"In my opinion, they are the finest men I have ever beheld [...] To see a white man bathing alongside a Tahitian, was like comparing a plant bleached by the gardener’s art to the same growing in the open fields."
He was “much disappointed in the personal appearance of the women; they are far inferior in every respect to the men.”
However "either they are not as handsome as they were said to be, or my ideas are fastidious".
Darwin's last publication in 1881 was all about earthworms. It sold faster than The Origin of Species for some reason (I guess people are more interested in the affairs of worms than anything else). His experiments for this work included shouting at worms and asking his son to play the bassoon at them. From barnacles to worms to biological evolution to continent wide geology, #CharlesDarwin loved it all. He died six months after this work.
Podcast from
NEW BOOKS IN CRITICAL THEORY/HISTORY OF SCIENCE
New Books Network
After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press (2022).
Great interview and discussion with the editors Devin Griffiths @Devo3000 and Deanna Kreisel @doctorwaffle
Feb 10, 2024 #CharlesDarwin#HistSTM#HistSci https://newbooksnetwork.com/after-darwin
It’s #InternationalDarwinDay! Ever wondered about the history of the word for Darwin’s most influential idea? Our video on the etymology of Evolution goes into the linguistic, scientific, and cultural connections to Darwin’s theory. https://youtu.be/kOK6kB9ytIo
Happy birthday to Charles Darwin (1809-1882)! Today is Darwin Day to celebrate his birthday, science and evolution.
“The inhabitants believe that these animals are absolutely deaf; certainly they do not overhear a person walking closely behind them. I was always amused, when overtaking one of these great monsters as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly,
"The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online... has released an online 300-page catalogue detailing Darwin’s complete personal library, with 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes and items including books, pamphlets and journals. ... Darwin’s library has also been virtually re-assembled with 9,300 links to copies of the works freely available online."
When life first appeared on Earth four billion years ago, it may have got its start in what the 19th-century naturalist #CharlesDarwin called “warm little ponds” (...)
'Three recently rediscovered pages from Darwin’s draft of Origin of Species have been published for the first time together with all the other known surviving pages in a new online edition. These documents are added to Darwin Online, a scholarly portal dedicated to Charles Darwin and helmed by Dr John van Wyhe, at the NUS Department of Biological Sciences.'
Fascinating piece on horror and psychology -- the evolutionary reasons why we're drawn to horror.
"..captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside.. a monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.
...Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom—it's called predator inspection."
I get kind of worked up about attempts to rob young people of the few interesting things that we really know about nature and the universe. This anti-evolution content is designed as a kind of inoculation against gaining further knowledge on the topic.
It contains neat little counter arguments that prompt kids to stop listening before they hear anything really interesting.
"[Darwin] avoided discussing his views on religion in public, but his private writings (from the Beagle era onwards) show that he was increasingly critical of theology and Biblical literalism, and had many doubts about God, including concerns about the problem of evil. In a letter of 1879, he described himself as an #agnostic rather than an atheist, but stated that belief in evolution is not incompatible with #theism."
Citation: Letter to John Fordyce, 7 May 1879, transcribed at the Darwin Correspondence Project
@thetaoistonline I'm aware that there's an extensive philosophical literature on emotions.
And ... it's not entirely in vain.
But much as other branches of philosophy have evolved into scientific disciplines, or been strongly informed by them, I feel this area could as well. It was after thinking to myself "emotions clearly must have developed through evolution and provide some level of fitness benefit, I wonder if anyone's looked into the evolutionary origins of emotions question" that I did a few searches ... and turned up Charles Darwin's work.
I'm not saying that discussion of how we engage with our emotions on a philosophical basis is invalid. But ... it should at least offer a nod to the science and origins, methinks.