When I think of Darwin and birds, I think of finches, which were among the species the master used to derive the theory of evolution. Now, in an intriguing piece in today's Science Times, Carl Zimmer tells us that Darwin was astonished by the diversity of pigeon breeds, and that he wrote about them in his On the Origin of Species, "a work greatly informed by his experiments with the birds."
Zimmer's story is about Michael D. Shapiro, a biologist at the University of Utah who is part of an international team of scientists studying the pigeon genome, trying to find the mutations that give rise to different breeds. According to Zimmer, the work supports Darwin's claim that all pigeon breeds were descendants of the rock pigeon.
Zimmer walks us through a history of pigeon breeding, including the revelation that Akbar the Great, "a 16th-century Mughal emperor, always traveled with his personal colony of 10,000 pigeons." He tells us about their use as food and as messengers, especially by Genghis Kahn, who "used pigeons to create a communication network across his empire" in the 12th century.
And he elaborates on the scientific findings. I encourage you to take a look.
-Paul Raeburn
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