darwin
gregladen | February 9, 2009Eventually, the Beagle headed south to the area of Uruguay and Argentina, still on the Atlantic Coast, where extensive mapping of the coastal waters was required.
The Parana and Uruguay Rivers meet in the Atlantic estuary known as Rio de la Plata. On the north side of this huge body of water is Montevideo, Uruguay, and on the south side, the northern coast of Argentina. There is an interesting story linked with early European exploration of this area. A Spanish ship is the first known European craft to explore La Plata. The ship's captain and a small crew went inland, and never came…
hrynyshyn | February 9, 2009Not to diminish Charles Darwin's brillance in the slightest, but there's a nice little essay in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade that helps explain why the guy managed to get so much so right so long ago. The money quote:
One of Darwin's advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing "The Origin of Species" in 1859, and for 12 years more before its sequel, "The Descent of Man," which explored how his theory applied to people.
So what need are more and…
clock | February 9, 2009
As you may remember, this week we have a special guest here in the Triangle - Carl Zimmer is coming to enjoy NC BBQ and, since he's already here on the 12th, to give the Darwin Day talk at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh (directions):
"Darwin and Beyond: How Evolution Is Evolving"
February 12, 2009
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Please join us for a Darwin Day presentation by Carl Zimmer. Mr. Zimmer is well known for his popular science writing, particularly his work on evolution. He has published several books including Soul Made Flesh, a history of the brain, Evolution: The…
gregladen | February 9, 2009When reading the Voyage, it is impossible to miss the observation that much of the time Darwin was engaged in adolescent boy behavior: Pulling the heads off insects, noting how long they would wiggle after cut in half, closely examining the ooze and guts, occupied much of his time. Obviously, careful observation and a strong stomach were not all that was required to think up Natural Selection and his other theories, or the Origin of Species would have been written dozens of times by dozens of grown up kids.
Reposted with minor revisions
...
In the following passages, Darwin is still along…
jwhitfield | February 9, 2009From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups.
Isn't that a good sentence? It's the first of this chapter. There's music in the way the Biblical ring of "From the first dawn of life", falls towards the swallowed repetition of "groups under groups", which itself mirrors and explains the descending degrees of resemblance that gives the sentence its scientific filling.
The next line is just as good: "This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of the stars in…
ddobbs | February 7, 2009My Darwin talk at Dartmouth on Thursday went well, and while there I had the privilege of meeting with editors of the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, or DUJS -- which is, at 11 years, the oldest extant undergrad journal in the U.S., as far as its editors can tell.
I knew from writing about scientific research that more universities are (wisely) involving undergraduates in serious research. But I hadn't known of any serious undergrad science journals publishing and commenting on research until the DUJS staff invited me over to Dartmouth to talk about Darwin and coral reefs. The…
gregladen | February 6, 2009What do you eat when you are traveling the world in search of truth about the natural world? Most of the time Darwin ate pretty well...
~repost~
While traveling through the South American interior near Rio, Darwin makes note of some of the agricultural practices of the region. He is visiting farms ... plantations .. carved out of the forest.
The chief produce of this part of the country is coffee. Each tree is supposed to yield annually, on an average, two pounds; but some give as much as eight. Mandioca or cassada is likewise cultivated in great quantity.
... that would be Manihot, or…
jwhitfield | February 6, 2009Back when I started this, I remarked that one of the reasons I hadn't read the Origin was that I couldn't imagine it being essential to a grasp of contemporary science. Regarding evolution, I think you could still make a case for this. But in other ways, that statement shows that you really shouldn't opine on topics you know nothing about.
Specifically, I'm talking about ecology (by which, just to be clear, I mean the study of the interactions of living things with each other and their environment, rather than 'nature' or 'environmentalism'). It's been said that all European philosophy is a…
gregladen | February 5, 2009I became acquainted with an Englishman who was going to visit his estate ... more than a hundred miles [north] of Cape Frio. As I was quite unused to travelling, I gladly accepted his kind offer of allowing me to accompany him.
And so was the case with a number of Darwin's excursions into the bush.
~repost~
Although he organized expeditions to the interior, he also took advantage of individuals or groups traveling one place or another, such as this Englishman, in order to carry out random acts of geologizing and opportunistic biologizing.
And thus seven men, including Darwin and his…
gregladen | February 5, 2009The first time I read the following passage from The Voyage, I was reminded of my own first experience in a rain forest (in Zaire, not Congo). Evident in this passage is at least a glimmering of Darwin's appreciation for the complexity of ecosystems. Darwin could be considered the first scientific ecologist.
But enough of my commentary ... this passage very much stands on it's own ...
reposted and slightly modified
BAHIA, OR SAN SALVADOR. BRAZIL, FEB. 29TH.--The day has past delightfully. Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first…
gregladen | February 5, 2009
Behold this humble passage by Darwin, which is what immediately follows his discussion of the octopus. This passage is a touchstone to several important aspects of what Darwin was doing and thinking, and is a poignant link to what Darwin did not know:
Repost with slight modifications
ST. PAUL'S ROCKS.--In crossing the Atlantic we hove to, during the morning of February 16th, close to the island of St. Paul.
Ah, sorry to interrupt. Saint Paul's Rocks are in the Atlantic roughly half way between South America and Africa. That geographical information should give you a hint of why…
gregladen | February 4, 2009Of his time on the Beagle (1832 - 1836), Darwin wrote, "The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career." Of the manuscript describing that voyage, he wrote, "The success of this my first literary child always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books."
Taking a cue from these reflections, I'd like to spend some time with this book, in celebration of Darwin's 200th birthday, coming up in just a few days.
(Reposted and slightly revised from last year)
An early version of "The Voyage."To begin with, it is…
jwhitfield | February 4, 2009When the Origin was published, the idea that species were not fixed entities had been in the air for some time, thanks to Lamarck, Robert Chambers, anonymous author of the best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus.
But unlike those men, Darwin put all the different pieces together into a coherent whole. How was that? Chapter 11 of the Origin, 'Geographical distribution', gives some hints.
First there's the nurture. In the age of long-haul flights and wildlife documentaries, it's easy to forget how difficult it was to see different…
jwhitfield | February 2, 2009We left Darwin in a troubled frame of mind. The fossil record seemed to offer little support to his theory (then again, it offered little support to any other theory). By the time we reach the end of chapter 10, 'On the geological succession of organic beings', he's feeling far more chipper:
"[A]ll the chief laws of palaeontology plainly proclaim, as it seems to me, that species have been produced by ordinary generation: old forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life, produced by the laws of variation still acting round us, and preserved by Natural Selection."
What…
jwhitfield | January 31, 2009Thomas Kuhn -- the one philosopher of science that even ignorami like me have heard of -- said that during periods of 'normal science', researchers only take on problems that they know they can solve. 'Paradigm' is an overused word, but it's a measure of the paradigm-shifting nature of the Origin that in much of it, such as in chapter 9 'On the imperfection of the geological record', Darwin flies blind.
This creates almost as much trouble for the reader as it does for Darwin, as we saw in the previous chapter. The less you can explain, the more you need to describe; where Darwin has cracked a…
amillikan | January 29, 2009ScienceBloggers are up in arms about the cover article of New Scientist which boldly proclaims "Darwin was Wrong." The article, authored by Graham Lawton, explains that occurrences such as horizontal gene transfer and hybridization transform the shape of Darwin's famous tree into something more like a thicket with criss-crossing branches. But some argue that new information in genetics doesn't render Darwin's model obsolete, and, moreover, that the headline is misleading and could be used as a tool for Creationists. "Very few readers will read your article. But everyone will see the cover,"…
jwhitfield | January 29, 2009George Bernard Shaw, according to a comment left on a previous post, thought that many people gave up on reading the Origin because, convinced of Darwin's argument, they wearied of him making his points over and over again.
But I disagree. It's not seeing Darwin restate his case that's tiring. It's seeing him return, like a dog to its vomit, to questions that he admitted in chapters one and two couldn't be answered.
When I read these earlier chapters, I was struck by how skilfully Darwin skirted uncertainties, and even how he used them in his arguments. I thought of giving this a fancy name…
jwhitfield | January 27, 2009Science is fun. Now, I know that someone telling you a thing is fun is usually a guarantee that it isn't. And I know that people who tell you science is fun usually do so in strained and pleading tones, and expect you to believe them because they have spiky hair and can play the harmonica. But it's true.
To see what I mean, read chapter 6 of the Origin, 'Instinct'. Despite, or because of, having its share of 'are you sure about that?' moments, it's a delight, because it shows Darwin doing the most fun thing in science: mucking about with reality, sometimes called experimentation.
In this…
jwhitfield | January 23, 2009Up until now, our route into the theory of evolution by natural selection has been all downhill. One thing has led effortlessly to another, with Darwin giving the occasional nudge to steer things in the right direction. Not any more. If it's human interest you're after -- doubt, sweat, anxiety -- then chapter 6 of the Origin, 'Difficulties on Theory', is the one you've been waiting for.
I obviously wasn't going to admit it, but after chapters 4 and 5, I was beginning to fear that we'd peaked with the struggle of chapter 3. But this chapter is full of gems, both in the science, and in the…
jwhitfield | January 21, 2009To a man with a hammer, said Mark Twain, everything looks like a nail. The better your hammer, I would add, the more nail-like everything looks.
In natural selection, Darwin had crafted one of the best hammers of all time. And in chapter 5 of the origin, 'Laws of Variation', you can hear him umming and aahing about various alternative mechanisms of evolutionary change before deciding that, actually, you know what this needs...hold 'er steady...Thwack!
How about, for example, the "effect of external conditions" -- "food climate &c.". Well, "Gould believes that birds of the same species are…