment changes the species must adapt with it, move to another environment, or go extinct. For the most part, the Origin of Species can be largely summarised:

1. Every species is fertile enough so that if all offspring survive to reproduce, the population will grow.

2. Despite occasional fluctuations, the population size will remain roughly constant.

3. Resources that sustain the population, such as food, will also remain roughly constant over time.

4. A struggle for survival is thus set up.

5. Individuals in a population differ significantly from others in the population.

6. Much of this variation is heritable – it is passed from parent to offspring.

7. Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive, and less likely to reproduce and pass on there traits to a successive generation. Conversely, those individuals which are better suited are more likely to survive and reproduce, giving their traits to the next generation. This process is termed Natural Selection

8. Natural selection creates populations which are adapted to their environment. Ultimately, the variations can accumulate over time, to such an extent that new species are formed.

These points were the basis of Darwin’s theory. After finishing his work on the geology of South America, he felt that the time was still not yet right for him to come out of the evolutionary closet. He was well known in geological circles, and widely respected in that field. But he felt he had to acquire some backing in the field of biology, before presenting his ideas on evolution. So he began his work on barnacles. He thought it would take a year or two, and give him a fair number of publications and insight into how species are classified and arranged. It ended up taking eight years, and by the end, he was thoroughly fed up with barnacles, as anyone would be.

So the scene was set, and he began to put his work together. Still concerned about the public reaction to such a heretic theory, he armed himself with other naturalists, who he had carefully told his secret to. Most notable of these was a young man who, like Darwin, had also gone on a great sea voyage – Thomas Henry Huxley. But it was a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace which changed everything. Wallace was unlike Darwin in that he did not come from an upper-class background. He had gone on a collecting spree to South America which lasted four years. Sadly, on his way back to England, the ship he was on caught fire and sank, taking virtually his entire collection with it. It was soon after this that he too began to develop his own theory on the transmutation of species, and managed to contact Darwin. But it was later, while he was in Indonesia observing and collecting birds of paradise, that he managed to put everything together. While he was bed ridden with malaria, he wrote an essay describing his theories, which he sent to Darwin. Strangely, Darwin was one of those very rare scientists who dont really seem to care who makes an important discovery, so long as it gets made. But it was a shock for him to realise that Wallace was thinking on such similar lines. He even considered abandoning everything in favour of Wallace, and letting him take all the credit – because he was so concerned about the theories implications. It was Huxley who insisted that he keep going, and kept him motivated. Darwin kept at it, and the book was first published on Thursday, the 24th of November 1859, priced at fifteen shillings. Needless to say, there were responses, and not all of them positive. Darwin was pleased with the books success – the first printing of 1250 c0pies were snatched up extremely fast. And he managed to avoid having to account for his ideas by staying out of the way, at his house in Kent. But Huxley revelled in the debate. Just seven months after the first publication, he famously debated with Samual Wilberforce at Oxford, in front of 700 people or so. He left with his head held high, and the losers with their tails between their legs.

There were problems with Darwin’s theories on Natural Selection. First and foremost is that at the time, there were no intermediate species. If birds had evolved from reptiles, where were the breptiles? The answer to that came in 1861, although Darwin probably never knew about it, in the form of the fossil of Archeopteryx, found near Langenaltheim in Germany.

Here was the fossil of an animal that had feathers and wings like a bird, but claws, teeth and a bony tail like a reptile. Since then other discoveries have been made of other links. The famous duck-billed platypus is another example – it has hair and suckles its young like a mammal, but lays eggs like a reptile.

Secondly, Darwin didn’t know how hereditary worked. How could traits of parents be passed on to offspring. It was the Augastinian Friar, Gregor Mendel, who provided the explanation for that. He experimented on pea plants, and paved the way for the science we now call genetics. And he was doing this at roughly the same time as Darwin was writing up the Origin. But because he was doing it in what is now called the Czech Republic, Darwin never heard of his work.

Like Copernicus before him, Darwin showed that the world that we are part of does not have to be explained in terms of divine beings and miracles, but by experimentation, observation and comparison. The Orgin of Species now ranks among the all time greatest seminal works, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Newton’s Principia. But importantly – and this is what caused so much fuss – it showed that man is not special. We evolved to where we are in the same way as everything else. We are not here by some divine spark, and when we become extinct, evolution and life on this planet will continue on without us.

Darwin died on the 19th of April 1882, at the age of 73. His work certainly changed the world, even though he was always modest about it, and preferred to stay at home rather than go out and publicise his ideas. The day after his death, his wife began to prepare for his burial in the St Mary’s churchyard, not far from his home. But Thomas Huxley – unkown to Darwin’s family – had other ideas. He spoke to the president of the Royal Society, William Spottiswoode, who in turn brought the matter before parliament. Darwin was given a major ceremonial funeral, and was buried near John Herschal and Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, a surprising end for a man who, toward the end of his life, had quietly stopped believing in God.