Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born on Febrary 12th, 1809, and lived until 1882. He was a geologist who significantly advanced our understanding of how coral reefs form. He contributed to the study of archaeology through his study of soil formation processes. Darwin made many contributions to the collections of natural materials including insects and birds to major British museums and institutions of study. He was an experienced traveller, and reported on the ethnography of peoples around the world, especially in South America. He played an important role as keeper of the clocks on a major British…
Happy Birthday Charles Darwin! Oh, and Abe Lincoln too. For Darwin's birthday, I want to discuss the uses of the terms "Darwinism, Darwinian, and Darwinist." Many have written about this and many don't like any of those words, some seem to equally dislike all three. A couple of years back, writing for the New York Times, Carl Safina said, Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics —…
Nifty Fifty Speaker Carl Zimmer is often called one of the nation's most astute, informed and lyrical science writers. Specializing in communicating about the wonders and mysteries of evolution, biology and neuroscience, Carl Zimmer - in such books as The Tangled Bank, Parasite Rex, and Soul Made Flesh - writes with such grace, skill and clarity that he makes even difficult subjects like natural selection and the brain understandable and exciting to readers who have little formal education in science. "I like to write books about subjects that greatly intrigue me --subjects that I want to…
In my discussion with Eliezer I referred to "recreational genetics." Basically, "for entertainment purposes only" genetics. For example, someone with blue eyes confirming that they have the alleles on OCA2 & HERC2 associated with blue eyes. Or a man with the surname O'Neill discovers that he has the Uà Néill Y chromosomal marker. Yes, people will pay money to find out these facts which are already highly probable. I think the news that Charles Darwin was likely of the R1b Y chromosomal haplogroup falls into the recreational category, though due to Darwin's fame the media has really been…
After watching Creation last week I decided to take the plunge and read Origin of Species. As I've mentioned before I did read Origin early in my teen years, but in hindsight with minimal comprehension. Since then I've occasionally started to read Origin, or perused an extract, but I've never made it from front to back as a sentient adult. At this point I'm 3/4 of the way through, and I need to get something off my chest: I now believe that Charles Darwin was a very smart man, a genius. I had heard other people to refer to Darwin in such a fashion, but reading his original works has brought…
I went and saw Creation today. I enjoyed the film, though personally I am a bit tired of the religion vs. science angle. To some extent I felt that there was a conflation between the views & emphases of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. Paul Bettany's character seemed to be expositing a view of evolution which was less subtle than what the real Darwin outlined so as to juxtapose his own stance cleanly against the simple narrative offered by traditional religion. But a movie is a story about characters, not a perfect reenactment of history. One thing that struck me about Creation was the…
Creation, the Charles Darwin biopic, is opening in a few large cities tomorrow.
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4In Quentin Skinner's celebrated history The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he writes that: If the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice. In Part II of this series I highlighted how a common objection to the political theory of social Darwinism is that it was a misapplication of Darwin's science to already existing ideas. A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the…
If you missed it, you can still watch it online.
Darwin's idea has cost lives: Truths that America's founding fathers had held to be self-evident - that all men were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights - were now scorned as gross sentimentalities that had been overtaken by Darwinian science. Within a decade the self-styled "scientific racialists" had begun to classify other groups as genetically inferior. Immigrants from Spain and Italy were held to be a threat to the quality of the American gene pool and spurious scientific evidence was adduced to "prove" that Jewish immigrants were near-imbeciles whose admission in…
The The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin was published 150 years go as I write this. At the time, several different alternative theories of the origin and history of life were being discussed in the West. Some of these theories were theological. Theological ideas included a literal translation of the bible, with the flora, the fauna, and humans created in three separate but related creation events on a freshly made earth just a few thousand years ago. Another theological idea had an Abrahamic God's hand involved in the history of life but in ways we were not likely to understand until…
The Darwin Experience: The Story of the Man and his Theory of Evolution by John van Wyhe National Geographic Books It almost seems like a throwback to another age, a time when people actually read books and stuff. And National Geographic Books' The Darwin Experience: The Story of the Man and his Theory of Evolution may be one of the last such volumes ever produced, given the rate at which e-books are gobbling up market share. After all, if you want to browse through Darwin's life or read On the Origin of Species, you can do that online. But for those of us born before the advent of the…
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker The Maldives, featured in a Wired gallery of islands shot from space. A place crucial to the story I told in Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong. It's also a singularly beautiful place, and particularly threatened by global warming.
My co-blogger at Gene Expression Classic, David, has completed a very interesting series today. 1: The Pattern of Evolution 2: Mechanisms of Evolution 3: Heredity 4: Speciation 5: Gradualism (A) 6: Gradualism (B) 7: Levels of Selection
I just read Eugenie Scott's review of the movie, Creation, a drama about the life of Charles Darwin that was recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival. This film, which -- astonishingly -- does not have a distributor in the USA, humanizes Darwin by showing us key events from his life after he returned from his famous five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. But Eugenie Scott is not the only one who likes this film; it has received positive reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, Ray Bennett of THReviews, the IMDB and Roger Ebert. Besides being touted as an excellent film, Creation has the coolest…
Creation, a biopic about Charles Darwin, premiers tomorrow at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trailer below....
Bloggingheads.tv just posted a conversation Greg Laden and I had about the second-biggest scientific controversy of Darwin's time, and of Darwin's life: the argument over how coral reefs form. The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father. His story -- and the tumultuous 19th-century struggle to define science and empiricism -- is the…
I was pleased to see my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral written up in a couple of venues recently. Over at The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael Johnson, who does on history and philosophy of science, looks at the "terrific argument" that the book follows -- an argument simultaneously about how coral reefs form, how to do science, and (a third layer out), creationism versus empiricism. A nice write-up -- you can't go wrong starting a piece about the creationism-empiricism debate (among other things) with an atomic blast. The book is also mentioned…
Short article in PLoS Biology, Charles Darwin's Reception in Germany and What Followed.
Darwin and Wallace, chillin' Let's talk about Darwin and Wallace's joint presentation on Natural Selection in 1858. It is not usually the case that I write a blog post for a carnival. I usually just write for the blog, then now and then sit down and figure out which posts should go to with carnivals. That is not the case with this post. Some time ago I thought, while writing a Peer Reviewed Research post, that it would be interesting to write up older papers, classics, or more recent papers that were of great interest for one reason or another but maybe a few years old. Just around…