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Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
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It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon that book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
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« Someone was awake at GECCO | Main | I don't think this is the message he wanted me to come away with »
Category: History
Posted on: July 18, 2008 1:16 PM, by PZ Myers
Somebody is publishing private letters! Of course, these are 186 year old private letters from a 12 year old Charles Darwin, and they're very amusing. I guess he wasn't a fan of bathing, and later wasn't shy about trash-talking his college professors. He was a very pugnacious little boy!
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Comments
Something tells me creationists might use the first letter as a means to 'obliterate' evolution.
Ken Ham: Kids, who are you going to trust? A man who wasn't fond of bathing, or God?
Kids: Go-- wait, I'm not a fan of bathing either.
Posted by: Dylan | July 18, 2008 1:21 PM
I'm sure the IDiots will have something stupid to say about this. Denyse?
Posted by: hje | July 18, 2008 1:22 PM
That... reminds me a lot of MY little brother, actually. Little brothers, it seems, are universal.
Posted by: lytefoot | July 18, 2008 1:32 PM
Some of his grandfather's correspondence is interesting too. Erasmus Darwin once loned his college notes to a friend, who returned them with a note, which criticized his terrible spelling and called him a son of a whore. Don't you love history? It's so colorful.
Posted by: MarcusA | July 18, 2008 1:38 PM
I hate to think what my students might say behind my back, although so far I don't suspect any of them of being a future Darwin. Of course, I have also complained about my own teachers behind their backs, but my criticisms have always been thoughtful and well-founded. And, unlike an obstreperous nephew I have, I never, never, ever baited an instructor to his or her face.
I do think students are getting cheekier these days. Fortunately, so far, not smellier.
Posted by: Zeno | July 18, 2008 1:40 PM
I'm sure this will be used as Creationist propaganda.
I can see it now:
"Well, evolution is bad because Darwin didn't bathe!"
Unfortunately, neither did Jesus. Ha! Staying ahead of the game.
Posted by: JStein | July 18, 2008 1:40 PM
Hee! I guess even geniuses are just little brats when they're young.
Posted by: Michelle | July 18, 2008 1:47 PM
Why did he want titanium?
Posted by: nn2 | July 18, 2008 2:00 PM
I'm sure Slimy Sal is beside himself with glee. So much new material to quote mine!
Posted by: H.H. | July 18, 2008 2:07 PM
I wonder who Erasmus is in those letters. Surely not his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, since he died in 1802. A brother perhaps?
Posted by: Neural T | July 18, 2008 2:14 PM
Although an afterlife is highly improbable, I can certainly imagine that in it there could come to pass a time in which Darwin and Jesus meet for a mutual foot-washing. Darwin wouldn't enjoy it much, it seems.
Posted by: shrimplate | July 18, 2008 2:17 PM
I love this bit from the second letter:
I've known a fair few people like that myself....
Posted by: Etha Williams, OM | July 18, 2008 2:20 PM
I can just see it now... the latest proof for god...
Darwin didn't bathe.
Because Darwin didn't bathe, evolution is bad
Therefore, God exists.
Posted by: HumanisticJones | July 18, 2008 2:23 PM
@ Neural T: According to Wikipedia, this was Erasmus Alvey Darwin, older brother of Charles Darwin.
Posted by: Irene Delse | July 18, 2008 2:25 PM
"Why did he want titanium?"
Possibly titanium dioxide oil paint, a common white oil paint used in backgrounds in painting picturesand preparing canvases. Titanium oxide has replaced lead oxide and zinc oxide (think sunscreen). I think in the early 1800's it was the exotic "new thing," as lead oxide had been around for centuries. See (for example) http://painting.about.com/od/artglossaryw/a/titanium_white.htm
Posted by: Paul Burnett | July 18, 2008 2:26 PM
Yeah. This is going to be a quote farm for the loons.
By the way, did anyone catch BoingBoing's post of the man electrocuting a pickle as a way to explain Christianity?
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/18/man-electrocutes-pic.html
I like it. If you've got Jebus in you, your head glows and you've got light coming out of your eyes like David Lo Pan (not the short little basket case on wheels, mind you. I'm talking about the ten foot tall road block).
Posted by: Capital Dan | July 18, 2008 2:27 PM
@ Neural T: Irene Delse is correct, Erasmus was his older brother. The first episode of PBS's Evolution series from 2000 does a great job using Erasmus as a foil for Charles for him to explain things to. He started studying medicine, than realized how much money he was actually going to inherit, and so basically became a playboy.
Posted by: Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. | July 18, 2008 2:35 PM
Off Topic and Self Promotion ALERT!!
Catholics Hijacked by Christo-Fascists AGAIN!!
KPFT Houston, Pacifica Radio
PZ Myers debacle escalates,
http://acksisofevil.org/audio/inner188.mp3
or download from
http://acksisofevil.org/innerside.html
Music by Tom Lehrer
spoken word, Sam Harris
you tube eucharist Challenge
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Iq_XZuF6Vsk
Posted by: scooter | July 18, 2008 2:35 PM
Of course today, this would be email or on Facebook and the kid expelled..
Posted by: George | July 18, 2008 2:36 PM
"Why did he want titanium?"
Probably code for something... 'Can anyone score me some "titanium"'?
Posted by: windy | July 18, 2008 2:37 PM
Hey Capt Dan #16
blockquote>did anyone catch BoingBoing's post of the man electrocuting a pickle as a way to explain Christianity?
Maybe I'm weird but I got the impression the old boy was torturing his own penis for being a bad bad boy.
Very Christian impulse
Posted by: scooter | July 18, 2008 2:44 PM
Creationists depend on Authorities. So, they tend to identify Darwin with the theory of evolution. Or Galileo with heliocentrism. According to the Authority reasoning, the morality of that Authority is important to "establish" the truthiness of theories and hypotheses linked to that person.
Posted by: Didac | July 18, 2008 2:56 PM
I believe that at one time bathing was considered unhealthy. It was thought to open the pores and allow diseases (noxious vapors) to enter the body.
Also, Native Americans did not like the fact that whites didn't bath regularly and often smelled badly.
As an aside, on the Nixon tapes Nixon can be heard commenting about how dirty he thought the Indians lived, but it turns out it was the white settlers who stunk.
Posted by: The Dancing Kid | July 18, 2008 3:30 PM
Darwin was interested in chemistry as a boy (he was nicknamed 'Gas') and spent a lot of his allowance on chemicals to use in the shed he and Erasmus had converted into a lab.
Posted by: Peter Mc | July 18, 2008 3:45 PM
Umm, legend has it that he bathed at least once.
Posted by: Warren | July 18, 2008 3:59 PM
Actually is it a complete myth that bathing is required to not stink. Body odor is caused by heterotrophic bacteria on the skin metabolizing things (sweat and skin) into compounds that stink. If those bacteria are suppressed by autotrophic ammonia oxidizing bacteria (the normal flora in "the wild"), there is no body odor.
Heterotrophic bacteria grow much faster than autotrophic bacteria (~30x faster doubling time), so it is easy to wash off autotrophic bacteria faster than they can proliferate. Until you have a sufficient population of ammonia oxidizing bacteria, the heterotrophs will cause you to smell bad. It takes 30 times longer to get an autotrophic biofilm going, that is months without bathing instead of days.
Native peoples who never bathe have the proper biofilm so they don't smell. Westerners who bathe lose the normal biofilm and the abnormal biofilm that develops is the one that causes odor.
This is one of the topics of my nitric oxide research. I have blogged about how these bacteria do suppress heterotrophs, most likely via quorum sensing. Very many eukaryotes do the same thing. This is how eukaryotes keep their surfaces clear of biofilms. They have the proper biofilm of ammonia oxidizing bacteria. When they lose that biofilm is when bad things happen, such as lobster shell disease in lobsters.
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2008/06/suggestion-to-reduce-antibiotic.html
If eukaryotes tried to suppress heterotrophic biofilms by killing them, that would lead to an arms race that bacteria would win because of their many orders of magnitude faster evolution. By not killing bacteria but instead suppressing quorum sensing there is no evolutionary driving force for the bacteria to evolve resistance.
Posted by: daedalus2u | July 18, 2008 4:00 PM
Poor old fella. He would have got a real kick out of blogging... if he could have just hung in there a little longer...
Posted by: DSKS | July 18, 2008 4:51 PM
This project was in a free newspaper on my bus today.
The story was about a letter from Darwin to his doctor, detailing Darwin's use of hydrochloric acid and cayenne pepper in his coffee to reduce his stomach troubles.
Which just kind of makes you wonder how bad they had to be to begin with...
Posted by: Mill | July 18, 2008 6:08 PM
Excuse the comment from a mere chemist, but titanium hadn't been isolated at this point. Titanium dioxide or rutile was well known as a white pigment, often refered to as 'titanium' or 'titanium white'. Could this be what he wanted?
Posted by: Geoff | July 18, 2008 6:51 PM
Excuse the comment from a mere chemist, but titanium hadn't been isolated at this point. Titanium dioxide or rutile was well known as a white pigment, often refered to as 'titanium' or 'titanium white'. Could this be what he wanted?
Posted by: Geoff | July 18, 2008 6:53 PM
In short, cleanliness is indeed next to Godliness.
Posted by: Unspeakably Violent Jane | July 18, 2008 6:58 PM
"Well, evolution is bad because Darwin didn't bathe!"
Unfortunately, neither did Jesus.
Add that to the "delusions of grandeur" as reasons to avoid being christ-like.
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | July 18, 2008 6:59 PM
..and if he'd been a woman I bet he wouldn't have shaved his armpits either.
Posted by: Bride of Shrek | July 18, 2008 7:28 PM
You know, BoS, some of us more unreconstructed freethinking male-types still rather like that kind of thing. A lot.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | July 18, 2008 7:43 PM
Shit, did I post that out loud?
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | July 18, 2008 7:45 PM
In the second letter, young Charles is now a 16-year old medical student in Edinburgh, chaperoned by his older brother, Ras, also a medical student. Among the "lectures" he had to attend were those where a bloody-aproned dirty saw-bones amputated limbs, sometimes from indigent children, without anesthesia. Any wonder they both eschewed their daddy's profession?
I have only 200 pages to go in Janet Browne's two-volume biography. Highly recommended--check your local library.
Posted by: JoeB | July 18, 2008 8:44 PM
The Dancing Kid @23 said
Certainly some Indians bathed daily; the Creek Indians were reputed to. It is also certain that some never bathed. Consider that they lived from above the arctic circle, in the desert and on the equator and had a wide range of lifestyles. Beware anyone who would make sweeping generalization about the Indians. A contrary example can almost always be found.Posted by: Blind Squirrel FCD | July 19, 2008 12:17 AM
What's truly amazing is that obviously 12 year old brains are capable of literacy levels far beyond those we generally see today.
Actually, that's not amazing, it's sad.
Posted by: GentlePath | July 19, 2008 8:55 AM
Hey folks,
Glad you all enjoy the letters; and thanks for linking them.
Since the young Darwin stuff is so entertaining, I'll try to find more of that sort this Friday. He was indeed an excellent writer at 12.
Cambridge University Library archives these CD letters (there are over 13,000 in all), so here at the Press, we publish them as a set and in collections. The Darwin Correspondence Project also has almost all of them for free online.
Cheers - J
Posted by: Jonathan | July 21, 2008 9:17 AM