by Michael Balter

GIBRALTAR—The first known Neandertal skull, left, was discovered here in 1848, and some of the last Neandertals may also have taken refuge in Gibraltar’s caves before they finally went extinct about 30,000 years ago. So Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum organizes a meeting here every few years on the evolution of Neandertals and other ancient humans.

This year, one presentation detailed the links between Charles Darwin himself and that first skull, which was found by workmen at Forbes’ Quarry on the north face of the Rock of Gibraltar. But its significance was not understood until sometime after 1856, when miners working in Germany’s Neander Valley discovered a partial skull and other bones.

Darwin was long interested in the Gibraltar skull, which he recognized as an ancient human, although many years passed before he got to see it. The circumstances of this historic encounter between Darwin and a Neandertal were described at the meeting by Alex Menez, a biologist and science historian at the Gibraltar Museum. Menez mined the 14,500 letters written by and to Darwin available online as part of the Darwin Correspondence Project maintained by Cambridge University and the American Council of Learned Societies. He found that although Darwin never visited Gibraltar, he had a keen interest in discoveries there on Mediterranean plant life and geology, as well as a fascination with the skull.

The Gibraltar skull was first presented in Great Britain in September 1864, to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Darwin had hoped to go, but illness kept him away. So shortly before the meeting his friends Charles Lyell, the famous geologist, and Hugh Falconer, a famed anthropologist, brought the skull to the home of his sister-in-law in London, where Darwin was staying at the time. Darwin’s reaction is recorded simply in a 1 September 1864 letter to his close friend, botanist Joseph Hooker: “F[alconer] brought me the wonderful Gibraltar skull.” As Menez put it: “We can imagine Darwin holding the skull, peering enthusiastically at its well-marked brow ridges, his own eyes beneath brow ridges that were themselves significantly larger than those of most people!”

Exactly what Darwin made of the skull is not known, however. He didn’t mention the Gibraltar or Neander skulls at all in On the Origin of Species and refers to them only fleetingly in the 1871 Descent of Man. Perhaps, as some speakers at the meeting suggested, he deliberately avoided speculating about them out of reluctance to stir up controversy about human evolution.

PHOTO CREDIT: Clive Finlayson, The Gibraltar Museum

The latest survey to take the pulse of the public debate on evolution suggests that a majority of people see nothing wrong with believing in a god and accepting Charles Darwin's work.

The survey, presented yesterday at the World Conference of Science Journalists in London by the British Council as part of its international program Darwin Now, asked more than 10,000 adults across Argentina, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States about their knowledge and acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution. Across all countries, 70% of the adults surveyed felt somewhat familiar with Darwin and his work, with the highest levels of awareness being found in the United States and the United Kingdom (71% in both), Mexico (68%), and Argentina (65%). Seventy-three percent of the adults surveyed in South Africa and 62% in Egypt had never heard of Charles Darwin or of his theory of evolution, however.

Overall, knowing meant believing in evolution. Fifty-six percent of the people in all 10 countries who had heard of Darwin believed there is sufficient scientific evidence in support of Darwin's theory of evolution. A more detailed analysis, however, revealed a complex picture. Although the majority of adults surveyed in India (77%), China (72%), Mexico (65%), the United Kingdom (62%), Spain (61%), and Argentina (57%) accepted the theory of evolution as scientifically founded, only 48% did so in Russia, 42% in South Africa, 41% in the United States, and 25% in Egypt.

Acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution didn't necessarily correlate with a rejection of creationism. The three countries with the greatest proportion of people (43%) believing that life on Earth was created by a god and has always existed in its current form were the United States, South Africa, and India.

The country that showed greatest support for the idea that evolution without a God guided the development of all life was China (67%), followed by Mexico (42%), the United Kingdom and Spain (38%), Argentina (37%), and Russia (32%). In Egypt, however, half of the adults surveyed believed in the evolution of human life in a process guided by a god.

"Most encouraging was a diversity in perspectives internationally," said Fern Elsdon-Baker, head of the British Council Darwin Now program, at yesterday's press conference.

"We need to look into these cultural differences. It gives an indication of how to target our efforts in public engagement across countries" when it comes to talking about Darwin and evolution, added Peter Kjaergaard, a historian at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge, U.K.

In spite of the cultural differences, what could be found in all of the 10 countries was acceptance of evolution and religion. In India, 85% of the adults surveyed saw nothing wrong with both believing in a god and accepting Darwin's theory of evolution. The same pattern was found in Mexico (65%), Argentina (62%), the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Russia (54%), the United States (53%), Spain (46%), Egypt (45%), and China (39%).

These were "quite surprising results," Elsdon-Baker said. There is "not necessarily a dichotomy." This contrasts with previous studies and media reports in which a conflict between religious beliefs and evolution views is assumed from the start, Kjaergaard added. The representation of the debate in newspapers "doesn't fit the general picture of the population throughout the world," he said.

—Elisabeth Pain

LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK—Leave it to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) to put molecules center stage at Darwin’s birthday party. Home to Nobel laureates such as DNA discoverer James Watson and corn geneticist Barbara McClintock, the lab plays host this week to 390 researchers for "Evolution: The Molecular Landscape" (27 May to 1 June). The theme stands in sharp contrast to when the lab last toasted Darwin, in 1959. Then "what was absent was any reference to molecules," says CSHL meeting organizer Jan Witkowski.

One of dozens of Darwin conferences taking place around the world to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, this event is billed as more of a scientific meeting than a celebratory one, billing 75 talks and 200 posters. The meeting is the lab's 74th annual symposium—originally a monthlong mix of research and presentation and now an annual 5-day themed meeting. It usually takes a year to plan, says CSHL meeting organizer David Stewart. But this time, he and Witkowski started 6 months early, anticipating that many meetings would be vying to book evolutionary biology's biggest names. They succeeded: The program reads likes a "Who's Who" in biology—with luminaries such as Edward O. Wilson and Thomas Cech on the program.

The opening session reflected more than just molecules and gave a flavor of the diversity of topics yet to come. First up was a close look at Darwin himself. Darwin scholar Janet Browne of Harvard University emphasized Darwin as an experimentalist who tapped into a far-reaching network of friends and relatives as collaborators. "He turned his house and garden into a domestic version of a modern research lab … in an age when laboratories were hardly in existence," Browne said. Darwin relied on simple tools. For example, a chemical balance from his youth and tin plant markers sufficed for his studies of what and how carnivorous plants ate. And he used household chemicals—wine, beer, ammonia, urine, nicotine—in those experiments.

Yet Darwin was also an early scientific celebrity. During his day, fans could buy portraits and paintings of their favorite naturalist. Songs, children's books, even Wedgwood china and a "gargling oil" had Darwin themes. Cartoonists depicted him as part human, part ape. And his theories overshadowed his research. His book On the Origin of Species "clouded everybody's view of what he was up to," says Browne. Darwin nonetheless cultivated collaborations across the globe—some 14,000 letters still exist—and solicited from these colleagues their own thoughts and observations about problems he was pursuing. "Letters were a major vehicle of scientific communication," said Browne.

—Elizabeth Pennisi

Photo credit: CSHL 74th Symposium and Daniel Smith

The University of Cambridge’s zoology museum has come across a long-forgotten egg that Charles Darwin collected during his famous voyage on the Beagle. The 4.7-centimeter-long egg (left), from a partridge-like bird, is cracked: “The great man put it into too small a box, and hence its unhappy state,” according to records found with it.

“It’s the only egg that we know for sure was collected by Darwin,” even though he collected eggs and nests from at least 16 types of birds on his travels, says museum Director Michael Akam.

A museum volunteer rediscovered the egg while cataloging the museum’s egg collection, which has lain uninventoried for a century. It was in a collection belonging to Alfred Newton, a zoologist and friend of Darwin’s, who noted in his journal: “One egg, received through [Darwin's son] Frank Darwin, having been sent to me by his father who said he got it at Maldonado [now in Uruguay] and that it belonged to the Common Tinamou [now the spotted nothura, Nothura maculosasa] of those parts.”

“This is an extremely interesting and significant ornithological find,” says Douglas Russell, bird curator at the Natural History Museum in London. It should encourage other researchers "looking for famous missing specimens."

—Claire Thomas

Photo Credit: University Museum of Zoology Cambridge

What would our world be like without flowering plants? Some 300,000 species of angiosperms are alive today. Their blooms color and scent our world; their fruits, roots, and seeds feed us; and their biomass provides clothing, building materials, and fuel. And yet this rapid spread and dominance of the terrestrial landscape, which took place perhaps 100 million years go, apparently happened in a blink of geological time, just a few tens of millions of years.

The father of evolution couldn’t quite fathom it. In 1879, Charles Darwin penned a letter to British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, lamenting an “abominable mystery” that threw a wrench into his theory of evolution: How did flowering plants diversify and spread so rapidly across the globe? Now, 130 years later, botanists are finally beginning to make sense of what has made this plant group so successful and are sorting out how, and when, flowers got started—and from which ancestor. April's Origins essay, "On the Origin of Flowering Plants," discusses how researchers now have analytical tools, fossils, genomic data, and insights that Darwin could never have imagined, all of which make these mysteries less abominable. Over the past 40 years, techniques for assessing the relationships of organisms have greatly improved, and gene sequences as well as morphology now help researchers sort out which angiosperms arose early and which arose late. New fossil finds and new ways to study them—with synchrotron radiation, for example—provide a better sense of the detailed anatomy of ancient plants. And researchers from various fields are figuring out genomic changes that might explain the amazing success of this rapidly evolving group. Questions still remain, particularly about the nature and identity of the angiosperm ancestor itself. But modern botanists are hopeful that the abominable mystery is well on its way to being solved.

—Elizabeth Pennisi

Credit: Reproduced with the kind permission of the Director and the Board of Trustees, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Cambridge University, Darwin Online, and the Huntington Library are trying to track down as many first editions of Darwin's On the Origin of Species as possible before the anniversary of its publication in November. They are looking for books in private collections as well as in institutions. Already, they have come across Francis Darwin's copy, with his annotations, in a private collection.

Here is more information about the census.