FM CRIBS presents Andrew Berry

Organisms arrayed in all their evolutionary glory transform the house of Andrew Berry—lecturer in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology—into a veritable museum of the Darwinian process.  FM recently visited the home that Berry shares with his wife and fellow curator, Professor of Biology Naomi E. Pierce, to get a glimpse of both the décor and the man behind it.

As Andrew Berry peruses the eclectic collection of artifacts that ornament his home, his eyes come to rest on a display of ceramic vegetation hanging on his kitchen wall. “Now this is bizarre,” he says. The observation can be applied to any number of the rare finds found throughout his home, a collection animated by an exotic, if unusual, aesthetic that uniquely reflects Berry and his family’s passions.

A specialist in evolutionary biology, Berry currently serves as the undergraduate concentration advisor for the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department. When the popular lecturer and noted scientist agreed to give FM a brief tour of the home he shares with his wife Naomi E. Pierce, a professor of biology in OEB, and their two daughters, he greeted FM first in his office at the Biological Labs, and after fetching his bike, led the five-minute walk to his house on Sacramento Street through the damp Cambridge afternoon that he affectionately calls the “English summer.”

A small mounting of butterflies—along with an accompanying collection of several larger mountings found throughout the house—provides an appropriate welcome to Berry and Pierce’s home; as the Curator of Lepidoptera in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Pierce’s job is to know moths and butterflies. Across the hall hangs an eBay triumph of which Berry is particularly proud: a framed letter written by British evolutionary theorist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose work preceded Darwin’s but has largely gone unnoticed.

A venture into the living room produces a similar mixture of the ordinary and the extraordinary, with a depiction of what appears to be a large, awkward penguin standing opposite the TV; the bird in question is in fact a Great Auk, a majestic animal whose significance is grossly underrated by any confusion with a penguin. Its remarkably well-documented path to extinction is a point of great interest for Berry; history reveals that fishermen killed the last pair of Great Auk in 1844 on the island of Eldey off of Iceland. “It really is an icon of extinction, this beautiful, beautiful bird,” Berry says. “You know those bumper stickers ‘Extinction is Forever’? For me you only need a picture of the Great Auk.”

On a shelf-lined wall near the kitchen hang numerous plant-like ceramic pieces, along with a similar collection of fantastic ceramic intestinal worms. Though they could easily pass for just another set of artsy decorations, Berry explains that the pieces represent the evolutionary phenomenon of adaptive radiation. “Think of the Galápagos finches, where you have one ancestor arriving on an empty island and then you have multiple different species spawned off from the ancestor,” Berry explains. “You take one original thing, and then you have variations of it.”

The concept of using adaptive radiation as a decorative motif is interesting to be sure, but Berry acknowledges that it makes for a less than appetizing atmosphere. “I am not responsible for any of the beautification of this house,” he claims, insisting that it is only because of his wife’s influence that several vases of flowers grace their kitchen and dining room tables.

He does not object, however, to being held accountable for what he calls the “greatest illustration ever made”—the framed copy of James Gillray’s political cartoon “New Morality” from 1786, which provides a caricature of British intellectuals of the period. Continuing to proudly display his treasures, Berry also gestures toward two large maps of India from 1794 by James Rennell and a bowl filled with eggs—from ostrich to double-yoke swan eggs—inscribed delicately with letters. The latter display was created by Christopher W. Adams ’94, a former student of Pierce’s, who also produced the adaptive radiation displays of the plants and intestinal parasites.

On the refrigerator, a photograph of Mount Harvard hangs amongst a crowd of magnets and a package of dried cuttlefish sent from a friend in Singapore; Berry explains that the peak is located in the Collegiate Range in Colorado in the company of other similarly named summits. “I am happy to say that Harvard is the highest,” he says.

Berry is an avid mountain climber whose most recent ascent was to the peak of Mount Darwin in the Evolution Range in the High Sierra of Central California. “The trouble with Mount Darwin is that it’s a technical climb,” he says. “I mean, there are parts where if you fall off, you die.”

With the help of a former student, however, he reached the top for the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth. In fact, he left a copy of “The Origin of Species” there.

Berry is also a fan of music: “It really is one of the most important things in the world,” he says. “I go to punk rock shows, I go to classical, to opera. This past week I went to the Harvard Mariachi Veritas show, and I went to see my favorite British post-punk band called the Wedding Present in the Middle East.”  He’s a fan of Harvard-based music as well.  “I’m a big Ghungroo groupie,” he adds, recounting how a one-time invitation from a former student to attend the annual event has morphed into a family tradition.

Berry’s house also is special in that it provides an unofficial community for his students. “It does mean that our house is a sort of home away from home for a lot of science grad students, bio grad students, in particular postdocs,” Berry explains. “Most evenings we will have people to dinner, people who were working late in the lab and so will swing by here.”

His home is open to undergraduates as well, and Berry is known to host his freshman advisees annually. “I get fed up hearing the complaints about Annenberg, so at least once everyone comes down here, which is nice,” he says.

In their hospitality, Berry and Pierce even offer a guest room open for visitors, and keep a cab company number memorized for them. The result?

“There was a time about six months ago when somebody was picked up by that cab company out here at six o’clock in the morning off to get an early flight,” he remembers. “The cab driver apparently asked this person, ‘Is this a hotel or a private residence or what?’ because he was so accustomed to picking up different people each time.”