Darwin took the best part of 20 years to publish his ideas on natural selection. There has been a lot of speculation as to why he took so long. We here at the Sandwalk have some ideas….
Darwin loved to write. He wrote books. He scribed copious numbers of letters to people all around the world. And yet he took such a long time to complete his signature work.
I’m not sure what Darwin would have made of generative AI. I doubt that he would have been impressed, especially at the moment where it only repackages ideas and does not create new one.
Still he might have impressed in certain aspects. I prompted ChatGPT to re-write the previous two paragraphs in the style of Darwin.
“It may be observed that Darwin possessed a profound affinity for the act of writing. His pen gave birth to numerous volumes, and through his hand flowed an unceasing correspondence with individuals spanning the globe. Yet, despite this prolific output, it is curious to note the extended period required for the completion of his most seminal work.”
“As to the advent of generative artificial intelligence, one might surmise that Darwin, ever the champion of originality and slow, deliberate thought, would have regarded such a tool with a measure of skepticism. For while this technology can indeed aggregate and reorganize information, it does not yet appear capable of producing the truly novel insights that arise from deep reflection and careful study—those hallmarks of evolutionary progress in the realm of ideas.”
Hmmm that might have saved him some time! Or maybe he would have used it for entertainment. What about some tardy Darwin jokes prompted from ChatGPT (although one is created by me – can you guess?):
‘It took Charles Darwin over 20 years to write On the Origin of Species. I guess he was evolving his ideas… very slowly!’
‘It took Darwin over 20 years to write On the Origin of Species. Talk about natural procrastination!’
‘Why did it take so long for Darwin to write On the Origin of Species? Maybe he was worried about natural rejection!’
‘Darwin spent 20 years writing his book. I guess even evolution needed a few extra drafts.‘
‘Charles Darwin took two decades to finish On the Origin of Species—he was just letting the ideas adapt!‘
‘Darwin took 20 years to write his book. I guess survival of the fittest applies to writers’ block too!’
‘It took Darwin so long to write On the Origin of Species, you’d think he was waiting for the manuscript to evolve itself!‘
Not bad. I think that we might not have received the Origin any earlier if Charles had enjoyed playing around with AI.
Recently, we ticked past the 500th article posted to EcoLincNZ. In many ways it is just a number, but it is sufficiently round to make me think about what we have achieved.
Jon Sullivan and I put the original site together in 2008. Blogging was the new thing and we thought that it might be a great way of getting information out about the cool research being done at Lincoln University by the ecologists (and ecology adjacent researchers). Our aim was to provide biology school teachers with examples of cool ecology done here in New Zealand, as well as to build a resource to show to prospective postgrads about what types of research they could do.
Sixteen years later, after a several of re-designs and shifts of providers, a couple of big earthquakes, and life in general, we have quietly and steadily kept accumulating articles. I quickly realised that Jon was going to handle the technical side and I would have to write the bulk of the articles. Currently, I have done about 220.
A world cloud of the first 500 articles in EcoLincNZ. ‘New’ ‘Zealand’ ‘species’, not surprisingly, are ahead of the rest!
The following year Jon and I had the idea that we would incorporate this writing into our Research Methods course and have the each postgraduate student produce an article about research done at Lincoln and uploading it to EcoLincNZ. The first article was by Phil Cochrane on May 15th, 2009 about hatching failures in native bird populations that suffer from inbreeding. We now have 183 of these postgrad projects.
I think that this has been a good learning experience (not only do the students write their blogs in a series of drafts but they also provide feedback on each others’ articles). It also means that we have a wider variety of topics for EcoLincNZ as many of the students are not ecologists and will pick papers of more interest to them.
Some newer topics have started to build nicely: agroecology (30), community conservation (39), plant pathology and wine (40), soil (19), fire ecology (14) and threatened species (43).
There are many common themes that we have talked about in our articles. As this is a blog written by the former Department of Ecology and now Department of Pest-management and Conservation there should be no surprise that Biodiversity is a theme of 117 (23%) of the articles, Conservation is a theme of 97 (19%), and Wildlife Management has 82 (16%).
In terms of taxa, plant ecology has done well (65 articles) compared to bird ecology (29) and invertebrate ecology (40). My own areas have been well catered for: behaviour (67), species distributions (44), monitoring (48) and biogeography (17).
I enjoyed writing my Tolkien-flavoured articles. I also had fun with the article about Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea (A weevil of Earthsea: Finding the true name for the fourth beetle) as names are so important in this work and Earthsea is a bit New Zealand-like. My favourite title was The beetle that joined the stones about a beetle group that moved from living under bark into living in crevices on high mountains. Or maybe it was ‘Kate Bush and the smelly stoats‘ where I combine my love of the songs of the great singer with some recent mammal research?
Where to from here?
We haven’t really done this for the internet traffic. With a few changes in provider it makes it difficult to look at popular articles over the 16 years. Certainly traffic was higher in the early teens than it is now but we still get a steady stream of visits every day and articles from all eras are still read.
Blogging declined worldwide in the 2020s as podcasting became more popular, but there seems to have been a mild blogging resurgence in 2024. So I think that we will keep on doing what we are doing. We tried a few podcasts in 2017/18 and this could be something to look at a little more. The online world continues to change. With AI around the corner it is not obvious what the value of these short articles will be in 5 years, perhaps worthless, perhaps really valuable.
I guess as long as I enjoy writing the articles and we think that there is value in postgraduates writing this way, we will continue on. I wasn’t expecting to be doing this 16 years on. 500 has a nice ring to it. 1000 sounds even better!
Adrian Paterson is a lecturer at Lincoln University and the Head of the Department of Pest-management and Conservation. He has interests in molecular biodiversity, conservation animal behaviour and biogeography. He quite likes writing these short articles about cool ecological science and his experiences.
Darwin took the best part of 20 years to publish his ideas on natural selection. There has been a lot of speculation as to why he took so long. We here at the Sandwalk have some ideas….
Although bicycles, as we know them, were still a decade or two off, in the early 1850s there were various forms of velocipedes with experimental modes for generating movement. Darwin may have come across some. Presumably, if bikes had been around at this time he would have been a mountain-biker, going off the beaten tracks to investigate bits of natural history. The Sandwalk, where Darwin liked to amble and ponder over his ideas, would have made for a nice place to warm up. Add in some jumps and stream crossings and it would be ideal.
