Life Science Tools of the Trade

I happily confess that I haven’t read many of Charles Darwin’s published works. Of those few that I have, one of my favourite passages (from The Voyage of the Beagle) is this:

“In the evening we reached the island of San Pedro, where we found the Beagle at anchor. In doubling the point, two of the officers landed to take a round of angles with the theodolite. A fox (Canis fulvipes), of a kind said to be peculiar to the island, and very rare in it, and which is a new species, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching the work of the officers, that I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer. This fox, more curious or more scientific, but less wise, than the generality of his brethren, is now mounted in the museum of the Zoological Society.”

Poor old fox. Little did he know his place in history.

Darwin, I suppose, was simply following accepted Natural History custom of his day, collecting a specimen for the museum back home. I know people who do this now, embarking on “prospecting” missions to exotic locations, to collect, catalogue, preserve, and, yes, bonk on the head (or the entomological equivalent, drop in alcohol) various unfortunate creatures. Perhaps even threatened or rare ones – by mistake, one might hope, or through ignorance of their scarcity. I recognize that Darwin’s time was different than today. But even so, it grates on me a little that he ”collected” the trusting Canis fulvipes quite so cavalierly.

Ironically, we can perhaps stretch the blame to encompass Darwin’s nature: in his autobiography, he notes that “The passion for collecting which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brother ever had this taste.”  But perhaps that’s playing the deterministic card a bit too much. And after so many years, Darwin hardly needs the likes of me to cut him some slack.

In researching this piece, I came across this rather endearing illustration of the little fox, who it appears now goes by the altogether more exciting name of Pseudalopex fulvipes. You can read all about him in this paper by J. E. Jiménez, or on this website. Unfortunately, it seems as though time hasn’t treated Darwin’s fox well, and he and his vulpine friends are still critically endangered.

Which brings me, via a tortuous route, to the point of this piece – the hammer. As a scientific tool, it’s better suited to the geology for which Darwin brought it along, than the Natural History to which he applied it on this occasion. But regardless of method, the result is that Canis fulvipes ended up in a museum collection, to ultimately be re-classified in the genus Pseudalopex (or perhaps Lycalopex - I’ve become rather confused in trying to sort this out). I confess I haven’t looked into the history of when and how this was done – whether on morphological, or genetic grounds, or perhaps a combination of both. But I can’t help wondering what Darwin would have made of the modern tools we have to aid us in classification in the Twenty-First Century -  this whole new discipline called “Phylogenetics“. Nurture may be one thing, but Nature leaves a fingerprint, and if you have the right skills, you can sort the evolutionary relationships out using a molecular hammer of much smaller size, and much larger impact.

None of this is news to anybody, I suppose – but imagine, if you will, what Charles D. would have done with a modern-day arsenal of analytical tools at his disposal. Think of the books he would have written. And then go and look at the books he did write, and be amazed. With little more than a notebook, a keen set of observational skills, and that all-important hammer, Darwin changed the way we all look at species, their relationships, and their evolution. And he was even stealthy enough to strike down poor Pseudalopex while it was distracted.

Happy Darwin Day, everyone.

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Some further reading, of the technical sort:

J. E. Jiménez  (2007). Ecology of a coastal population of the critically endangered Darwin’s fox (Pseudalopex fulvipes) on Chiloé Island, southern Chile. Journal of Zoology, Volume 271 Issue 1, Pages 63-77. Jiménez and co-authors have written a number of papers about this species.

B. Rannala and Z. Yang (2008). Phylogenetic inference using whole genomes. Annual Reviews of Genomics and Human Genetics, Volume 9, Pages 217-231. PMID 18767964 A technical, but not completely overwhelming, treatment of a very complex subject.

Posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 11:23 pm Categorized as:General

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