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