Rasik Bhadresa’s excellent essay “Let Us Celebrate Darwin”, has left me wondering what else to say about the great man in his bicentenary year, so I’ll just let the stream of consciousness flow, and hope that it’s not a string of entirely unconnected thoughts.

Darwin saw the storm stirred up by “The Origin”, but did he imagine it still going on after 150 years? The inane intelligent design argument immediately springs to mind but more fascinating is the discovery that the cow genome contains a piece of snake DNA that it picked up about 50 million years ago. This is one example from the growing body of evidence that ‘the tree of life’ concept may be wrong and that the phenomenon of ‘Horizontal Gene Transmission’ (HGT) is responsible for genetic traits jumping across chasms of taxonomic distance, an event not confined to bacteria as once thought but acting at all levels including higher groups like vertebrates and flowering plants. This stems from research enabled by DNA studies. What a time to be a biologist! We are very fortunate to witness the diverse fruitfulness of what only a few decades ago was looked on as ‘the soft science’.

Less fortunate are the climate scientists who have to make predictions more dire with each week that passes. Carbon-trading always seemed like a ‘smart alec’ politician’s idea but now it appears that wind farms and the like won’t stop the warming getting out of control either; they cannot keep up with the year-on-year increase in coal-fired power in China and India. And I still can’t understand why governments are bailing out the car industries in this recession. As things stand the prospects for future generations of East Anglian naturalists look grim. Darwin’s inspiration for the mechanism of evolution may have arisen during the voyage on HMS Beagle, but most of the evidence he amassed came from observations of everyday things at home and copious correspondence with plant and animal breeders. The word evolution was carefully avoided in The Origin. Darwin had realized from early on that he ‘could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law’ [of transmutation]. So, following publication of The Origin and after a period of refuge in the uncontentious study of orchids, he embarked on the Descent of Man (1871) where his theory on the origins of man was made clear. This, he said, was ‘so that no honourable man should accuse me of concealing my views’. As if...