Days of the Beer, July 1

The beer for today is Butt Monkey Chimp Chiller Ale.

On July 1, 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both read their papers on evolution to the Linnean Society. The society is the world's premier society for the study of taxonomy and natural history. It was founded in 1788, and is based in London.

Evolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next.

The title of the joint presentation was On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection. It was based on On The Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, by Wallace and Extract from an unpublished Work on Species by Darwin.

Darwin started as a geologist, and went on a five-year voyage to learn. During that time, he investigated the transmutation of species and made his theory of natural selection in 1838. It wasn't until 1858, when Wallace sent him an essay with a similar theory, that they both published their theories on July 1.

Wallace did his work in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago. His biggest contributions to evolutionary theory was the concept of warning coloration in animals and the Wallace effect (which seems to have something to do with exchange of genes).

As for the beer: I had it March 3, 2007 at 11:15 a.m. I have no idea how I acquired the bottle. I don't remember it being too horrible. But there are some pretty nasty reviews of it.

Beer Advocate has it as a C-. Rate Beer has it as a 5th percentile.

So, if Darwin and Wallace are correct, and this beer wants to survive, it's going to have to shed some of the undesirable traits and develop some new ones. Maybe someday this bad monkey beer will evolve into a good human beer. We'll only have to wait millions of years for that to happen.