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

https://books.google.com/books?id=lIcoAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA179&lpg=PA179&dq=charles+darwin+eyebrows&source=bl&ots=YrNkw9VczZ&sig=ACfU3U06m2pYFahEfpPveHOyT8auD0ZeXw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwivsMeU4LvgAhUbJzQIHUaoA5wQ6AEwFXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=charles%20darwin%20eyebrows&f=false

[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