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.
===============================
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
http://birding-aus.org
===============================
|
