Towards the end of his life, Charles Darwin was preoccupied with the question of whether worms think. Night after night, he would go out into the garden of Down House, armed with shovels, lamps and whistles, hoping to prove that these worms were cleverer than they looked.
It was certainly an odd pastime. Anyone who happened to see Darwin, then in his seventies, beating the soil, gluing leaves together, or shouting at burrows at the top of his voice would have been puzzled, to say the least. But this was no eccentric whimsy. As Darwin knew, the problem of vermicular intelligence went to the heart of man’s relationship with animals – and threatened to destabilise his life’s work.
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