they were a lot like other elites who help people in bondage. and i think that's hard sometimes for americans to grapple with because we revere our founders and they were heroes in many ways but this one area, we can't hold them up because they were slaveowners. >> the book is called the ties that bound. first ladies and slaves and the author maurice jenkins swarts. >>

director of the darwin manuscript project at the american museum of natural history and he will be joining as soon. a special welcome to the other staff members and research from the american museum of natural history. we are very pleased you were here. thank you, thank you. and also to the students and researchers from fordham university. it's a pleasure to have you here. this morning our focus of course is darwin. all of you have a special relationship with this man, and today will focus on his backyard experiments. and doctor james costa will guide us through the story. he is an aspiring scientist and esteemed author of the new book "darwin's backyard" and you've already seen that you're actually able to purchase it

here after the presentation and have doctor costa, or jim as we will call him, but a special personal message for you. while people are standing in line to buy that book, we have a first edition, a very rare sample of the darwin materials the library is so lucky to have. and for you also do know that you can come back and research are special collections in that field. we also are very happy that the publicist, senior publicist kyle, and editor of the book are here to join us. there have been as you may have noticed most excellent book reviews out about jim's book, and the "new york times" mention

it specific is most inventive and entertaining. so there you go. whatever you say, they all agree that the key argument is in this book that advanced technologies are not really necessary to develop sophisticated knowledge of biology and ecology. and it's good for us all to hear. all it takes to probe nature secret is a bit of creativity and resourcefulness, is what jim writes in the book. and to prove this he has added some of darwin's quirky do-it-yourself household experiments. and the readers i invited to try those out in their own backyards, or in our case, our windowsills in new york city. the book is therefore really an

invaluable tool to also students, and young students, and here at the new york botanical gardens were looking for to welcoming many of the new naturalists who have read this book, and are inspired to become botanists themselves it's my great pleasure and privilege to introduce dr. james costa now. jim is an executive director of the highlands biological station and a professor of biology at western carolina university. where he teaches courses on biogeography, evolution and, of course, darwin. he's a long time associate in entomology at harvard museum of zoology and a former fellow of the radcliffe institute for advanced study, as well as in berlin. jim lectures widely in u.s. and abroad, destroy serving as the distinguished lecturer amnesty

of the charles darwin trust. he's the author three major books already, on the organic law of change, and the annotated origin. jim lives in the blue ridge mountains of north carolina but has ventured out to come and visit us in the big city and tell us more about darwin. please help me welcome him. [applause] >> wow. it's great to be here. i can't really -- expect to come in from the provinces. great to be back in my home state. wonderful to see family here, old friends and colleagues and darwin enthusiasts. some things are in order.

i'm deeply grateful of course to vanessa and her team here at the new york botanical garden for hosting me and my friend and colleague david, for cosponsoring this event. it was such a special privilege and pleasure. and, of course, i want to thank wonderful team at norton, colin was mentioned and amy cherry, my editor. really they have been wonderful to work with and i am very, very grateful for them as well. and, of course, i would be remiss if i didn't acknowledge my wife leslie who unfortunately is not here with me today who did many of the illustrations for this book. so many thanks and thanks to all of you for being here. did i just lose sound? is it okay? is all right? there we go. this is a special privilege. what i hope to do is really share with you maybe a perspective on charles darwin that is new to you.

we think about charles darwin, the image that comes to mind might be characterized by this portrait, or maybe some of these other images. you consider these photographs and portraits of darwin and you can't help but think this is a melancholy guy, i got bummed out much of the time. maybe he's tormented, sad. he is usually late in life but is always very serious. i came to realize over the years of studying darwin at his time that these give us a rather inaccurate portrait of darwin. i think they see more about victoria portrait, maybe limitations of photograph technology than they do about the person. the darwin on fluid is, the darwin unfairly with is a dad, husband, a friend, a a correspondent. it's a darwin who has a sense of humor. he's a real jokester, who can be

self-replicating. there's a whole other aspect to darwin that i find endlessly fascinating. there is nothing that tells the story of the real charles darwin than his pension for endless quirky and curious experiments -- penchant. the ways in which that engaged his family, his friends, his correspondent from around the world. this is a quote from darwin that i love. i love little experiment. that's suffocating -- self-replicating kinds of ways. he sort of makes fun of himself turkey makes fun of the experiment and they are quirky, curious, but they are all an interesting point. there's an interesting scientific point behind them and that's worth exploring. many of you will know i think darwin and young man in his 20s traveled around the world

on hms beagle. interesting that became quite the somebody at returning home. aside from some limited travel, scotland and family holidays to the this eccentric he never left home again. he married in 1839. here are the wedding portraits. and over the years they had ten children. only seven of whom survived to adulthood. so certainly like many families of that time there were tragedies. so yes, certainly there were times when darwin has a melancholy aspect, but i think more times than not, the darwin that comes through in his correspondent, his interaction with his friends and family is more the english darwin and that's the darwin i would like to introduce you to. -- impish. by involving the kids says a lot about darwin and his work. the all sorts of little glimpses

of the way which his kids were involved or very much aware of his work. for example, there was about an eight year period when darwin studied barnacles of all things. barnacles particles particles. some of the young ones, all they knew was barnacles. dad did particles. this one stories were one of the kids is visiting friends and looked around puzzled. where does dad did was barnacles? like for all he knew every kids dad does barnacles. that's understandable. there was an interesting episode of the mystery of the buzzing places where they were very curious about these buzzing bumblebees zoom into the garden. we understand this to be in terms of trap lining behavior, marking different waypoints. they didn't know that. the ceremony of communication was a known so soccer trying to figure it out at an characteristic fashion charles darwin rallies the troops. he gets all the kids out there

running around trying to mark the bees with loud to make it more visible zooming around trying to track them and understand what you're doing. years later later darwin had remembered his dad at that time in that study he was like a boy amongst other boys. he was just out there running around in the garden with the little ones calling around in the hedgerows and so on. there's one other episode a little glimpse here to share with you that says something about charles darwin in his relationship with his kids. this is a little note in a publication that you can imagine was maybe not the most widely read, the entomologist weekly intelligence service. everybody subscribed. [laughing] here's a note about some rare beatles found near the house. this is side francis leonard and horse darwin, the young

collectors. here clearly is the proud dad pinning this note to this periodical just practice can be. he was happy to collect himself turkey loved beatles and here his kids are out collecting beetles. this is maybe in some ways a more telling publication from 1859, the same year that saw the origin of species published which is pretty interesting. darwin's experiments, his weird wild wonderful endless series of experiments all took place almost literally in his backyard. in his greenhouse but also in the woodlands, in the meadows, in his lawn. i have long been struck by how fundies can be for a modern audience certainly. sometimes very quirky, kind of odd but the fact they are always interesting and there's always an interesting point .2 then provides an interesting book for engaging today's young students

perhaps. these are as vanessa minchin eminently accessible. experiments have contacted on-the-fly literally in the yard, no sophisticated equipment, no precision special consideration for experimental design, analytical procedures, all of that. what's interesting to me as onee interested in history of ecology and evolution is how often foundational principles in these fields have their origin in these literally backyard experiments, done almost on-the-fly. so this makes, this makes these experiments easily duplicated. and, of course, adaptable to any age group that can be scaled up or down. you can run these with kindergartners, with college age students. something for anyone, any grade or age. so what was the experiment icing all about? one word that surely comes to

mind is curiosity. that's what drives really any kind of investigation, natural phenomena, patterns, processes and drove a lot of this, but after a while darwin came to fascinating evolutionary understanding of the world press at a time when no one else did. and answer part of this experimt icing became an effort to gather evidence, new way of understanding the nature and origin of species, often using the local case studies in seeing universal principles in his yard. i find that fasting. so many of you have may be vend into on the origin of species will remember that in that book, darwin refers to the origin as one long argument. what does he mean by that? this covers disparate subjects, domestication so on and so forth

and get it all hangs together as a cohesive argument. but what you may not notice is how often many of those arguments are based upon or they are buttressed by the necessity backyard experiments. the book behind the book is really this book to me. in a sense of darwin experiment book. one of those works in which he recorded various kinds of experiments and the result, fascinating book that now reside in cambridge university library. so much could be said about what darwin did and how we did it. for starters i'm just going to give you a taste of one subject and has to do with dispersal. the geographical dispersion, how do species become distribute as we see the on earth. i'm not going to go through all of these experience but this is a sample of, often rather odd and quick investigations,

seasoned salt water, hitchhiker experience with ducks duck feet which i say something, collecting bird droppings to dissect out the seeds, so a supporter of gdp examples of his various experiments aimed at trying to understand dispersal. so for example, think that remote oceanic islands, the galapagos islands landlord with think about charles darwin but really any remote oceanic islands is of interest to him because you have volcanic islands never in contact with a mainland, a continental mainland. there are many plants and animals. how did they get the? it's easy not to see how a flying animal might be blown off course by storms or something but a lot of these critters don't fly. how do they get there? he's thinking about this and he figures floating, rafting, sometimes scary but often just loading. the question becomes could they

float? courtesies of species float and somehow make it to some speck of land in the middle of the ocean somewhere? his good friend joseph hooker the botanist didn't think so. he thought this is nonsense. darwin, he realized where's the evidence? and to demonstrate that? ocker couldn't so of course darwin decides it himself. he doesn't do things by halves he throws himself into this project where he has jar after jar of saltwater and he just feels the seller. the house is practically full of this jars, species after species of floating cities, taking samples, will the germinate after week? what about two weeks, a month, three months? success, they do seem to survive exposure to saltwater oftentimes, not always. the kids were really rooting for their dad. they knew that joseph hooker was

dubious about enterprise, darwin and fire to hooker in a letter that the children were at first tremendously eager and as it often what i should be doctor hooker, prove them wrong. and, indeed, he was triumphant. species after species proved to be viable after exposure to saltwater, except then poker point something out that was inconvenient. he said yes, but a lot of those sea species given testing, they sink. this is a problem because that's a moot point whether they can survive if they will never float out to one of these islands. in another letter to hooker, the rather the music darwin says it's, i've been taking all this trouble for nothing. those letters, they are a window into a personality, a window a person. i find that fascinating. it's emblematic of darwin,, undaunted. what does he do?

let's try drawing the seeds, let's try seeds and dried fruit still adhering to foliage. page after page of the book dedicated to floating. poker sent him species. specimens from all over the place. to the satisfaction he could show significant number of these can float for extended periods. they remain viable for extended periods. if you look at and alice of ocean currents you can calculate how far they could be carried in principle thousands of miles. hooker was duly chastened, came to agree. as was mentioned i think an experiment like this that is eminently accessible and fun for a modern audience young and old. for example, any chapter of this book i have a do-it-yourself section where people can replicate experiments. for example, you can experiment

ties allah darwin getting around pick you can look at seeds in a pickle and you can test for the viability over periods of time. great fun. or a related topic, that was remote oceanic islands. what about ponds and lakes, island on the land? how do aquatic organisms get carried around? darwin thinks docs have something to do with this. ducks surely. he is envisioning that ducks when they're you're sleeping og their feet in the water and hitchhikers will and partly perhaps climb on board and the ducks wake up and off they go and the fly hundreds of miles and they carry these hapless hitchhikers with them. darwin is fascinated by this. this is a do-it-yourself version of his experiment that his version of issues actual duck these two severed of course but he probably ate the ducks. they were dinner. he would dangle the ducks eat in

his snail great to see if the snails would climb on board and then he would pull them out when they did, and they did and you'd see how long this about outside of water? an hour, 24 hours, 48 hours? prepa, how far could a duck fly in 28 hours? they could be carried hundreds and hundreds of miles. i want to entice kids to kind of test this motive of dispersal but don't want them to be chopping the legs off of ducks, as you might understand. and so i give instructions for building your own models. jewish is a bobber or a ping-pong ball and it wouldn't out and a little fabric duck foot and attach it to online as you see one of my younger son doing here. you can go fishing for aquatic hitchhikers ala darwin which is great fun. i've done this with educators and students, my own kids. it's remarkable how many think you do catch with your duck

feet. darwin once again was kind of indicated. dispersal, he wasn't content with just doing his backyard experiments and looking at dispersal. here we also see, this is one area where darwin becomes the crowd source or your here for example, are for letters are published in the gardners chronicle in 1855. what are these about? these are about asking readers, has anyone ever tried this? does anyone know if seeds will float in saltwater? will they survive saltwater? i would appreciate it if people would try this instantly the results. letter after letter and, of course, he is famous by then that readers were very happy to do this and send in the results, send them to him, send them to the magazine. some of this correspondence became cited in the origin of species. these are reported in the origins of species. i consider darwin to be the original crowdsourcing.

whenever he would need a bigger picture sense of will this work, he would publish an open letter and try to get people to send in the results. i think that's really fun. there's one other interesting aspect to this whole enterprise, and this is darwin's openness to the oddest experiment. we're on the subject of dispersal. i call this frank is experiment. little francis darwin was known as frankie would use give it when he was eight he came up with his experiment and darwin described in a letter to joseph hooker, and he says i must tell you another of my profound experiments, you can see he is tongue-in-cheek, very profound, frankie said to be why shouldn't the birthday killed by hawk or lightning or something with seeds and its craw. a bird flying along made over the ocean and lightning strikes it or hail strikes it or something and poor bird down it goes and it's floating in the

sea and it gets washed up on some foreign sure and it's got built-in fertilizer. in the form of the rotting carcass. this is frankie is idea. what does this that's a quick he says to hooker, no sooner said than done. no problem. a poor pigeon is that a bunch of seeds and ends up sadly floating in saltwater for a month he says in his notebook come in this letter he reports and also in his notebook, though seeds they have grown splendidly. another box checked. another interesting form of dispersal. so dispersal is, tells us so much right there about darwin and their other areas as well. biodiversity studies in a sense, botanical studies really. one who pioneered the idea of using very small areas, understanding diversity in very small areas. here in this nearby meadows he

worked with the children's governess catherine who was quite a talented botanist, very happy to help darwin with these experiments. you get these glimpses of the triumphs and their trials and tribulations. here's darwin saying i made out my first class. anyone who is tied to keep out a grass one of his pain. this is not easy to identify grasses. but he is triumphant. he never expected he says to make out a grass in his life. he is thrilled about this. what i find fascinating about these experiments, the studies with catherine is that they are foundational to key studies in history of ecology. because they lead to what are known as the weed garden experiments. these again are literally in the backyard, the long plot. these are like small 354 plots. you should house in the background. this is literally the backyard. in the case of the long plot is

mowing the lawn but leaving the plot unmount and the ideas to document the various species that are occurring over time and co-occurring. he can rest in the genetic diversity, different groups that are going in these very small areas. he's interested in competition, interested in what persists and what doesn't. it natural selection and action. the ecologist in the audience will recognize terms like niche partitioning, competitive exclusion, bio 101 textbooks have these principles. what i i find fascinating is te principles literally originate in this experiment. they come back to darwin's backyard. i find that really, really interesting. the weed garden is a study of natural selection as well where he clearly plot and little seedlings would, he would mark them with colored wires basically looking at their

demographics, looking at their mortality rates over time. again, absolutely foundational to the history of ecology. very interesting. done just in the yard, right? anyone can do a weed garden or a lawn plot. so i give instructions on do-it-yourself versions we can make a little plots. you can track them, track the dynamics of the species the way darwin did and even perhaps compared to results with darwin's results because they are all available. pretty interesting. so at, if the origin is one long argument, you know, we have to remember of course darwin may be best known for the origin of species that he published a multitude of books post origin, many of them experimental in nature and so there's a whole series of interesting volumes, i

call this one longer argument because darwin, may seem that he is exploring diversity of subjects, orchids, climbing plants, carnivorous plants, earthworms and so one. it's all of a piece, it's all intended to extend and reinforce his overarching theory, the unity of life, to understand that idea, the big picture relationship of all organisms have come understand better the wing natural selection works, adaptation and so on. that's the longer argument. so much could be said, i of course don't have time to give you a real sampler but i'm going to give you a taste of some of these post origin investigations because i find them so informative. this is a little smattering of topics he got into. pigeons, barnacles, climbing plants. you can imagine at any one time a dozen different experience with being juggled at the house.

darwin planted flower beds, excremental beds and in his garden, he also built a greenhouse. he grew climbing plants in there. he had orchids, carnivorous plants, all to conduct his various experiments. many people find it a little bit odd that the very first book to come out after the origins, this book orchids a few years later. 1862. what in the world, is he becoming something of a doddering naturalist and author goes on some kind tangential direction? no, the orchids are another piece. is tested by the intricate adaptations of orchids, the ways in which the relationships with insects, often one-to-one relationship with their pollinators. the ways in which different lineages of orchids, they sort of our variations on a theme. they are highly modified reproductive structures and pedals and all of that. they are all modified in

different ways in different lineages that all to the same in turkey found it very, very interesting. he thought it more on the philosophical issue of design in nature. he argued against design. then you discover interesting omission, mechanisms in orchids. for example, orchids are one of those groups that package nepal into discrete units that botanist call bulimia, little pollen packets. often we have this blockage relationship with insects the little pollen packets are glued to the insects as insects tried again to the orchid to get at the nectar. lastly by these relationships but then also ways in which some of them don't rely on a kind of passive gluing. they forcibly fire their little -- here's his neighbor and friend and protége at one time, he comments in 1874 essay, mr. darwin has been so good as to irritate one of these flowers in my presence.

it was still nearly three feet when it struck an interior to the paint of the window. darwin thought this was hilarious. unsuspecting friends and family in the greenhouse he would sort of trigger one and did a little parts fired at them and stick to their shirts that he thought that was a hoot. he was really into that. this is down bank, a favorite picnic spot for the family. he would go here you can imagine the kids gamboling around, playing in the governess in hot pursuit. darwin is interest in the orchids among other things of this beautiful, beautiful site. a terry document some of those interesting holiday relationships like this beautiful burnett mosque which you see the coil as these yellow packets. those are pollen packets. unfurled and all these paired pollen packets turkey document

quite a few of these cases of insects this can fit into broader interest and that is the interest of cross-fertilization, cross polarization. overarching interest darwin is convinced all organisms at the integral must cross fertilize comp report. i will get into why he thought that. it is interesting but it won't get into that. what it will mention is his dedication to document it in different cases especially with plants. here's a little page taken from what other notebooks where he has mapped out the structure of a flower engine what he called the gangly, the language to be interest of the flower. you can see that to good effect in rhododendron for example, rhododendron out that classical upturn pattern. he's interested in curious

pollination mechanisms like trigger sensitive pollination accuracy with our berries or our mountain laurels where the stamens are refluxed back and debbie will displace them and they shower the insect with flour. he just love that. he thought that was fascinating and document case after case of interesting cases of this pollination. broad beans, common themes in the very curious wave the stamens and pistols are wrapped into the tube he calls it like a french horn and when the bees talk on the floor pedals how it pokes out and catch paul on the back of the beat. these relationships he thought were fascinating. it also led to an interesting episode, discovery or maybe a co-discovery he made made when he stumbles upon a principle that botanist call -- your different flower in the same species. this is interesting. he first found this in

primroses. he thought he made a great discovery returns at is was known already. but to give them credit it is only figure out the significance of this phenomena. this is interesting to notice this flower upon the left, the female is a very long pistol, the female part of the flower and very, very short statement. you can't even see the stamens. but the so-called mao more on the right has very long stamens and a very short pistol so just the inverse. this is curious, so-called e-mail and mail, comey's very, very excited by this. he thinks maybe, he believes again thinking big picture, he's thinking all organisms, plants and animals and sexually our unit sexual. some of them retain that like many perfect flowers have stamens and pistols equally well-developed. but often timeshift separate sexes occluding implants you have kind of male flowers, e-mail flowers on other

individuals. maybe this is an example of evolution in action. they are in the process of the virgin he thinks can super civic center he writes to his friends is this known? has anybody study this? his working hypothesis is if this is evolution in action, well then, logically perhaps the female morph would be producing disproportionally more seeds. you give me more seeds than the male morph. effectively he wants to test this hypothesis. what do you do? you marshal the troops. out the kids go, out they go. this is from the experiment book, may 13 my children gathered 79 stocks of male flowers, 52 female flowers. then he's doing meticulous crossing. he is studying c production by these morphs and he goes on ann and on. he's just like with the seed soaking in salt water. he throws himself all in

together some evidence. he thinks he's onto something big, and then he crashes headlong into thomas henry huxley is great tragedy of science, and any scientist among us will have experienced this, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. in this case of course the manifestation of the great tragedy was that darwin found just the opposite of what he had expected, the so-called male morph was producing in a study many more seeds than the female. shoot, you know. so that turns out to be, a nice example would darwin had it wrong. he was barking up the wrong tree but that in itself is informative. it's a something about his stick to adeptness. he will test the hypothesis, tried to get out. he comes up short. act to the drawing board. but if you what's going on. he publishes whole book on this subject and he does get it right in the sense he realizes this is

all about outclassing out all about enforcing cross-fertilization between individuals. minimizing the self-realization by individuals. in that respect he got it right. so of course in that spirit i have a do-it-yourself darwinian encounters of the floral kind in my book where you can explore, you know, dissecting flowers look at the peculiar pollination mechanism. everyday even houseplants let alone common garden-variety type plants are endlessly interesting in these ways and can be dissected, observed. like the common salvia and his little lever action pollination mechanism is fast and it's a way to really get people maybe to engage not just with darwin but with the natural world and see things with new eyes. these are plans that are often planted ornamental he.

they are in peoples gardens. it in the house as houseplants and yet have they really looked closely? there's much more than meets the eye with these plans and death are interesting to me. let's briefly look at another couple of examples. carnivorous plants, darwin is fascinated because again thinking big picture darwin is interested in the unity of all of lights or even groups of organisms as seemingly different as plants and animals he thinks ancestral he must've had a common ancestor. and, therefore, be able to find evidence, he's a rest in plantlike animals and animallike plans, trying to find those lines of evidence that underscore the very ancient relationship. of course what group of plants is more animallike than carnivorous plants? these things that digest insects, they can't and they dissect insects. some of them can move very

quickly like venus fly traps, snap action, and him in her characteristically dry stodgy comments in a letter that her husband, she is only half joking. he really does want to show that it's fundamentally different physiologically from animals, even though quite quite different. what does he do? he sort of starts and stops these experiments because he's distracted by anything other experiments but at one point he ought and enforced break, on holiday. he's bored out of his mind and he tells one correspondent this place is like patagonia, there's nothing to do, nothing to look at. until he finds some sundays. then there's something i can look at. what are going to do? the first thing you might just begin to explore their dietary preferences and so he tries to

feed all of it of his hair. he tries defeated his toenails, things like that which admittedly like it is not very profound conclusion, they don't like you, i don't like toenails. [laughing] but you have to start somewhere. you got to start somewhere. there's a range of passing experiments i think are eminently accessible to a modern audience. feeding sundews of various kinds substance. darwin . darwin discovered he had a sense these carnivorous plants grow and nitrogen poor environments like boggs, and probably they are interested in substances with some kind of nitrogenous component. so does a series of extremist and he gets it right. he tries different substances. they don't like. sugar but they do like milk, for example, some protein and some sugar and so on. so you can do your own sort of experiment with these picky

eaters. there are a lot of fun. you can do experiments with fly traps. darwin was fascinated by answer independently discovered the way which you check the mechanism. get to touch a little specialize hairs on the inside surface with just the right frequency in just the right way and snap they go. and again you can torment them by giving them things they don't like to eat and then spit it out, slow-motion spitting out for a flytrap. it's really great fun, great fun. there's another group of plants that imminently animallike if you think about it and that is the climbing plant. the climbing plants. vines, the way they probe, the way they seem to grab things they sense thinks. there's something sinister and eerie about them. in popular culture, in lower they have a kind of negative, a negative aspect. people are a little bit wary of

them. it was exactly those attributes, visibility to touch perception and to react to that. at 1.1 of his neighbors garters was visiting and he has a climbing plant in a study that readily seen to latch on to a stick. he is marbling, his neighbors garbage garden this is most like their eyes, like vacancy. there's something disturbing about that. darwin is fascinated. so what does he do? the family like every good between family has got an indoor plant case. everybody's got beautiful indoor plant case. this is an early terrarium which his daughter and his wife loved putting nice ornamental plants in, but they were very tolerant of his, doing it, removing all the ornamental plant in putting vines and thinks in different what you would do, industry trends and investigations with climbing plants that use the

class upper surface, he would put tracing paper and then you see it in this diagram where he has a kind of visual marker, a reference point. you can look through the class at the tip of the growing tip of the shoot and notice, note its position using paper document or timeout it's moving and he documents and so discovers independently this principle of constant circular searching motion by growing shoots. he coined the term. this is already known but his term has prevailed. it's now by botanists today as circa mutation. he went through and is characteristic way hundreds of species documenting how they moved. he's trying to figure out what is the basis, and do that some kind of a nervous system like animals? the answer is no, they do have a nervous system like animals.

he didn't fully understand the physiologically understands this as a fascinating, it's an adapted elaboration of the movement that he finds all plants actual exhibit are all growing shoots exhibit the circular motion but in climbing plants it is exaggerated for adaptive reasons. so of course in the spirit of darwin's investigations in my book i provide instructions for observing variations on to think of the ways of climbing and also a kind of a home -- take a nice going fine or shoot like brewers hops and fitting a kind of circular dial with maybe numbers of a clock around the flower plot and showing how fast and oftentimes these growing shoots can move. something that really fascinated darwin. one final example for you here,

one final example and that is worms. darwin, this i think because darwin, this represents an area of interest very early in his career and was is very last set of studies, his last book before he died was this book on earthworms. his interest in the subject developer shall s.a.p. evolved over the years and it started out as earthworms as a geological force. this is classic darwin as a geologist trying to understand the slow steady accumulation of little tiny baby steps, alteration in the landscape that at of two great changes in the landscape overtime. he is convinced earthworms are just such a geological force, that imagined it in their billions in the soil literally eating their way through the soil, bringing sort of future castings and in that way very slowly and insensibly bearing

objects and reshaping the landscape. so he and is now grown sons, we're talking 1870s, went on many excursion to archaeological sites like stonehenge, for example, a big following block, a following block of stone at stonehenge was measuring how deeply as this song? if we know about how old it is we can get a sense of on average how quickly is this thing subsiding, right? earthworms as a geological force. then there's also this idea that he came to a little later, and that is it says something also about what he calls the scale of nature. the seemingly humble organisms, no limbs, not eyes, people assume that they just are, they don't do anything. they have no behavior to speak up and get he thinks they have personalities. they are intelligent. they are problem solvers. they are fascinating, intelligent beings that have

social sense. this is really a fascinating aspect because he sorts to experiment on their intelligence and their predilections he confided in one letter to one of his nieces, i am becoming deeply attached to worms. he worked with, this is a letter to one of his nieces. he worked with her sister lucy who is quite a talented experimentalist herself, did quite a few of experiments with darwin and, of course, much of her data are reported in this book. so worms as a geological force, here the inventiveness of one of the kids, horace, little horace darwin grew up to become one of the founders of the cambridge scientific instrument company was a very long-lived company, very inventive, inventor invene instruments and one of the earliest was the so-called worm stone. this is a diagram that horse published in 1901. the worm stone is a millstone

which would be set on the ground and then he designed this precision micrometer two very slowly measure that very slow subsidence of the millstone. this is replicated one at lucy south come one with you at downs house. in this way collect data on the downward movement of the big millstone through the action of worms or quantifying for the first time their ability to very objects. at the same time he and lucy also pioneered this idea of using -- to quantify the castings of the soil, earthworms will eat the way through the soil, they will, and they will essentially the soil will be deposited on the surface in very discreet little units called worm casts. you can collect the cast and you can try them and weigh them and you can get some sense of just how much assault was being rude. what different is it up to 16

times of soil per acre are moved by worms annually which is truly remarkable. that's not it, right? remember his interest in the personality of his words, there were intelligently if an opportunity to visit down house and you visit the partner, you will notice sort of a staging of one of their more memorable experiments. you notice there is a piano in the back of the room, and you notice that a you flowerpot one piano. one might assume the flowerpot probably disposed of flowers in it but no, no, no. this is one of his or murray's. darwin would maintain his worms in flower pots. in this reenactment he is trying to test the music appreciation of his worms. so he's got his wife is an accomplished pianist.

his son francis can play the bassoon which you see there and his old grandson bernard plays the penny whistle and they would play little concert, shall i say, to the worms trying to engage appreciation. and, of course, emma is, in a kind of classic way, she's always got a very dry, father has taken to train earthworms but does not make much progress as they can neither see nor hear. nonetheless establish ultimately vibration. they do detect vibration. they are not appreciating different genres of music but of abrasion they're paying attention to and then dissecting the wormerys and understand what they're doing he's fascinated by that. well, you know there we have an music appreciation earthworms as darwin would certainly smile at if nothing else. looking at wormerys you can

reconstruct experiments like darwin taking part color paper, cutting out little shapes, triangles, desks, squares, different types of angles of triathlons, sprinkling on the transit and observing, what do they prefer? have no limbs or eyes but how do they feel around? how did you make choices? they like to line their burrows with lease lethal paper and ont basis do they choose? they would set up their wormerys in this way and then they would sneak out at night and spy on the worms as a out on the surface in the dark trying to feel around and making selections of what shape paper, what size, and you can dissect these out and observe the way the selections that they've made but is when what he was doing t the darwin noticed they are snuggled in little girls together and all nestled in the mass. that made them think the action

of social appetites. they love to be together. togetherness in worms. again are far from an aspect of worms that any of us had ever thought possible possibly all g in this wonderful book that he published new the end of his life. and with that i'm going to, vanessa, if i can borrow your copy of the book, i wanted to share with you -- i'm very happy to give it back to you. i'm just going to share with you one passage, the very last passage of this book that kind of speaks to darwin's model of worms but also i think speaks to the way darwin, the way he learned to see things with new eyes and the lessons that he still offers us for us to try to understand the natural world and see this wonderful world with new eyes. so i think his earthworm work is

truly emblematic of a whole way of understanding the natural world and i thought i would just share that with you. it's the very last passage as a sister darwin's yields and meadows are a microcosm of the wider world. as with all the naturals investigation over the four years he lived, what you learned locally in a study in greenhouse, fielding garden, woodland and lawn at global implications. it is resident darwin's research on worm expand his entire life that down after he worked above grant as a reworked the soil beneath. that forward in your earthworm odyssey was classic darwin,, seeing, things with new eyes, new significance, asking with childlike wonder why or how, always extreme enticing to find an answer. he was as revolutionary as his worms. with this knack for asking questions at the determination to follow out and reinforces ideas, through subject after

subject to book after book, those books were like worm castings, slowly bearing received wisdom and old prejudices making the world anew. and with that i thank you all very, very much. [applause] >> thank you. thank you, and very happy to answer any questions. >> for the questions, we have ten more minutes for about five questions i believe. it you have a question, raise your hands and i will bring you the microphone because your questions will be recorded by the television crew. >> be careful what you ask. [laughing] >> i was saying hello, richard. >> hello. wonderful talk. wonderful talk. welcome since i have the

microphone i i just want to pot out that when darwin went to stonehenge to see how deep the stones were buried, a terrible trip for him and his son. he was very disappointed he said the words in this area not very industrious at all. i think there was some sort of disappointment about how deep the worm stone had sunk in the yard. didn't quite work out, , but anyway, lovely talk. >> he had certainly hoped that things would have progressed, you know, at a greater rate, absolutely. >> and now you have an opportunity to have a question from david. would you like to stand for a second because you are our cohosts and we unfortunately missed you. this is david frum the museum of natural history, director of the darwin -- [applause] >> great to see you. >> brca2, david. >> and i blame it all on your

metro-north. everything. a general question. thank you for this wonderful talk. bring experiments to life and put an emphasis on the day and they really do deserve. we think of darwin as a theorist, and obviously he is one of the great biological terrorists of all time. so what is the relationship, which comes first, the theory of the experiment, how they rely on each other? >> thanks, thanks, david. that is a great question. and maybe chicken and egg-ish, what comes first. but i think it all begins with the curiosity. and i think that curiosity and noticing things, and even at a level as a kid that's not sophisticated but there's a certain sense of wonder that he

think that many a good naturalists have anything darwin certainly had. i think noticing things and that sense of wonder, leading to observation, leading to eventually the sophistication sufficient to ask why or how. i cannot help but think that it's the observation, curiosity and observation that then stokes those created fires, , and yes,e was a theorist. he thought big. yet some bacon faceting theories, not all of which band out of course. i think that's a motivator for some of those at some level was observation and the kind of questioning about why and how that made him delve into understanding what others thought of the street. take the geologist trying to understand his grandiose theory of the earth and is processes. certainly realizing to try to better understand this i must make more observation.

i can contribute observational evidence. admittedly it is a chicken and egg kind of thing about theory versus observation, but ultimately that curiosity has got to start somewhere and that's got to start with kind of becoming aware of and noticing things in nature and that sense of wonder kicking in, i like to think. >> who has another question? >> there's one here. >> that was a great talk, thank you very much. i do question, since darwin did all of these experiments including a spare mental crosses, do you have any insight into why he never came up with doing -- experiments which have been done but were not know it at the time? how did he not come up with more information on the rules of inheritance which he thought was really a problem with his there because he thought inheritance

was always blini but how was he didn't observe that in his own experimental process? >> it's a good question. it's something of an ironing maybe that even while darwin was working away, gregor mendel was working away and his monastery garden in the 1860s and leading to insights that were not really appreciated for another 40 some odd years. i don't have necessarily a very good answer to that except that sometimes, and maybe relates to the question about the rising and observation and what you're pursuing. when you have a degree, a working hypothesis, a model you're looking for, it becomes difficult maybe to think of things in different ways and blending inheritance seems imminently logical. absolutely it just makes complete sense that inheritance must be blended. darwin had at some of you i think we'll know in the 1860s he put forth his own three of blending, this kind of idea which is one of the examples where darwin really got it

wrong. maybe this idea of, in retrospect we recognize that gregor mendel who may be himself didn't fully maybe appreciate the big picture significance of what he had found, particular inheritance, discrete genes, with white out-of-the-box like off anyone's radar. let's add to that the fact that although darwin did collect data, no one would accuse him of being overly quantitative, right? he made fun of himself about his lack of capacity for mathematics. so that kind of a quantitative analysis probably was not to his taste, i suspect. so yeah, that would be my take on that. thank you. >> we have time for one quick last question. >> thank you for the wonderful talk. i was just going to ask that same question, and i also heard

a rumor that darwin even had a manuscript of one of the papers them lying on his shelf unread after he moved out i guess. i would if you heard of that? and also won't would ask aboutr own writing habits because you're such a prolific author and i was wondering when you write or how you mix your research with your writing and if you could talk about that? >> sure, thanks. .. with assistance but yes, the short answer to the question about did darwin have greg or mendel's papers, that is an apocryphal story. as for my own writing, well, that's perhaps difficult to answer.

i take a uniform attorney and approach. in darwinian spirit, but by which i mean that i try to do something every day so incrementally, every day, of course once i had kids it shifted my whole living schedule and rather than being a night owl i would get up in the wii hours and have unbroken blocks of time. will the living commodity is time to work so that was a habit i started when my kids were born and they are now in their late teens and i'm still doing that and i'm only half kidding aboutthis uniform attorney and approach because i think if i can do something, however little, a paragraph every day , then it adds up to step-by-step, it adds upand over time before long you got something. you've got something you can

work with .thanks. >> i think we can't get a better lesson. i would like to thank you again for a wonderful insight in darwin. we all feel enriched and know more about this phenomenal man. you now have an opportunity to see some of these recitations and you will see when they are published with some information and the highlights and the message of the work. please come back to the botanica gardens. thank you for coming to this special friday morning science humanity seminar and if you would like to purchase the book, it is for sale around the corner and join me in another round of applause for our phenomenal speaker. [applause] [inaudible

conversation] >> here's a look at some of the best books of the year according to publishers weekly. in ants among elephants, joffrey did love describes her family's history and upbringing in india. peter manzo, curator of religion at the smithsonian's national museum of american history recalls the life of william butler, a photographer in post civil war america known for his spirit photography in the apparition is regarded city university of new york professor ashley dawson explores how cities could be affected by climate change in extreme cities. in fear city, new york university can pine recall the fiscal collapse of new

york city in 1975 and how the cities brush with bankruptcy reshaped ideas about government. and wrapping up our look at publishers weekly's best books of 2017 is the color of law, richard rothstein's report on how local, state and federal legislation is responsible for america's segregated cities. >> today those holes so for 300, $400,000. the african-american families were prohibited from moving into those homes and rented apartments in the city, did not gain 200, $300,000 in equity. white families came and today , those homes are unaffordable to working-class people. $100,000 in 1940 in our terms to 1947 was twice the national median income. working families can afford

to buy those homes. today those holes so for seven times national median income. middle-class families can't afford to move to the suburbs that were created in these enclaves in the 40s and 50s. today, nationwide we have a ratio of income, african-american income average is 60 percent of white income. african-american wealth is 5 to 7 percent of white wealth. most families in this country gain their wealth through having equity. it's an enormous difference between 60 percent income ratio and five percent wealth ratio is almost entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policies practiced in the 1930s, 40s and 50s though the wealth gap i think is attributable to this residential segregation. >> some of these authors will

be appearing on book tv. watch them on our website booktv.org. >> this is called revolving door lobbying, public influence and the unequal representation of interest. tell me a little bit about the book . >> in this book, we look at a problem that we've long known and probably the problem with lobbying is that it's a phenomenon where people work inside government and then go back out and end up representing science and going back through the door to lobby on the otherside . but i like to think of it, where the first one to do it systematically so what we did is we got a random table of lobbying. and we had to do for years. by doing that we essentially reconstructed the status so we can look at a rare

lobbying piece and who they work for and which gave us the opportunity at the time of their work in congress at the white house, federal agencies and do they represent interests now that are being regulated? >> where did most of them come from? >> so there was a time that this was all changing. in the 70s and 80s when we had data on who lobbyists were in the early days, most lobbyists by far came from their own industries. they were servants or business managers or lawyers and they come up through the ranks and am not doing lobbying on behalf of their industry or corporation, now it's about one into lobbyists working government and we find some differences between them, not surprisingly. lobbyists in their own industries, narrowly focused

on issues in which they are experts and we tend to think of social gridlock which means their background and their self-preservation. there's lobbyists that come from government, they represent everything in this foundation. they are disenfranchised long-range industries, they are engaged in our wide variety of policy issues. which we interpret to mean that they're not actually policy experts but they are experts and complaining to their clients that they can't get them in the door. that what's happening behind those closed doors, so in a world today where you have highly formalized congress, where they end up essentially writing the bill to design those stores as opposed to the open committee rooms of yesteryear, we expect these

lobbyists to become valuable to explain to their clients about what to expect. their job is to try to reduce the political uncertainty that we all feel but as it turns out, there not able to afford that critical intelligence that these lobbyists are. >> how much money is spent here on lobbying? >> we could say for 30, about 3.2, 3.3 alien dollars is spent on lobbying that we know of. so we can get these numbers because the congress requires lobbyists and of course in related work, my coworker and i have found that there's about one lobbyists for every other one who does.so we say that 3.2 is probably not much different. and it's probably growing because a lot of lobbyists in

town are earning that they can do their job and they can improve their clients and earn money and not trigger their really strict laws that require them to disclose their money. chances are, the number is probably seven, eight 90. >> what is your background? >> i'm a political scientist so i study congress and politics but before iwent to graduate school i worked . so i guess i decided not to become a lobbyist and make a lot less money writing. >> while you were doing your research for this book, is there any particular industry that you were surprised that had a lobbyist? >> no. because i've been studying lobbying and politics long enough to know that every industry, every self industry within the industry, they will have lobbyists but

really the story we tried to tell here is that there was once a time when those lobbyists work for every issue and every industry and they knew how those witnesses will be made. but now the lobbyists represent them know how the sausage being made in congress, they don't know anything. >> . >> do you think that there will ever be a situation where lobbying will no longer exist? >> know, nor do we want. all of them have the opportunity to abuse the power. and mostly that's what lobbyists are doing. what the real problem is is that some kind of abuse of power, a little more extension than others abuses of power and as for what we see in our world is that the wealthy and the best organized and largest corporations, they're the ones with coverage here in washington.

the problem is we don't want to get rid of that just like you wouldn't want to get rid of journalism, you wouldn't want to get rid of any of that. it's a real conundrum and to try to think about how do we give the least of us as much voice as the wealthy. >> what would you like people to take away from reading this book? >> i think the story that i just told, one that lobbying itself is not bad. it's all the story that scared journalists and the story we hear commentators and even politicians themselves that we want to this response and that's not often true. what we mean is they won't agree with trump of those that they disagree with. >> so i think one of the takeaways here is that lobbying in itself is not the enemy. but really what is underlying

the underlying cause of lobbyists is that congress itself has effectively lobotomized it. they no longer higher high-quality staff that stay for a normal period of time. now what we see is people spend on congressional staff and working at the white house and the federal agencies long enough to then be able to go out and make the money. i think you take away that and try to bring back that public spirit of once you observe the greater good and working in government for that as an entity itself.so and as a steppingstone in the world. >> every weekend, but td offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. keep watching for more here on c-span2 and watch any of our past programs online at booktv.org.

>> you are watching tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's our primetime lineup. at 7 pm eastern, michael costa, editor chronicles his life in britain in the run-up to world war ii. and eight, it's jeff yeager, executive producer of 60 minutes . he provides a behind-the-scenes history of the news program. on "after words" at 9 pm, daily color news foundation editor-in-chief christopher bedford examines donald trump's leadership as a businessman, politician and president. a former high school principal linda nathan examines the challenges facing high school students pursuing higher education and we wrap up our primetime programming at 11 pm eastern with