58 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
    1. Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from…the parent…to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.

      Interesting to contemplate the evolution of the idea of evolution through the Darwin family.

      Charles would obviously have read his grandfather's book, but it also bears noting that he also had access to his grandfather's commonplace book (and likely his other papers).

      See also: https://hypothes.is/a/FmVxQuqJEey33Uu0UTcMlg

    2. Darwin's Grandfather<br /> by [[Dan Allosso]]

    3. Erasmus Darwin’s popularity in America was so great that over a hundred children in Massachusetts between 1800 and 1850 were apparently named after him. I was so surprised to discover a half dozen of them in the remote hill-town of Ashfield where I had gone to find Dr. Charles Knowlton that I did a whole project trying to track them down.
  2. Oct 2023
  3. Jul 2023
    1. Für eine neue Studie wurden die Klagen gegen climate washing, also gegen falsche Angaben von Unternehmen und Organisationen über die von ihnen verursachten Emissionen, erfasst. Global haben diese Prozesse in den letzten Jahren enorm zugenommen, wobei die Zahl der Prozesse etwa zum Ende der Amtszeit von Donald Trump in den USA am schnellsten wuchs. Die Verurteilungen, zu denen es bereits gekommen ist, führen aufgrund der mit ihnen verbundenen Kosten zu Veränderungen bei den Unternehmen.

      https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/de-plus-en-plus-de-plaintes-contres-des-entreprises-et-des-gouvernements-pour-leurs-engagements-climatiques-trompeurs-ou-insuffisants-20230629_B447RVPNDFADBDY44XDJR2KDDI/

  4. Jun 2023
    1. Creation, (Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2009) https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/creation-2?vp=lapl

      Torn between faith and science, and suffering hallucinations, English naturalist Charles Darwin struggles to complete 'On the Origin of Species' and maintain his relationship with his wife.

      Director Jon Amiel Featuring: Jennifer Connelly, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones, Paul Bettany, Ian Kelly

  5. May 2023
    1. system was described by Charles Darwin:I keep from thirty to forty large portfolios, in cabinets with labeled shelves, intowhich I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought manybooks and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work.Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes and make a generaland classified index, and by taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all theinformation collected during my life ready for use.13

      via Nora Barlow ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 vol. 1 (London: Collins, 1958), 137.

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  6. Mar 2023
    1. his original French

      Rentre à la maison, Darwin me fit voir sa bibliothèque, grande pièce du rez-de-chaussée, très commode pour un homme studieux: beaucoup de livres sur les rayons; du jour de deux côtes; une table pour écrire et une autre pour les appareils destinés aux expériences. Celui sur la direction des racines était encore en action. Darwin me donna une idée de son avant-dernier ouvrage, qui était alors sous presse. Il est seul l'obligeance de m'apprendre que pour ses notes il avait employé, de lui-même, précisément le procède des fragments détachés que mon père et moi avons suivi et dont j'ai parlé en détail dans ma Phylographie. Quatre-vingts ans de noire expérience m'avaient montré sa valeur. J'en suis plus pénétré que jamais, puisque Darwin l'avait imaginé de son côté. Cette méthode donne aux travaux plus d'exactitude, supplée à la mémoire et gagne des années.

      http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=CUL-DAR134.11&viewtype=text

    2. He was kind enough to inform me that, for his notes, he had himself employed exactly the same process of loose slips that my father and I have followed, and which I have spoken of in detail in my Phytographie

      De Candolle use the same method as Darwin. He describes it is his book. It would be nice to hace a English translation of it

    3. In other words, in modern note-making parlance, Darwin: gathered loose slips of information in a number of different filed folders dedicated to particular topics of interest. These slips included notes, speculations and draft fragments of his own; interesting snippets from, and comments on, stuff he had read; and extracts from personal correspondence; made brief source/literature notes which he filed either: a) in the back of the book concerned; or b) in a dedicated file (i.e. drawer). Note: As we shall see from his son Francis’s account of Darwin’s note-taking system, Darwin sometimes also filed particular source/literature notes in the appropriate topic-related folder(s).

      Modern terminology of Darwin Method

  7. Feb 2023
    1. Whewell was one of the Cambridge dons whom Charles Darwin met during his education there, and when Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage he was directly influenced by Whewell, who persuaded Darwin to become secretary of the Geological Society of London. The title pages of On the Origin of Species open with a quotation from Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise about science founded on a natural theology of a creator establishing laws:[33] But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.
  8. Jan 2023
    1. Darwin knew nothing of genes. He was unaware of the work of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who worked in his monastery garden and did experiments on the inheritance of pod-color in peas. Mendel discovered that heritable traits such as pod-color are inherited in discrete packages which he called genes. Any act of sexual reproduction of two parents with different genes results in offspring with a random distribution of the parental genes. Heredity in any population is a random process, resulting in a redistribution of genes between parents and offspring. The numbers of genes of various types are maintained on the average from generation to generation, but the numbers in each individual offspring are random. Mendel made this discovery and published it in the journal of the Brünn Natural History Society, only seven years after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Mendel had read Darwin's book, but Darwin never read Mendel's paper. In 1866, the year when Mendel's paper was published, Darwin did a very similar experiment, using snap-dragons instead of peas, and testing the inheritance of flower-shape instead of pod-color. Like Mendel, he bred three generations of plants, and observed the ratio of normal-shaped to star-shaped flowers in the third generation. Unlike Mendel, he had no understanding of the mathematics of statistical variations. He used only 125 third-generation plants and obtained a value of 2.4 for the ratio of normal to star-shaped offspring. This result did not suggest any clear picture of the way flower-shapes are inherited. He stopped the experiment and explored the question no further. Darwin did not understand that he would need a much larger sample to obtain a statistically significant result. Mendel understood statistics. His sample was sixty-four times larger than Darwin's, so that his statistical uncertainty was eight times smaller. He used 8023 plants. Mendel's essential insight was to see that sexual reproduction is a system for introducing randomness into inheritance. In peas as in humans, inheritance is carried by genes that are handed down from parents to offspring. His simple theory of inheritance carried by genes predicted a ratio of three between green and yellow pods in the third generation. He found a ratio of 3.01 with the big sample. This gave him confidence that the theory was correct. His experiment required immense patience, continuing for eight years with meticulous attention to detail. Every plant was carefully isolated to prevent any intruding bee from causing an unintended fertilization. A monastery garden was an ideal place for such experiments. Unfortunately, his experiments ended when his monastic order promoted him to the rank of abbot. Obedient to his vows, he ceased to be an explorer and became an administrator. His life-work lay hidden in an obscure German-language journal in Brünn, the city that later became Brno and is now in the Czech Republic.

      !- history of science : Mendel and Darwin - Mendel’s training in statistics helped Mendel construct his experiment differently from Darwin’s and also to interpret the results differently

    1. Like many people, I’d always been baffled by the occasional, undeniably ‘Lamarckian’ passages in On the Origin of Species, bearing in mind Darwin is generally credited with having discredited such thinking.

      Despite Darwin being thought of as having discredited Lamarckian inheritance, there are Lamarckian passages in portions of his work.

    1. An alternative school of Darwinism emerged in Russia emphasizing cooperation, not competition, as the driver of evolutionary change. In 1902 this approach found a voice in a popular book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, by naturalist and revolutionary anarchist pamphleteer Peter Kropotkin.

      Was this referenced in the Selfish Gene?

      Things working at the level of the gene vs. species...

    2. Spencer, in turn, was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection in On the Origin of Species jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories. Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe.
  9. Dec 2022
    1. he concept of cultural evolution began with the father of evolution himself, Waring said. Charles Darwin understood that behaviors could evolve and be passed to offspring just as physical traits are

      !- Charles Darwin : cultural evolution - Darwin understood that behavior could evolve and be passed on to offsprings

  10. Nov 2022
    1. https://medium.com/@ben_fry/tracing-the-origin-65011dc20877

      Could be interesting to apply this sort of process to a variety of texts over time. A draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comes to mind.


      How to view this through the lens of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? particularly as this was the evolution of an idea by the same author over time...

    2. The only diagram or image in The Origin of Species, a tree depicting divergence (source)

      Darwin's On the Origin of Species only contains one diagram, a branching tree diagram which shows divergence of species.

    3. he was working on the same theme with Stefanie Posavec. They completed their piece some time later, depicting the changes as lovely branching trees — a kind of homage to Darwin’s lone diagram in the book.

      Greg McInerny of Microsoft Research and Stefanie Posavek created a version of Darwin's On the Origin of Species that displayed variations between the editions as a branching tree diagram, a nod to the only diagram which appeared in Darwin's original work. .

    4. Fifty years ago, coinciding with the centennial of the release of Darwin’s manuscript, author Morse Peckham collected all six editions into a single “variorum” text. Peckham painstakingly created a reference system that denotes the modifications and changes between editions. The text was created by Peckham’s careful enumeration of every sentence from every edition, copied onto index cards; from these cards, he carefully assembled them into a final text.
  11. Oct 2022
  12. Jul 2022
    1. New DNA technology is shaking up the family trees of many plants and animals.

      One of Darwin's most compelling arguments in favour of evolution by means of natural selection was just how many different, apparently unrelated phenomena it explained. One of these was 'Classification' (what we now call taxonomy).

      Darwin argued that, when the taxonomists of his day arranged species into hierarchical groups, those tree-like groupings were best explained by genealogical descent.

      Now that biological evolution is accepted as a fact, genealogical descent has become the criterion taxonomists use to place species into hierarchical groups. Ironically, Darwin's explanation of taxonomy means it can no longer be used to justify his theory because modern taxonomy is, in effect, defined by his theory.

      The strongest tool we have for identifying genealogical descent in species is modern DNA analysis. This has helped identify many mistakes in former, non-DNA-based taxonomic classifications. But DNA analysis can't be used in all cases… For example, we do not have access to DNA samples of the vast majority of extinct species.

  13. Jun 2022
    1. https://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/the-scope-and-nature-of-darwins-commonplace-book/

      Erasmus Darwin's commonplace book

      It is one of the version(s?) published by John Bell based on John Locke's method and is a quarto volume bound in vellum with about 300 sheets of fine paper.

      Blank pages 1 to 160 were numbered and filled by Darwin in his own hand with 136 entries. The book was started in 1776 and continued until 1787. Presumably Darwin had a previous commonplace book, but it has not been found and this version doesn't have any experiments prior to 1776, though there are indications that some material has been transferred from another source.

      The book contains material on medical records, scientific matters, mechanical and industrial improvements, and inventions.

      The provenance of Erasmus Darwin's seems to have it pass through is widow Elizabeth who added some family history to it. It passed through to her son and other descendants who added entries primarily of family related topics. Leonard Darwin (1850-1943), the last surviving son of Charles Darwin gave it to Down House, Kent from whence it was loaned to Erasmus Darwin House in 1999.

  14. May 2022
    1. Toward the end of the 18th century English publisher John Bell published notebooks entitled Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” These included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

      At the end of the 18th century, John Bell (1745–1831), an English publisher published notebooks with the title Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke. The notebooks commonly included 550 pages, of which eight pages included instructions on John Locke's indexing method.


      Link to: - Didn't Erasmus Darwin use one of these?!

  15. Feb 2022
    1. “I had [...]during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever apublished fact, a new observation or thought came across me, whichwas opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of itwithout fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such factsand thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory thanfavorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raisedagainst my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted toanswer.” (Darwin 1958, 123)

      Charles Darwin fought confirmation bias by writing down contrary arguments and criticisms and addressing them.

  16. Jan 2022
    1. Charles Darwin wrote an entire book about humans being social creatures. He wrote that any Hobbesian human would be an “unnatural monster.”

      Relate this back to Graeber/Wengrow's thesis.

  17. Nov 2021
    1. For if I wait out the uncomfortable night by the river,I fear that the female dew and the evil frost togetherwill be too much for my damaged strength, I am so exhausted, and in themorning a chilly wind will blow from the river; 470 but if I go up the slopeand into the shadowy forest,and lie down to sleep among the dense bushes, even if the chill andweariness let me be, and a sweet sleep comes upon me,I fear I may become spoil and prey to the wild animals.’

      There's something about the description here that reminds me of the closing paragraph of Charles Darwin's On The Origin of the Species (p 489):

      It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, [...]

      Both authors are writing about riverbanks, life, and uncertainty.

  18. Aug 2021
  19. Feb 2021
    1. Teilhard consistentlyargued that,“the main movement in the universe has been, and is, a groping towards consciousness.”262Evolution, in hisview, exhibits a tendency towards increasing complexity and “cerebralisation.”263To date, this process has resulted in the emergence of humans, highly complex creatures thathave in turn given rise to a new “‘thinking layer,’” or noosphere—the complex web of collective thought and technologies that have dramatically extended humanity’s reach within the biosphere.264

      The tendency to ascribe a telos to evolution is an interesting trend here. It's essentially anthropomorphizing Darwin's ideas in ways that don't really track the reality. Natural selection is after what is adaptive in a particular context, it does not actually have to trend towards greater complexity and greater minds.

  20. Dec 2019
    1. I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher

      It is unclear who this English philosopher might have been, though it might be a reference to Erasmus Darwin, who Percy Shelley cites in the novel's introduction.

    2. Dr. Darwin

      Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the evolutionist and poet who lived in Birmingham, England, is clearly on Percy Shelley's mind when he introduces Mary's text in the 1818 edition. Critics of the novel have not often followed this lead in thinking about it as an early work in the British evolutionary imagination. Erasmus Darwin had made "not of impossible occurrence" that one presently visible species could mutate into another. Victor contemplates this possibility—as an alarming one—when he speculates in Volume 3, Chapter 3, that the Creature's demand that he create a "mate" could result in a new evolutionary development, "a race of devils."

  21. Oct 2019
    1. « Si tu te regardes trop longtemps dans la glace, tu y verras un singe. » J’ai dû me regarder encore plus longtemps : ce que je vois est bien au-dessous du singe, à la lisière du monde végétal, au niveau des polypes.

      darwinisme, théorie de l'évolution (nous avons tous un ancêtre commun)

  22. Dec 2018
    1. Finches

      These finches are not related to "true finches" at all. More here.

    2. marine iguanas, the only lizard that scours the ocean for food.

      This four minute BBB Video about marine iguanas is crazy--they cliff dive, then go down thirty feet, and stay there for ten minutes grazing on algae! https://youtu.be/tO_9zm9tsCs

    3. island of Santiago

      You can learn more about Santiago and tips for exploring it here.

  23. Nov 2018
  24. Aug 2018
  25. Jun 2017
    1. The Galápagos are an archipelago of 20 islands, originally called the Enchanted Islands, and made famous by Charles Darwin, who visited the islands in 1835, later formulating his theory of evolution based on his trip.

      Galapagos--on the bucket list!

  26. Apr 2017
    1. How inexplicable are these facts on the ordinary view of creation! Why should the brain be enclosed in a box composed of such numerous and such extraordinarily shaped pieces of bone? As Owen has remarked, the benefit derived from the yielding of the separate pieces in the act of parturition of mammals, will by no means explain the same construction in the skulls of birds. Why should similar bones have been created in the formation of the wing and leg of a bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes? Why should one crustacean, which has an extremely complex mouth formed of many parts, consequently always have fewer legs; or conversely, those with many legs have simpler mouths? Why should the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils in any individual flower, though fitted for such widely different purposes, be all constructed on the same pattern ?

      Reminds me of Thoreau:

      We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be. The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

    2. If it could be proved that the Hottentot had descended from the Negro, I think he would be classed under the Negro group, however much he might differ in colour and other important characters from negroes.

      He removes this later.

    3. Finally, with respect to the comparative value of the various groups of species, such as orders, sub-orders, families, sub-families, and genera, they seem to be, at least at present, almost arbitrary. Several of the best botanists, such as Mr Bentham and others, have strongly insisted on their arbitrary value. Instances could be given amongst plants and insects, of a group of forms, first ranked by practised naturalists as only a genus, and then raised to the rank of a sub-family or family; and this has been done, not because further research has detected important structural differences, at first overlooked, but because numerous allied species, with slightly different grades of difference, have been subsequently discovered.

      Read by Tamashasky: "Getting away from making flat assertions by defending your claims."

    1. We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be. The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

      Reminds me of Darwin:

      How inexplicable are these facts on the ordinary view of creation! Why should the brain be enclosed in a box composed of such numerous and such extraordinarily shaped pieces of bone? As Owen has remarked, the benefit derived from the yielding of the separate pieces in the act of parturition of mammals, will by no means explain the same construction in the skulls of birds. Why should similar bones have been created in the formation of the wing and leg of a bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes? Why should one crustacean, which has an extremely complex mouth formed of many parts, consequently always have fewer legs; or conversely, those with many legs have simpler mouths? Why should the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils in any individual flower, though fitted for such widely different purposes, be all constructed on the same pattern ?

  27. Feb 2017
    1. which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve them-selves-since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey.
    1. This conclusion is not founded on this single instance, but on this instance compared with a general experience of the regularity of this clement in all its operations.

      I am thinking here of Darwin's Moth, a species of moth Charles Darwin concluded must exist, from the shape of a certain orchid, 40 years before the moth itself was discovered. It is not the induction from orchid->moth, but dozens of moth-orchid interactions that lets you fill in the probable details.

      e. Actually, I think this is better an example of analogy, now that I think about it.

      e2. Moth-Orchid Dynamics would be a good name for a rock band

  28. Sep 2013
    1. whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior.

      reference to 'survival of the fittest' philosphy

    1. struggle is what all life essentially consists of,and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the humanspecies.
    2. preservation of the species

      consider in context of Darwinian "survival", and interesting to consider the contrast with Berlant's "Slow Death" concept--hunger to the point of obesity, love striving after objects to the point of depression