History
pharyngula | March 2, 2007Adam Cuerden sent me a scan of this interesting article from the 1871 Illustrated London News, and I decided I was being terribly selfish keeping it to myself, so here you go — don't say I never share. The image that accompanies it is a wonderful example of old-time illustration; click on it for a larger version.
As the media usually does, it plays up the horrible danger of this alien creature.
THE EIGHT-ARMED CUTTLE
The aquarium at the Crystal Palace now contains, with many other interesting objects, several specimens of the poulpe, or eight-armed cuttle, Octopus vulgaris, obtained from…
pharyngula | February 28, 2007A new movie about Darwin is in the works—
Jeremy Thomas is set to produce Annie's Box about Charles Darwin, and hiring John Collee to write and directed by Jon Amiel.
The film will be based on a biography of Darwin by Randall Keynes, the great-great grandson of the Victorian scientist. Variety notes it focuses on the period when Darwin was writing The Origin of the Species, his ground-breaking treatise on evolution, while living a family life at Down House in Kent, near London.
The 'Annie' of the title is Darwin's first daughter, whose death aged 10 left him grief-stricken. With his…
evolvingthoughts | February 27, 2007
So what if the remains found really are those of Jesus of Nazareth? This joke indicates that for some it might not matter:
One day the Pope received a phone call from an archaeologist in Palestine. "Holy Father," the voice said, "I don't quite know how to tell you this, but we have discovered what prove beyond doubt to be the very bones of Jesus!" Hanging up, the Pope convened his closest advisors. Explaining the situation, he asked the stunned clerics for suggestions. One stammered, "Holy Father, I believe there is a theologian in America who might be able to help us. His name is Paul…
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2007
"I support ignorance. There is my philosophy. I have the tranquility of ignorance and faith in science. Others cannot live without faith, without belief, without theology [or theory - the original is smudged. JSW]; I do without all of these. I do not know, and I shall never know; I accept this fact without tormenting myself about it." [Stebbins, p 135f]
The French is this (can anyone translate the final sentence for me?):
Je supporte l’ignorance: c’est là ma philosophie. J’ai la tranquillité de l’ignorance et la foi de la science. Les autres ne peuvent vivre sans foi, sans croyance,…
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2007
Mahatma Gandhi is reputed to have once been asked by a journalist what he thought about western civilisation. "I think it would be a very good idea", Gandhiji is supposed to have replied. True or not, the anecdote came to mind when I read William Rees-Mogg's piece in the Times Online: "Religion isn't the sickness. It's the cure". A curative religion, one that civilises, would be a very good idea. Pity it's not yet in existence.
Rees-Mogg repeats the old canards of conservativism about "modernity" - it is a moral failure, a panic against religion, a neurosis, and it caused social Darwinism…
pharyngula | February 21, 2007The article about gastrulation from the other day was dreadfully vertebrate-centric, so let me correct that with a little addendum that mentions a few invertebrate patterns of gastrulation—and you'll see that the story hasn't changed.
Remember, this is the definition of gastrulation that I explained with some vertebrate examples:
The process in animal embryos in which endoderm and mesoderm move from the outer surface of the embryo to the inside, where they give rise to internal organs.
I described frogs and birds and mammals the other day, so lets take a look at sea urchins and fruit flies…
clock | February 20, 2007Back in May 21, 2006, Montenegro seceded from Serbia. Here is what I wrote:
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Right now, there are five countries in the place of Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia & Montenegro. Considering the very high turnout at today's referendum in Montenegro, there soon may be another split, as Serbia and Montenegro go their separate ways.
Of course, the whole thing is misguided. Just like a division into Red States and Blue States (and you remember some of those "Jesusland" maps right after the…
clock | February 20, 2007They are the last ones who should be playing with this fire:
Croatia probes Hitler likeness, jokes on sugar packets:
Small packets of sugar bearing the likeness of Adolf Hitler and carrying Holocaust jokes have been found in some cafes in Croatia, prompting an investigation, the office of the state prosecutor said on Monday. "The local district attorney in (the eastern town of) Pozega has opened an investigation and is currently looking at the matter," said Martina Mihordin. The Novi List daily newspaper reported that officials at a small factory in Pozega have confirmed the sugar packs were…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2007
I get notifications of the incredibly bigoted and stupid comments at Town Hall.Com via Google. I usually ignore them - that's PZ's domain. But this has to be commented on.
Some idiotic ignoramus named Mary Grabar attacks Sam Harris, who most likely knows three orders of magnitude more than she about the history of both science and religion, thus, in a column nicely titled "Letter to a Stupid Atheist":
You have a degree in philosophy, I see, but were you aware that science as a mode of thought came about through monotheism? You see, the idea of a single creator made it possible for human…
pharyngula | February 17, 2007Lately, the Discovery Institute has stuck its neck out in response to the popularity of showings of Randy Olson's movie, Flock of Dodos, which I reviewed a while back. They slapped together some lame critiques packaged on the web as Hoax of Dodos (a clunker of a name; it's especially ironic since the film tries to portray the Institute as good at PR), which mainly seem to be driven by the sloppy delusions of that poor excuse for a developmental biologist, Jonathan Wells. In the past week, I've also put up my responses to the Wells deceptions—as a developmental biologist myself, I get a little…
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2007
Apparently this was a real exam answer. I sympathise.
Thanks to Rich Baldwin...
Late note: Some more are available here.
oracknows | February 15, 2007Fellow ScienceBlogger Martin is hosting the History Carnival over at Aardvarchaeology. More good stuff to peruse!
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2007
It's high time for a first History Carnival here at ScienceBlogs.
Science is the systematic study of source material to find out what the world is like or has been like. If a scientist's source material is written matter and pictures and her questions are about what people's lives were like in the past, then she is a historian.
I'm an archaeologist, meaning that my questions are similar to a historian's though my source material is the wordless material culture of the past. I'll be your host for the 48th History Carnival -- welcome to Aardvarchaeology!
Natalie of Philobiblon heads straight…
evolvingthoughts | February 14, 2007
Most of us have seen or heard of those who challenge the age of the Earth, from the undue pressure on the NPS, to the assertions that the Earth is "really" just 6000 or so years old. But how did we arrive at the present figure of 4.55 billion years?
"The Chronologers' Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth" (Patrick Wyse Jackson), gives a nice and comprehensive account of the project to date the earth, and the means used to do it, from early modern theological approaches like the famous Ussher's (and Jackson has some corrections to make to Gould's essay on the topic), through to the…
evolvingthoughts | February 11, 2007
Another stupid piece by DIsco, in which David Klinghofer tries to blame Darwin for eugenics, totally overlooking the fact that the mediate source is animal husbandry, which predates Darwin by several thousand years, and that the immediate source is genetics, not evolution. I think that we should immediately teach the doctrine of signatures (in which natal traits are formed by the parents looking at similar objects, like the "striped and speckled sheep" in Genesis, which were mated before peeled branches) rather than genetics, because of the bad consequences of people misusing that science…
evolvingthoughts | February 11, 2007
One of the ironies of the history of biology is that Darwin did not really explain the origin of new species in The Origin of Species, because he didn’t know how to define a species. [Futuyma 1983: 152]
Comments like Futuyma's have been published in scores of textbooks and repeated ad nauseum. Similar criticisms go back to the 19th century, and in my view, they are totally wrong.
Charles Darwin was a student of some of the best geologists and naturalists in Britain at the time, when geology and natural history were regarded as being similar if not identical topics. When he set off on the…
clock | February 7, 2007From today's Quotes Of The Day
Sinclair Lewis was born at Sauk Centre, Minnesota on this day in 1885. He was an avid and somewhat romantic reader as a boy, he attempted to run away from home at age thirteen to be a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War. He graduated from Yale in 1908 and set to work writing romantic poems and stories. He was awarded, but refused, a Pulitzer in 1926. He was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, a prize he accepted. The Nobel Committee praised "his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour,…