The Science Show, 28 August 2010

On the ABC Radio Science Show on Saturday (repeated yesterday) Robin Williams included an interesting piece on “collecting” by David Attenborough, the transcript of which I have copied below. It makes some interesting observations of relevance to the pastime of birdwatching (which, although not any longer to do with collecting ‘objects’ [eggs, nests, feathers, specimens, etc*] is a form of collecting nonetheless – as a displacement activity for hunting (??), perhaps accounting in part for the preponderance of males in the ranks of hard-core listers and twitchers?) – and is interesting for other reasons as well. You might enjoy it.

[* however, “ticks” in a field-guide, lists, and photos of birds might indeed be legitimately thought of as collectable ‘objects’.]

Richard NOWOTNY

Port Melbourne, Victoria

M: 0438 224 456

David Attenborough – Collecting

http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/player_launch.pl?s=rn/scienceshow_item &d=rn/scienceshow/audio/items&r=ssw_28082010_1247.ram&w=ssw_28082010_1247.as x&t=David%20Attenborough%20-%20Collecting%20-%2028%20August%202010> LISTEN NOW http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/08/ssw_20100828_1247.mp3 DOWNLOAD AUDIO

Collecting… Books, coins, shells, beetles, postage stamps, the range is endless. Bowerbirds also collect objects. But why do we do it? Collectors are often men. So is there a biological basis for our behaviour? Charles Darwin’s collections led to him proposing his theory of evolution and natural selection. David Attenborough explores the strange affliction which he admits affects him as well.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Did you see David Attenborough’s film about birds in the Life series last week? He showed the arduous work of the male bowerbird building his elaborate home over the years, decorating it with collections of trinkets, all to attract one capricious female and, with luck, to mate for barely a few seconds. Collections and sex; is that why we do it?

David Attenborough:: Collecting is a strange affliction. I have to admit to being a sufferer since childhood; stamps, magazines that were numbered in sequence, bus tickets, coins, fossils. And advancing years have not really cured me. So today, for example, I collect books about New Guinea, and if I find one, no matter how boring it is, I’m likely to buy it for no better reason than that I don’t have it.

Where does this urge to collect come from? Some animals certainly collect objects, but all those that I can think of collect things that have a use. Caddis fly larvae collect tiny sticks or grains of sand with which to build the little tubes in which they live, and will collect coloured beads if you keep them in an aquarium and provide them with nothing else. Bowerbirds, the most spectacular collectors among birds, also assemble coloured objects, but that is in order to create a display that will impress females.

Human beings on the other hand collect things that have no practical use and often they don’t even show them to anyone else but keep them secret, hidden away in a back room. But why? It seems to me that the affliction, if it can be called that, is by and large more masculine than feminine. There have been, it’s true, one or two spectacular women collectors. Lady Charlotte Schreiber, for example, who had a passion for little china figures of shepherds and shepherdesses and suchlike, and left thousands of them to the Victoria and Albert Museum. But that is nothing compared to Sir Thomas Phillips who in the 19th century collected books in quite phenomenal numbers. Most of us, I dare say, are guilty of buying more books than we actually read, but he bought 40 or 50 a week and by the end of his life had a collection of 40,000 books and 60,000 manuscripts. And certainly most active collectors I know who scour shops, auctions and car boot sales for the objects to which they are addicted are men, and men whose wives look at them with an affection and even pitying tolerance when they spend yet more extravagant sums on something that is quite useless but which appeals to them irresistibly because they haven’t got one like it.

The male emphasis, I think, is an important clue. There can be little doubt that there was a division of labour between the sexes early in mankind’s history. The long period the human infant needs before it’s capable of even walking by itself, let alone finding food, meant that women by and large remained in camp or cave and men went off hunting for meat for the family. So the hunting instinct, the delight in finding prey, tracking it and catching it, is deep-seated in men. Indeed, it seems to be possible that men found a positive pleasure in the process and didn’t go off hunting only out of a sense of duty towards their families. In short, I think the process of collecting objects is a way of satisfying the deep-seated urge to hunt, an urge that in modern life is not properly satisfied when all that a man brings back to support his family is a piece of paper or simply the information that a message has been sent to his bank.

Natural history objects – shells, birds’ eggs, fossils, odd stones, skeletons – have been collected by people since the beginning of scholarship. In the 16th century, Aldrovandus, the Italian author of the first great encyclopaedia of natural history, was said to have had 4,550 drawers of specimens. Noblemen throughout Europe had their cabinets of curiosities in which they displayed anything, animal, vegetable or mineral, that seemed strange and remarkable to them.

In the 19th century, Lord Walter Rothschild, fuelled by his family wealth, assembled the biggest collection of natural history objects ever made by one man, paying over 400 collectors to scoop up things for him from all over the world. Giant tortoises, bird skins, birds eggs, butterflies, beetles, there seems to be no product of the natural world that he was unwilling to acquire.

Charles Darwin in his youth was a passionate, fanatical collector of beetles. As an undergraduate at Cambridge he searched for them obsessively. ‘No pursuit gave me more pleasure,’ he said. He didn’t dissect them, he simply classified them. That is to say, he learned to recognise different species. He arranged them, both in practice and in his mind, in some sort of order. He put those that were most like one another, close to one another. He divided them into families, and that process must have made him wonder why there are so many species and what processes might have brought them into existence.

He was still at this stage when he was invited to join The Beagle, the naval surveying ship that was about to set off on a round-the-world voyage to survey the coast of South America. But he did not go as a beetle collector or any other kind of naturalist, his official job was simply to be a companion to Captain Robert Fitzroy, the autocratic and irascible commander of The Beagle, and to provide him with gentlemanly conversation. But the collecting mania still possessed him. Everywhere The Beagle went, young Mr Darwin eagerly went ashore and collected; fossils, plants, mammal skins, shells, everything natural in fact that was collectable. And it was that passion and those collections that gave him the raw material for the theory of evolution by natural selection.

It may come as a consolation to some of us that on occasion even the great Darwin was less than perfect as a scientific collector. It’s said that the idea of natural selection was sparked in his mind by the claim made by a British resident in the Galapagos Islands that he could tell which island a giant tortoise had come from by the shape of the opening in the front of the shell through which the animal’s head emerges. Those on dry islands which lacked a reasonable turf on which to graze had front openings with a peak to them so that owners could crane their exceptionally long necks upwards and browse from the branches of tall plants.

Darwin certainly brought back several shells and skeletons of these extraordinary reptiles, but he had done the unforgivable; he had neglected to note which of them came from which island. So he couldn’t use them to illustrate his theory. Instead he had to base that on the mockingbirds that is assistant, Syms Covington, had not only collected but had meticulously labelled with their place of origin.

Darwin’s son inherited his father’s collecting mania, but by now a new collecting possibility had arrived. Britain had invented the postage stamp in 1840 and it had spread around the world. In 1862, Darwin wrote to one of his correspondents, Asa Gray, the professor of botany at Harvard in the United States, and asked him if he could possibly send his son some stamps. Not any old stamps of course but the Wells, Fargo Company Pony Express tuppeny and fourpenny.

Stamps were still the rage when I was a boy, but I sense that these days the passion has lessened with the sheer abundance of different issues. Bus tickets, which back in my boyhood had different colours for different values, have now gone. Even train numbers, which were once in vogue, are no longer, I’m told, very interesting. More seriously, collecting many kinds of natural objects is now forbidden by law. For very good reasons, it is now illegal to collect birds’ eggs or pluck rare wildflowers. Nor is it allowed on many sites of geological importance for a boy without a permit to go in search of fossils, as I once did. And I worry about that, for it seems to me that the collecting impulse was responsible for stimulating an interest in natural history and ultimately giving people a love and an understanding of the natural world. Maybe some of us will be able to translate that passion to accumulate material objects into an equally satisfying way of collecting photographic images of birds and butterflies and dragonflies and flowers. I hope so.

But there is no need for us to feel too guilty about the seemingly irrational passion for collecting in general. For many of us it is the trigger that has led us to the deep pleasures that come from an involvement with the natural world and an insight into how it works. And it led one man of genius to propose the most important and revolutionary theory in the whole of natural science.

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