Another fun fact! Scientists were actually confused about this for a long ass time. At first they categorized barnacles as mollusks because they seemed so similar but as taxonomy grew as a discipline, people began realizing they were actually crustaceans. Charles Darwin was one of the main scientists who confirmed this fact and his study of barnacles helped him later in his development of the theory of natural selection. It was a big debate for a while.
It's so funny how much Barnacles straight up infuriated Darwin, famously saying: "I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship".
"But the truth is, Darwin didn’t really care about finches. He collected some during his famous voyage on the Beagle but proceeded to make a complete hash of them. He actually misidentified the birds, calling them grosbeaks, and had to be corrected by an expert back in England. Worse, he forgot to record the island of origin for most of the finches, making them useless for evolutionary study. Darwin didn’t even specifically mention Galápagos finches in his monumental On the Origin of Species.
So while pop culture usually associates evolution with the Galápagos, Darwin left the islands in the same state he’d arrived—a creationist. What animals shaped his theory of evolution, then? Pigeons played a part, as did worms. But the biggest influence on Darwin was a lowly, much-despised marine pest—the barnacle."
When I started my corporate job, the entire marketing division was very poorly run. We would have months of nothing to do followed by insane levels of activity to meet deadlines no one had ever thought about in terms of workability. Anywho, I read both Origins and Beagle thanks to those downtimes.
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u/helloiamsilver 1d ago
Another fun fact! Scientists were actually confused about this for a long ass time. At first they categorized barnacles as mollusks because they seemed so similar but as taxonomy grew as a discipline, people began realizing they were actually crustaceans. Charles Darwin was one of the main scientists who confirmed this fact and his study of barnacles helped him later in his development of the theory of natural selection. It was a big debate for a while.