This Is a Truly Lousy Experiment About Evolution

“Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons,” wrote one Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. Four years earlier, Darwin had taken to raising pigeons in his own dovecote, hobnobbing with other pigeon fanciers, and carefully measuring the birds. In the diverse breeds, with their fantails, feather-duster feet, and frilly backs, Darwin saw validation for his ideas about evolution. If people could artificially select for such astonishing diversity in just a few generations, nature was surely capable of far more over longer timescales.

Now, 160 to demonstrate evolution in action. But instead of focusing on the birds themselves, they turned their attention to the pigeons’ parasites.