jwhitfield
Posts by this author
February 12, 2009
After careful reflection, I'd say it is worth reading The Origin of Species. Biology doesn't erase it's past, as I thought. It just forgets to cite it.
The Origin is biology's hub -- all the routes that the science has taken since seem to pass through it. This, I think, is partly because Darwin had…
February 11, 2009
So, what is there left to say? Not much. As its title suggests, the fourteenth and final chapter of the origin, 'Recapitulation and Conclusion', mostly restates things that Darwin has already said, often several times.
This relentless piling, sorting and re-arranging of evidence can make Darwin…
February 9, 2009
From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups.
Isn't that a good sentence? It's the first of this chapter. There's music in the way the Biblical ring of "From the first dawn of life", falls…
February 6, 2009
Back when I started this, I remarked that one of the reasons I hadn't read the Origin was that I couldn't imagine it being essential to a grasp of contemporary science. Regarding evolution, I think you could still make a case for this. But in other ways, that statement shows that you really shouldn…
February 4, 2009
When the Origin was published, the idea that species were not fixed entities had been in the air for some time, thanks to Lamarck, Robert Chambers, anonymous author of the best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus.
But unlike those men, Darwin…
February 2, 2009
We left Darwin in a troubled frame of mind. The fossil record seemed to offer little support to his theory (then again, it offered little support to any other theory). By the time we reach the end of chapter 10, 'On the geological succession of organic beings', he's feeling far more chipper:
"[A]ll…
January 31, 2009
Thomas Kuhn -- the one philosopher of science that even ignorami like me have heard of -- said that during periods of 'normal science', researchers only take on problems that they know they can solve. 'Paradigm' is an overused word, but it's a measure of the paradigm-shifting nature of the Origin…
January 29, 2009
George 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…
January 27, 2009
Science is fun. Now, I know that someone telling you a thing is fun is usually a guarantee that it isn't. And I know that people who tell you science is fun usually do so in strained and pleading tones, and expect you to believe them because they have spiky hair and can play the harmonica. But it's…
January 23, 2009
Up 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 --…
January 21, 2009
To a man with a hammer, said Mark Twain, everything looks like a nail. The better your hammer, I would add, the more nail-like everything looks.
In natural selection, Darwin had crafted one of the best hammers of all time. And in chapter 5 of the origin, 'Laws of Variation', you can hear him umming…
January 19, 2009
Mathematicians and physicists speak of a result 'falling out of the equations', implying that if you set things up properly, the rest takes care of itself. Chapter 4 of the Origin, 'Natural Selection', is where evolution falls out of the machinery that Darwin has spent the three previous chapters…
January 16, 2009
If, 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.…
January 14, 2009
Here's a project for a playful biology grad student with some time on his or her hands. Take chapter 2 of the Origin of Species, 'Variation Under Nature', and modernize the language. Toss in a few figures and some contemporary citations. Give the result a title like 'A routemap for biodiversity…
January 12, 2009
Man, this guy didn't know anything.
I don't mean that as an insult. Darwin, as he admits, knew almost nothing about inheritance, about how variation is produced, or about the origins and history of domesticated plants and animals. You'd think that would be a handicap in using domestication as an…
January 9, 2009
Among the small thrills of encountering canonical works for the first time - Homer, say, or the King James Bible, or Star Wars - are the moments when you come across some turn of phrase so well-used it has been worn flat into the surface of everyday speech and think: so that's where that comes from…
January 7, 2009
Hi! My name is John. I've got a PhD in evolutionary biology, and I've spent much of the past decade writing about evolutionary ideas, as applied to everything from literary criticism, to language, to anti-terror policy, and even on occasion to biology. And I've got a confession - I've never read…