Worming out of listening
Worms, apparently, have no appreciation for great music. They have no appreciation for other noise either, since they pretty much simply lay in the dirt despite students’ shouts, drumming, and repeated playing of a piano note, loudly. “Worms do not possess any sense of hearing, I think we confirmed that,” said Ned Friedman, Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and leader of the freshman seminar “Getting to Know Charles Darwin.” Friedman, five students, a research assistant, and a teaching fellow were in an unlikely location to replicate a Darwinian experiment involving earthworms: the Music Building. Crammed into a small basement room that itself was jammed with chairs and two pianos, Friedman and teaching fellow Jesse Weber on Nov. 16 re-created one of Darwin’s last experiments, to see if earthworms can hear. He detailed the experiment in his book “The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits,”...