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How the Collapse of an Economic Bubble Helped Charles Darwin Prove His Theory of Evolution

How the Collapse of an Economic Bubble Helped Charles Darwin Prove His Theory of Evolution

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(It’s probably not a secret that I enjoy finding examples of economic bubbles. So here’s a pretty obscure one, courtesy of some recent readings on chickens.)

Not many people remember the chicken bubble of the mid-1800s. Variously referred to as ‘The Fancy’ or ‘Hen Fever,’ the movement saw thousands of newly-minted middle class families rush to purchase rare varieties of chicken. Those birds came with wondrously exotic names such the ‘Sultans’ imported from Istanbul, ‘Great Javas,’ or ‘Cochin-Chinas,’ which were rumored to resemble ostriches in their size and feathered legs.


  • From Geo P. Burnham’s ‘The History of Hen Fever,’ published in 1855

Hen Fever reached its height by 1849, with breeding pairs of ornamental birds going for thousands of dollars in modern money at poultry shows. Across the U.S. and Great Britain (Where Queen Victoria’s early passion for a couple of of rare chickens had helped ignite the craze) polite parlours were apparently filled with fluffy-feathered talk of hen breeding.

When the bubble burst in 1855, the prices of fancy chickens plummeted — putting them in reach of one Charles Darwin and a host of competing biologists and theologians. By then, Darwin had returned from his famed trip to the Galapagos and was feverishly incubating his ideas on natural selection.

From Geo P. Burnham’s ‘The History of Hen Fever,’ published in 1855


Armed with wild Red Jungle Fowl from Southeast Asia and a newly cheap and varied supply of domesticated chickens, Darwin was able to show that the wild red birds could successfully breed with ‘fancy’ fowl to produce fertile offspring — suggesting that the modern supply of chickens wasn’t a separate species to its jungle cousins and in fact, had probably originated from it. He argued human intervention through generations of selective breeding likely accounted for the many features found in domesticated chickens, be they an snowy white coloring or feathered legs.

Chickens got short-shrift in Darwin’s famous Origins of Species when it was published a few years later, but they helped him firm up many of his ideas on adaptability and genetics.

It’s worth mentioning here that Darwin’s exact conclusions when it comes to the humble chicken are still being debated to this day — with researchers at Uppsala University arguing that grey jungle fowl also donated some genes to domesticated chickens.

Regardless of how you feel about the humble chicken’s origins, it’s fair to observe that an economic bubble almost contemporaneously described as unsurpassed in “ridiculousness and ludicrousness,” helped provide the raw materials for one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of all time.

For more – check out:

Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? by Andrew Lawler, and The History of the Hen Fever : A Humorous Record, published in 1855, and the source of the above images.

Read the world

Read the world

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I love to travel and I love to read.

I read some great books on my most recent trip to Nepal, which led me to list some other memorable reading recommendations from some other recent-ish travels.

Nepal

Massacre at the Palace – I was surprised to see that the paperback version of this book isn’t available on Amazon given that it seems to be in every bookstore in Kathmandu. Regardless, this is a compelling account of the 2001 massacre of Nepal’s royal family. It’s packed full of history but reads like a thriller. Interestingly, a big chunk of the Nepalese population doesn’t seem to buy that Crown Prince Dipendra murdered his family and then committed suicide – one reason the book gets mediocre reviews on Amazon. If you visit Narayanhiti Palace in Kathmandu, you’ll also notice no mention of Dipendra’s role in the massacre or his suicide.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster – Compulsory reading for trekkers in Nepal I guess. I read this book and then dreamed of Everest for the next week (not in a good way). Make sure to read the end bit in which Jon Krakauer deals with a rival account of the 1996 Everest Disaster by Anatoli Boukreev.

From Goddess to Mortal: The True Life Story of Kumari – This is the photo you’ll see on every travel brochure for Nepal – the Kumari is a young girl believed to be the physical manifestation of the Goddess Taleju. There are at least three in the Kathmandu Valley and this is an account written by a former Royal Kumari of Kathmandu in the early 1980s. Perhaps the most interesting thing in this is getting first-person perspective of her life (including her thoughts on tourists!) and her opinion on the role of Kumari in Nepalese society. While some have criticised it as a form of child labour, this ex-Kumari believes the position can help unite religions since the tradition sees girls from a Buddhist Newari caste become the embodiment of a Hindu goddess. If you don’t want to read, this documentary on the Bhaktapur kumari is also excellent, free to watch, and occurs against the backdrop of Nepal’s Civil War.

Pakistan, India and the Middle East

The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan’s Pleasure District – Sociologist Louise Brown spent a long time living with and shadowing a family of dancing girls in Heera Mandi, the Lahore’s ancient red-light district. There’s obviously a firm-focus on sex work in this but Brown’s account also contains much detail about the daily life of the poor in Pakistan, including food, religion, cleanliness and the stubbornness of the caste system.

The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan – Journalist Kim Barker gives her account of war reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia – Seems to be standard recommended reading on Saudi Arabia.

City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism – A highly-readable one-stop shop account of Dubai (and to some extent, the entire UAE’s) transformation from desert outpost to modern metropolis. The first section is history, followed by some contemporary issues divided by topic – including labour rights, environmental degradation and social problems caused by a huge influx of immigrants. Worth reading as more and more Gulf states attempt to wean themselves off oil.

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East – Neil MacFarquhar is a well-traveled reporter who gives a great cultural and political tour of the Middle East, organised by country. This is the book that taught me about ‘Bebsi‘ and Fairuz.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity – A true-life account of a family living in a Mumbai slum that reads like a Charles Dickens novel. The human impact of India’s convoluted courts system is one thing that really struck me from this Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Guatemala, Mozambique, Various

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? – There’s a tendency to write off traditional societies as primitive or old-fashioned but Jared Diamond makes the case that many of their customs and practices persist for a reason. This book has stuck with me for a long time – and the lesson he learns about “constructive paranoia” in the aftermath of a boat accident somewhere off the coast of New Guinea is one I tend to bear in mind whenever I travel.

China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa – One of the things that surprised me in Mozambique was the pervasive presence of the Chinese. From Maputo to Maxixe, Beijing’s influence is behind everything from football stadiums to newly-constructed roads and the trucks and cars on them. Howard French’s book tackles this issue and includes some memorable anecdotes – including a Chinese immigrant attempting to repopulate the continent in his image.

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? – Riveting and informative tale of Bishop Juan Gerardi’s 1998 death in Guatemala City. A good introduction to some of the horrific history of Guatemala’s long civil war as well as its continued troubles with gangs and general political corruption.

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World – I never thought I’d enjoy reading a book about the history of a fruit (although, that said, I did read this book exploring every ingredient contained in Twinkies and it was pretty great) but I picked this up before heading to Guatemala in an effort to get a grip on the United Fruit Company and its role in the country. What I got was much more – including, eventually, an Odd Lots podcast with the author Dan Koeppel.

Previous Convictions: Assignments from Here and There – A travelogue by the late, great AA Gill.

Reading list – Unruly places: Lost spaces, secret cities and other inscrutable geographies

Reading list – Unruly places: Lost spaces, secret cities and other inscrutable geographies

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The bitter cold of a New York winter makes me long for travels to far-flung locations. That’s not on the cards this year, and so I am instead reading a book about said far-flung locations. Unruly Places is a compendium of mini-essays about the hidden or exceptional geographies of the world. Some of them are well-known – such as Pripyat, site of the Chernobyl disaster, or the floating garbage islands of the Pacific – but others are far more esoteric.

On that note, one that I found interesting from a markets perspective is the Geneva Freeport, a giant warehouse where things can be imported and exported essentially free of customs duties and other taxes. As author  Alastair Bonnett puts it: “The freeport vaults are able to conjure ever more exchange value out of cultural artifacts that possess only abstract worth.”

It’s worth a read, especially in conjunction with some of Izabella Kaminska’s thoughts on artificial scarcity. Here’s Bonnett:

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Reading list – Business adventures: 12 classic tales from the world of Wall Street

Reading list – Business adventures: 12 classic tales from the world of Wall Street

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So apparently everyone who is anyone has already read this book. Except me. It’s been sitting on my Kindle for months – untouched and unloved until very recently. But having started on this compendium of 1960s New Yorker articles just last week, I am now about a third of the way into it and all I can say is that this is the way business writing should be – full of fascinating and powerful narratives that tell you something about human behaviour as much as finance and markets and corporate intrigue. Oh, and the prose is to die for. You know, if that’s your thing.

Given recent events, one passage in the first chapter of the book struck me as particularly prescient.

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Reading list – The cockroach papers

Reading list – The cockroach papers

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Why am I recommending a book about cockroaches? Three words: KNOW YOUR ENEMY.

As a newish New Yorker living in a decidedly old New York apartment building, the occasional cucaracha sighting is an inevitable event. Reading The Cockroach Papers by Richard Schwied is therefore STEP ONE in an ongoing war against these hideous creatures and an experience that is surprisingly informative and, sometimes, even, enjoyable.

For instance, did you know the only food cockroaches won’t eat is cucumbers?

And they are surprisingly social:

Schweid writes, “cockroaches, while not social insects in the entomological sense of bees or ants with clearly assigned tasks that benefit the whole community, do clearly take pleasure in the company of other roaches, and the aggression pheromones draw them together, eliciting their effects regardless of the sex or age.” Cockroaches reared singly develop more slowly and take longer between molts than do those reared in a group. Although those groups can be too big “just as development is delayed in young cockroaches if they are isolated, over-crowding also extends the time between molts. So there is yet another kind of pheromone, called a “dispersal pheromone,” and it serves as the chemical signal that it is time to look for a new, slightly roomier harborage. This chemical is found in the insects’ saliva, and has just the opposite effect of the aggression attractant, in that it repulses cockroaches and causes them to look elsewhere for harborage.”

In true New Yorker fashion, I’ve put my hard copy of the book into storage so the above excerpt is borrowed from the excellent Farnam Street.

Reading list – Where are the customers’ yachts?

Reading list – Where are the customers’ yachts?

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In 1940, a former trader named Fred Schwed Jr sat down to write a book about Wall Street.

Mr Schwed had a front row seat for the crash of 1929, the unbridled Wall Street enthusiasm that preceded it, and the depression which followed. What he penned is a thoroughly enjoyable account of finance which continues to resonate, so much so that it was re-released during the bull market of the 1950s, again in 1996, and then again in 2006 – just before the crisis.

The whole thing is well worth a read, but as a fellow financial writer (of sorts) one passage struck me in particular.

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