as I wrote in my autobiography, another book which many who profess to know my mind have not read. As anyone who has read the Rev. Malthus’ book may gather literary amusement in my day was very limited. (I am currently enjoying Noir detective fiction: ‘she had eyes like strange sins’ – oh, very good! And I should really like to meet a lady who has ‘more curves than a country road’, and could ‘make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window’.)

However, Malthus was instructive: and it was one of those ideas that (as Huxley was kind enough to say when he read The Origin of Species) ‘why didn’t I think of that?’

The notion of a carrying capacity is of course now the basic fare of biology. It was controversial in the 1830s when the notion of progress, the inevitability of progress in human society was de rigeur. I mention this because it is becoming increasingly clear that with burgeoning populations, rising food fuel and commodity prices we are seeing (and we now can see through the media) the effects of many human populations reaching their local carrying capacities.

The media allows us to watch with a certain amount of disturbing voyeurism places where food or water are in short supply and the populations are suffering disease or malnutrition.

I tried to avoid confrontations with clerics who thought my work offended God and debased man to mere monkeys shaved (or waxed, as they would be today – when I wrote of Brazilians in The Voyage of the Beagle I never thought…let us leave the thought there), fortunately Huxley would cross a busy town to start a fight with one on my behalf. So I rarely had the chance to debate the point ‘what makes man different from the brute beasts of the field?’

Your cleric, the ‘black beasts’ (priests – they dressed in black in my day, you understand) would say that God made man in his own image. I would say that what sets man apart is that we are the only animal able to manipulate his environment and coerce others to his service so as to maintain a population substantially beyond what one would expect of their natural carrying capacity.

There is a limit to any organism’s ability to manipulate its environment, of course. H. sapiens in the northern hemisphere and the developing nations of Indian and China collectively do not seem to have realized this.

While reading of the advances in evolutionary science with a certain amount of gloomy satisfaction, I think one of my original assertions hold true in the face of new discoveries in the field: it is populations which are best able to cope with change which survive. Surveying H. sapiens’ civilization at present, I am not sure we are presently in a position to cope with the coming change.

And in a late PS, how I regret the decline in the standard of scientific comment in The Times newspaper. As my Noir hero would say, ‘Not fast, not funny, not original.’

Oh dear, the rot has not yet reached its carrying capacity in the popular prints: the Daily Mail, reporting on my statue being moved in the Natural History Museum, opens its ‘report’ claiming my theories are ‘elitist’. I agree. My theories on climbing plants are the cause of the most shocking snobbery. My work on cirripedia is only discussed in the highest counsels of the land.

I assume that like many critics the ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ has not troubled his, her or its ‘mind’ with my writings before pronouncing them elitist with such brazen confidence. As a doughty defender of my person mentioned, The Origin was a sellout on its first day.