Adelie Penguin: Not so cute (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Forget about the beautiful stories in ‘March of the Penguins’ where the Polar birds find their soul mates and never give up on love – the truth about the sex lives of Penguins is a lot more sordid – and we’ve known about it for a lot longer than previously assumed. In a fascinating story, The Natural History Museum has unearthed some research about the Adélie penguin’s sex life by Captain Scott’s expedition that was deemed so shocking it was hidden from the public 100 years ago. It took another 50 years before the Adélie penguin was studied again and details about their remarkable sexual violence exposed.

Warning – this it not for the faint of heart! (via the Guardian):

It was the sight of a young male Adélie penguin attempting to have sex with a dead female that particularly unnerved George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition. No such observation had ever been recorded before, as far as he knew, and Levick, a typical Edwardian Englishman, was horrified. Blizzards and freezing cold were one thing. Penguin perversion was another.

Worse was to come, however. Levick spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing the colony of Adélies at Cape Adare, making him the only scientist to this day to have studied an entire breeding cycle there. During that time, he witnessed males having sex with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them sexually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them.

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Former editor of the British newspaper 'The Sun' Kelvin MacKenzie has written a forceful defense in the Guardian of his former paymaster and perhaps the most reviled man in modern media history, Rupert Murdoch. He writes:

Sky is not Fox News and I have my doubts that in leftwing, socialist, clapped-out Britain, the latter would work commercially or audiencewise.

Thank God for the Rupert Murdochs of this world. I wish there were hundreds more in our country. Unemployment would be wiped out at a stroke. At a conference in London recently he used a quote I really love about the lack of business adventure in Britain. He said: "We've got to get rid of the fear of failure in this country. In America, people start things, fail and shake themselves down and start things again. The animal spirit of capitalism is stronger there."

It is true that Murdoch has created many jobs and made lots and lots of money, but if you weigh it up against the massive damage to fairness and accuracy in journalism (just look at the Sun in the UK and Fox in America) and the complete destruction of independent media, I think it is fair to say that the world be a better place without him.

In recent years, the Murdoch press helped sell two illegal and disastrous wars in the Middle East, vilified millions of immigrants in both the US and UK, and has consistently failed to provide meaningful journalism on the banking industry (no Murdoch paper saw the financial meltdown coming – to the contrary, every outlet he owns cheerled as MacKenzie put it, the 'animal spirit of capitalism' that created the disaster in the first place). 

Murdoch epitomizes the worst aspects of modern business culture – naked greed, and ruthless monopolization – two ingredients that have ruined the spirit of fairness and accuracy in news, and eliminated diversity in programming.

Not exactly a record to be proud of.

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