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Jimmy Doherty in Darwin's Garden is a BBC Science series produced to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. The series consists of three episodes. These are:


 * Of Apes and Men
 * The Storm Breaks
 * Dangerous Ideas

The Series was produced in cooperation with the Open University and was first broadcast in 2009.

The aim of the series, says presenter Jimmy Doherty (farmer), is "to explore Darwin’s experiments – how he underpinned his theory of evolution".

Episode 3: Dangerous Ideas
This episode covers the following topics:
 * Seed-salting Experiment. This experiment concerns the topic of the geographic dispersal of plants (how plants travel). The botanist Joseph Hooker had reported that the plants found on the Kerguelen Islands were the same as those found in South America. Darwin sought to test one hypothesis explaining the reason for this: some plants seeds could be transported by the sea. To test this idea, Darwin soaked the seeds of various plants in salt water for a month or more, and then planted them to see if they would germinate. In Jimmy Doherty's repeat of this experiment, tomato, onion and cress seeds all successfully germinated. This evidence supports the idea that plants seeds can be dispersed by the sea. This episode also discusses horse-eye beans and seapeas as examples of plants whose seeds cross the Atlantic and grow in western Ireland.


 * Galapagos Islands. Darwin had noticed that species found on these islands were noticeably different from their rekatives on the mainland. For example, iguanuas in the Galapagos are marine-living instead of land reptiles. Also, ther are many varieties of finches that seem to have developed mew characteristics that enable to adapt to the island habitat.


 * Fancy pigeons and artificial selection. Darwin joined two London pigeon clubs, whose members explained how new varieties of fancy pigeon were bred. This gave Darwin insight into how selection might work in Nature.


 * Farm Cat-Red Clover Experiment. Darwin suggested that farms that have more cats will have more red clover in neighbouring fields. This is because: farm cats kill or deter field mice; field mice destroy bee nests and eat bees; bees are the only pollinator of red clover. hence, Darwin hypothesized that if there are more farm cats then there will also be more red clover.


 * Weed-Patch Experiment. Darwin created a weed patch in his garden by removing a rectangle of turf measuring 3 foot by 2 foot. The bare soil was then left untouched. Over time, Darwin used sticks or wires to mark the position of each seedling that started to grow. At the end of a X month period, he calculated how many seedlings had started to grow overall, and compared this to how many of them had actually survived. Darwin took this experiment as an illustration of the continual struggle for existence among plants.


 * Age of the Earth: North and South Downs. Darwin started from the idea that the North and South Downs were originally part of a single chalk mountain that had a diameter of 50 miles. Using an estimated value of how fast the sea erodes a chalk cliff (one inch per year), he calculated how long it would have taken to erode the single chalk mountain and form the separate North and South Downs.


 * Confidence to publish. In 1857, Darwin received a letter from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in which Wallace explained his own insights into the process of evolution. These ideas were similar to Darwin's own.

The three episodes of this series were used as supplementary material for the Open University's 10-credit Science Short Course S170 Darwin and Evolution, which ran from 2009 to 2012. Students of this module were provided with a DVD of the three episodes, along with the set book 99% Ape: How evolution adds up.