Every once in a while there’s a day that seems to be tied to an idea. The thing is, it’s not always easy to discover what the idea is. Take today, for example. November 24 is Evolution Day in celebration of the date in 1859 that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It seems like that would be a great big clue right there…but I’m not talking about the declaration of a holiday. I’m talking about something more deeply intrinsic to the date itself — call it coincidence, synchronicity, or whatever, but there are some dates where similar things seem to happen throughout history.
There is another event that happened on November 24 that seems like it might be connected with evolution. Darwin didn’t use the word “evolution;” he called it “natural selection,” and others (Herbert Spencer was the first) have called “survival of the fittest.” But never mind that; the event I’m talking about happened in 1974 when Donald Johanson, an anthropologist from Case Western Reserve University, discovered the skeleton of the first known member of the species Austalopithecus afarnsis — a hominid that lived somewhere around 3 million years ago in east Africa. A very early ancestor of homo sapiens; we ourselves could be called “australopiths” too. Johanson renamed the individual “Lucy,” after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. When he got back to Case Western (the school’s odd name was created when Case Institute merged with Western Reserve University), he wrote Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. It’s a good book if you’re looking for one!
So maybe November 24 is tied to evolutionary biology. Maybe. There was certainly a lot of that to be researched in Van Diemen’s Land when Abel Tasman discovered it on November 24, 1642. The place is now well known for unique vegetation and animals that live nowhere else in the world. Oh, if you’re wondering why you’re having a hard time placing Van Diemen’s Land, Tasman had discovered it but named it after somebody else. The people who had been living there for about 40,000 years called the island Trouwunna. When it was eventually invaded and stolen (they called it “being settled”) by Europeans, they renamed it again, to Tasmania.
Tasman had named the island Van Diemen’s Land after Anthony van Diemen, the governor of the Dutch East Indies at the time — he’s the one who commissioned Tasman’s voyage. The island itself isn’t named for him any longer, but he’s not entirely forgotten; there’s a Van Diemen Gulf near Australia, and his wife is commemorated by both Cape Maria van Diemen in New Zealand and Maria Island, east of Tasmania. And although you wouldn’t want to meet one, there’s a genus of venomous snakes in Australia called Demansia after van Diemen. There have been no reports that the snakes feel one way or another about their new name.
You won’t find any creatures from the genus Demansia in the US, but you can certainly find rattlesnakes. They were one of the hazards faced by horsemen in the southwest in the 1800s. The horsemen being typical members of homo sapiens (or australopiths or hominids), a bigger hazard was always other horsemen. That’s why on November 24, 1835, a kind of paramilitary militia was created: the Texas Rangers. As time went on, the Texas Provincial Government grew into the Texas State Government, and decided (if these things are ever actually “decided”) that a better name would be the Texas Ranger Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety. It rolls right off the tongue — at least maybe it does if you’re a bureaucrat. Texans (who used to call themselves “Texians”) have always been proud of the Rangers, who nowadays function a lot like a miniature, local version of the FBI. They do major investigative work, which these days has less to do with horses and more to do with labs.
The FBI has a crime lab too, and it opened on November 24, 1932. At the time it was officially the Technical Laboratory. A simple name like that was obviously not going to cut it in a large bureaucratic organization, so it wasn’t long before it became FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory. Although it’s called a “laboratory,” they ran into difficulty when that term (not to mention the word “scientific” in the name of the place) implied that what they did there was supposed to be rigorous, valid, reliable…that is to say, actually scientific. In the 1990s a series of whistleblower reports revealed that the investigators there weren’t practicing science at all. Investigators work backwards to try to prove a conclusion (such as “the butler did it”) instead of using real scientific methods. They do, though, use a lot of expensive science-y equipment, so at least they have the right toys. They reportedly dress like scientist characters in movies, too.
They used a lot of that equipment after November 24, 1971 when D.B.Cooper parachuted out of an airliner he’d hijacked, carrying the $200,000 in ransom money he’d gotten. The FBI kept the case open for 45 years, but all they ever really discovered was that D.B.Cooper’s name was not D.B.Cooper. They had at least 13 suspects, but every one of them was ruled out. They still don’t know what his real name was, or whether he even survived the parachute jump. If he did survive, maybe that would be evidence that he was the fittest. It being November 24 and all.
