History and Philosophy (often of Science)
jlynch | December 26, 2006
Today in 1831, Charles Darwin left Plymouth on board the HMS Beagle for a voyage that would be epoch-making in the history of science. He would return to England on the 2nd of October 1836. In 1837 he would begin a series of notebooks that would culminate in his 1842 "pencil sketch" of his theory of transmutation through natural selection.
jlynch | December 25, 2006
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 (Julian calender). As Alexander Pope famously said. "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;, God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light."
jlynch | December 19, 2006
I spent last night reading the updated version of Ron Numbers' classic work The Creationists. While the majority of the text has not changed from the 1992 edition, Numbers has added two new chapters - one on Intelligent Design and another on the spread of creationism outside the US.
For those that have not encountered The Creationists before, it is - without doubt - the historical examination of creationism in America. Numbers traces the roots of modern anti-evolutionism to Seventh Day Adventism, and over sixteen chapters (in the first edition) traces the interactions between young and old…
jlynch | December 14, 2006 Edward T. Oakes may be a good teacher of theology at St. Mary of the Lake, but he is a lousy historian of Darwinism. Witness the following statement from his review of Richard Weikart's work, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany:
Spencer might well have been the first to coin the phrase "survival of the fittest." But Darwin enthusiastically adopted it in the 6th edition of his Origin of Species as a substitute term for "natural selection." Nor did he ever demur when other advocates of evolution's social application came pleading their case. Karl Marx…
jlynch | December 13, 2006
Today is the anniversary of the death, in 1873, of the Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist, Louis Agassiz (born in 1807) whom I've mentioned before. It is fair to say that Agassiz was the last intellectually respectable creationist in America. A vehement anti-evolutionist and polygenist, Agassiz none-the-less left modern science with a theory of glaciation. He was influential in the formation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) & the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (home of Gould, Mayr, and…
jlynch | November 22, 2006
This illustration of a rather jovial looking Bradypus tridactylus (three-toed sloth) comes from Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber's Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen ['Mammals Illustrated after Nature with Descriptions', 1774, Vol I II & III].
(HT to BibliOdyssey)
jlynch | November 22, 2006Others have noticed that John Horgan has presented his own personal list of the ten "worst science books." Many of his choices aren't science books per se and he obviously ignores his own excerable The End of Science which was, frankly, drivel that brought much joy to postmodernist critics during the "Science Wars" of the 1990's. He's also, in my opinion, unfair to E.O. Wilson ... but that is an argument for another day.
Horgan does, however, get Gould's Rocks of Ages correct when he describes it as "Gould at his pompous, verbose worst. He managed somehow both to pander and condescend to…
jlynch | November 20, 2006From here. The top ten are:
1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie]
3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687)
4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632)
5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)
6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.)
7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543)
8. Relativity: The…
jlynch | October 21, 2006As some of you may know, in 1650, the Irish archbishop, James Ussher dated the beginning of the universe using the Book of Genesis and calculated the date of creation to be October 22, 4004 BC. That would make the universe 6002 6009 years old today.
jlynch | October 18, 2006
I've been waiting for this for a while. The Darwin Online project is now live and ready for customers - your one-stop-shop for scans and transcriptions of not only Darwin's published works (and reviews thereof) but also his notebooks, lesser known papers, and other materials. Props to the good folks at Cambridge University, especially John van Whye, for making this valuable resource available to the history of science community.
jlynch | October 6, 2006
Seen for the first time, October 7th, 1959.
"there is no dark side of the Moon really... matter of fact it's all dark"
jlynch | August 1, 2006
Today is the anniversary of the birth (in 1672) of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer. A major factor in the development of paleontology in Switzerland, he is also considered the founder of paleobotany and his Herbarium diluvianum was a standard through the nineteenth century. His work on a great variety of fossils makes him generally considered the founder of European paleontology.
In 1725 Scheuchzer examined a specimen of what he believed to be a fossilized victim of the Noachian Flood (homo diluvii testis) and he described the specimen in his 1731 work Physica Sacra. He died in 1733, believing the…
jlynch | July 31, 2006A quick puzzle ...
I was born on this day in 1860 and have a 10502 foot peak named after me in Alberta. I helped my better-known husband (whom I married at the age of 54) with his fieldwork in Canada, but am also known as an illustrator.
And a quick visual clue:
jlynch | July 19, 2006I'm actually finding it remarkably easy to answer this question.
I'd have to go for the period after 1660, in London, and thus during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Sure, you had to be a gentleman of privilege, but the Royal Society of London had begun to consolidate informal attitudes that had developed in Gresham College. Inquiry was everywhere. Experiments - often gruesome and on the experimenter - were run. (This gruesomeness - particularly in basic medical research - would continue well into the Georgian period - witness the life of the father of modern surgery, John Hunter).…
jlynch | July 18, 2006Coturnix the Chronobiologist offers an oldest book meme. I guess my library is in as much disarray as his - especially as it's split between home and office - so here's what I have to hand and own that pre-dates 1900:
Geology and Revelation: of The Ancient History of the Earth Considered in Light of Geological Facts and Revealed Religion. Gerald Molloy, 1873 (2nd ed).
Memoir of Robert Chambers with Autobiographic Reminiscences of William Chambers. William Chambers, 1872.
Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation. James M'Cosh and George Dickie, 1857.
Not very much, I know. I like old books,…
jlynch | July 16, 2006Can anyone guess where this is? And equally, why it is topical?
Clue: "Batter my heart, three person'd God"
[I stole the idea from Alex's Map That Campus quiz]
jlynch | July 15, 2006Today is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt van Rijn. In honor, I give you The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) which is probably my favorite Rembrandt painting.
[click above for much larger version]
For more on the painting, see here.
jlynch | July 12, 2006It is a truism that creationists such as Jonathan Wells can't get enough of Haeckel's embryos, pictures they see as conclusive evidence that evolutionary biology is a fraud foisted on innocents by liberal, godless, evilutionists. "Informed" commentators on the right such as Ann Coulter hew to that party line. Reading Wells or Coulter one would imagine that it was modern creationists who discovered the fraud. Sadly for their revisionist history, that is not the case. Nick Hopwood has just published a paper in Isis (the premier journal in history of science) that examines the history of the…
jlynch | July 6, 2006Back in January I discussed a review of Rodney Stark's triumphalist The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Lead to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success by Alan Wolfe who describes the book as "the worst book by a social scientist that I have ever read." The current issue of Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society offers three similar indictments of Stark's foray into history.
Jack Goldstone (George Mason School of Public Policy:
It pains me to say that the results [of Stark's investigations] are a tissue of gross historical errors and illogical conclusions. It is…
jlynch | June 10, 2006The Ask A ScienceBlogger question for this week inspired me to revisit this post I made on April 22 2005.
Today in 1827 the Irish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer William Rowan Hamilton presented his Theory of systems of rays a work that brought together mechanics, optics and mathematics and helped in establishing the wave theory of light. In addition, this year marks the bicentenary of Hamilton’s birth.
Hamilton sticks in my mind for two reasons. Firstly, nearly twenty years ago as a sophomore zoology major, I took a course in quantum mechanics and loved it. So much so, that the…