Secular Café: Early British Antarctic explorer embarrassed by penguin sex.

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

Early British Antarctic explorer embarrassed by penguin sex. Jun 10th 2012, 13:05 How science has moved on! But however shocked he was, he was a good enough scientist to record everything faithfully. He just couldn't publish it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18370797 Quote: Details, including "sexual coercion", recorded by Dr George Murray Levick were considered so shocking that they were removed from official accounts... ...The Natural History Museum has published his unedited papers. Dr Levick, an avid biologist, was the medical officer on Captain Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in 1910. He was a pioneer in the study of penguins and was the first person to stay for an entire breeding season with a colony on Cape Adare... ...He was shocked by what he described as the "depraved" sexual acts of "hooligan" males who were mating with dead females. So distressed was he that he recorded the "perverted" activities in Greek in his notebook. On his return to Britain, Dr Levick attempted to publish a paper entitled "the natural history of the adelie penguin", but according to Douglas Russell, curator of eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum, it was too much for the times. "He submitted this extraordinary and graphic account of sexual behaviour of the adelie penguins, which the academic world of the post-Edwardian era found a little too difficult to publish," Mr Russell said. The sexual behaviour section was not included in the official paper, but the then keeper of zoology at the museum, Sidney Harmer, decided that 100 copies of the graphic account should be circulated to a select group of scientists. Mr Russell said they simply did not have the scientific knowledge at that time to explain Dr Levick's accounts of what he termed necrophilia... ..."He's just completely shocked. He, to a certain extent, falls into the same trap as an awful lot of people in seeing penguins as bipedal birds and seeing them as little people. They're not. They are birds and should be interpreted as such."

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