history of science
laelaps | February 3, 2009
The extinct whale Dorudon, from the new PLoS One paper.
When the English anatomist William H. Flower proposed that whales had evolved from terrestrial ungulates in 1883 he cast doubt upon the notion that the direct ancestors of early whales chiefly used their limbs for swimming. If they did, Flower reasoned, whales would not have evolved their distinctive method of aquatic locomotion, typified by vertical oscillations of their fluked tails. Instead Flower suggested that the stock that gave rise to whales would have had broad, flat tails that paved the way for cetacean locomotion as we know…
laelaps | February 3, 2009From his instance that human evolution has halted to his rather crummy review of Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life (see my thoughts on the book here), Steve Jones has been raising the hackles of his colleagues more than usual lately. Given that I am not a scientist I cannot count myself among his frustrated peers, but I was aggravated by Jones' latest op-ed "Can we please forget about Charles Darwin?"
Jones is worried that this year's celebration of Darwin's work will overshadow modern evolutionary science. Jones writes;
I hope that, by its end, its subject's beard, his…
laelaps | February 2, 2009
The right hip of Basilosaurus as seen in Lucas' 1900 description.
If you were a 19th century American paleontologist and you wanted a Basilosaurus skeleton there was only one place to look; Alabama. Even though fossils of the ancient whale had been found elsewhere their bones were most abundant in Alabama, and S.B. Buckley, Albert Koch, and others exhumed multiple specimens of the extinct whale from the southern state. Unfortunately, however, most of the skeletons were fragmentary. Even though long chains of vertebrae were often found intact other parts of the skeleton, most notably the…
cmooney | February 2, 2009So...how cool is this?
I'm 31 years old. I graduated from college in 1999. Since then I've been a journalist--for ten years.
But now, at this very minute, I'm finishing my first reading assignment for Princeton's History 293, "Science in a Global Context," taught by D. Graham Burnett. Today is the first day of classes. (Princeton starts late.)
I am a student again, exhilarated by the prospect--and also deeply confused by it.
For example, I currently have numerous journalistic and book assignments, in various stages of completion. So while I'm being a student, I'm also going to have to keep…
clock | January 30, 2009From NESCENT:
Carl Zimmer
"Darwin and Beyond: How Evolution Is Evolving"
February 12, 2009
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Talk Overview: Charles Darwin launched the modern science of evolution, but he hardly had the last word. In fact, today scientists are discovering that evolution works in ways Darwin himself could not have imagined. In my talk I will celebrate Darwin's achievements by looking at the newest discoveries about evolution, from the emergence of life to the dawn of humanity.
Please join us for a Darwin Day presentation by Carl Zimmer. Mr. Zimmer is well known for his popular science writing…
laelaps | January 30, 2009
G.J. Romanes
With the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth just two weeks away there is sure to be a spike in articles, lectures, and other events meant to honor the great naturalist. These homages to Darwin can be instructive, but they lack a personal touch; what we know of Darwin comes from his books, letters, and the numerous biographies of his life.
The scientist George John Romanes, however, did know Darwin and was among the youngest of the Darwinists. Even though we often speak of Huxley, Hooker, Gray, and Lyell as being among Darwin's closest friends, Romanes also had a very…
laelaps | January 29, 2009
When the Cardiff Giant was making its first public appearance in the fall of 1869 the earliest ancestors of humans were still unknown. That our species had evolved and had its own fossil record was implied by Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but the fossil remains of our ancient ancestors was still missing. Human fossils had been found in Europe, like those of the Cro Magnons in France and the fossils from the Neander Valley, but these were so similar to the skeletons of modern humans that, at best, many scientists felt that they only…
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…
laelaps | January 28, 2009
The Giant of Cardiff. Note the leaf placed to protect viewer's sensibilities.
Given the speed at which information travels these days it is not surprising how quickly we forget hoaxes and humbugs. Every year people get their 15 minutes of fame by claiming to have seen ghosts, aliens, or fanciful creatures, but these far-out tales quickly fade away. This past summer, for instance, Matt Whitton, Rick Dyer, and "professional Bigfoot hunter" Tom Biscardi claimed to have in their possession the corpse of a Sasquatch.
Media outlets, particularly FOX News, picked up the story and ran with it but…
laelaps | January 27, 2009It is another busy day, and since I am again left with little time to write here I have decided to post another "follow-up" excerpt from my book.**
A few days ago I mentioned that many paleontologists were skeptical that humans had lived alongside extinct mammals until discoveries made in Europe between 1858-1859 convinced them otherwise. Below is a brief summary of how the scientific consensus began to change on this issue;
The plan of Brixham Cave, from Geology: Chemical, Physical, and Stratigraphical by Joseph Prestwich.
Several months after Koch's presentation, and over 4,000 miles…
laelaps | January 26, 2009
A porpoise, or "sea-hog", from Appletons' Annual Cycloaedia.
I do not have much time to write today, so rather than type something from scratch I have decided to share an excerpt from my book (still in-progress).
In my recent post "Ancient Armored Whales" I briefly drew attention to a quote from Richard Lydekker deriding William Flower's hypothesis that whales may have evolved from ungulates. Presented below in the passage on this subject as it presently appears in the chapter "As Monstrous as a Whale";
A lack of other transitional forms had stirred debate about the place of Basilosaurus…
laelaps | January 25, 2009
The AMNH mount of the Warren Mastodon. From The American Museum Journal.
Glendon's session on Art & Science last weekend inspired me to intensify my search for bits of paleontological art, and I have been fortunate enough to uncover some more verses about a prehistoric beast. Here is Hannah F. Gould's "The Mastodon", published in the prosaically-titled New Poems in 1850;
THE MASTODON.
Thou ponderous truth, from thy long night's sleep
Through the unrecorded eras
Awaked, and come from their darkness deep
To this day of light chimeras! --
What wast thou, when thy mountain form
Stood forth…
laelaps | January 23, 2009
The skull of Basilosaurus, from the 1907 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1900 the famous bone sharp Barnum Brown discovered the skeleton of a huge carnivorous dinosaur in Wyoming, and near its bones were a few fossilized bony plates. When H.F. Osborn described this creature as Dynamosaurus imperiosus he used this association to hypothesize that this predator was covered in armor, but as it turned out "Dynamosaurus" was really a representative of another new dinosaur Osborn named Tyrannosaurus rex. Osborn's famous tyrant showed no sign of being covered with armor, and the…
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…
laelaps | January 22, 2009
A restoration of the Warren mastodon entombed in sediment, from Popular Science.
In 1841 S.B. Buckley was the first to mount a skeletal restoration of Basilosaurus, but his efforts to do so have generally been forgotten. The skeleton changed hands several times during the 1840's and Buckley's more accurate restoration was overshadowed by Albert Koch's monstrous "Hydrarchos", a fantastical creature made from Basilosaurus bones.*
*[I have to admit that that I have not seen any illustrations of Buckley's restoration. My statement regarding its accuracy is based upon his technical papers in…
laelaps | January 21, 2009
A Megatherium, from The Testimony of the Rocks by Hugh Miller.
I can't believe I didn't think of it at the time. During Glendon's session on Art & Science last weekend he asked the audience for specific examples of how art & science influenced each other. A few examples from modern science fiction films came to my mind but I forgot the most obvious example of all; cave art! The paintings made by ancient humans are not only beautiful but reveal details about extinct creatures as they were in life, thus being of value both as art and objects of scientific inquiry.
But what about…
jwhitfield | January 16, 2009If, so far, you've been finding Mr Darwin's book tough going (it's OK, there's no shame in admitting it), here's what you should do: skip all that flannel about variation, and start here. This is where it gets serious.
Chapter 3 of the Origin, as its opening pages explain, faces in two directions. In chapters one and two, we've established the fact of variation, and the fluidity of living forms -- both in space, as shown by the blurry boundaries between species, and in time, as shown by the effect of artificial selection on domestic species. In the chapter to come, says Darwin, we'll be…
laelaps | January 15, 2009
The skull of Koch's "Hydrarchos".
In the summer of 1845 Albert Koch was relieved to receive a collection of Basilosaurus bones he had collected in Alabama. He had shipped the fossils ahead of him to New York, but when he arrived at the city he was told that they ship they were on had wrecked. He feared the worst, but the salvagers had saved the bones and sent them to Koch free of charge. He did not call his reconstruction Basilosaurus or "Zygodon" (as he called it in his journal, a derivation of Zeuglodon, itself synonymous with Basilosaurus), though. The bones were said to represent a…
clock | January 15, 2009I get e-mails about such events, so I thought I'd share, so you can attend some of these talks if you want:
NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott will be speaking twice in North Carolina shortly.
First, at 7:00 p.m. on January 27, she will be speaking on "Darwin's Legacy in Science and Society" in the Wright Auditorium on the East Carolina University campus in Greenville. "Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 was an extraordinary milestone for science, but it also had profound effects on theology, philosophy, literature, and society in general. Nowhere is…
laelaps | January 13, 2009
So this is it; the Darwin Year. From blogs to books and lectures, lots of people are going to be talking about Charles Darwin and his scientific legacy. It was the same in 1909. (Alright, they didn't have blogs, but you know what I mean.) Lectures were delivered, books were published, and monuments were erected to commemorate Darwin. You would think that some of these signs of homage would have some permanence, but while we are still talking about Darwin the tributes made to him have largely faded away.
Take, for example, the establishment of the 1909 Darwin Celebration at the American…