History
razib | April 18, 2007I have a review up over at my other weblog of the book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization.
clock | April 18, 2007Clarence Seward Darrow was born at Kinsman, Ohio on this day in 1857, the son of the town's undertaker. He joined the Ohio bar in 1878, moving on to Chicago in 1887 where he became counsel for the city and later for the Chicago and Northwest Railroad. He left the railroad to defend Eugene V. Debs, the head of the striking union, and from then on was a defense attorney, often for hopeless causes and extremely unsympathetic clients. He defended at least 100 clients on trial for murder, and though many were found guilty, none was put to death. He defended John Scopes in the infamous "Scopes…
oracknows | April 15, 2007Heh.
Although it's apparently been making the rounds over the Internet, I had never seen this list before until Andrew over at Flavor Country posted A Dictionary for the 9/11 "Truth" Movement, which, if you've ever read the comment thread (223 comments!) after my one major foray into discussing the true idiocy that is the 9/11 "Truth" Movement, you will immediately realize to be pretty darned close to the truth.
A few key examples:
Alternative theory: Something so wacky that even Twoofers don't give it much credence (e. g. holographic planes, pods).
Brainwashing: non-conspiratorial thinking,…
terrasig | April 15, 2007The weekend version of the Wall Street Journal (sorry, sub reqd) included John Gribbins' list of influential science books that also make for good literature. Gribbin trained originally as an astrophysicist and recently finished writing his 100th book.
The list:
1. On the Loadstone And Magnetic Bodies - By William Gilbert - 1600
William Gilbert of Colchester was the first person to set out clearly in print the essence of the scientific method of testing hypotheses by experiment. He also made discoveries in the field of magnetism that were not improved on for two centuries.
2. Micrographia -…
evolvingthoughts | April 14, 2007
For a long time now, I have had troubles with the use of the word "Darwinism". Not just by creationists and antiscience advocates like IDevotees, but by scientists themselves. You routinely see press releases and book titles that declare the death or some fatal illness of Darwinism, which, in every case, their own theoretical or experimental contributions points up. It is time, I think, to lose the word entirely.
The term has a history that is itself confusing and contradictory. Let's consider some of the things it has been used to denote:
1. Transmutation of species
1.1 Gradually (…
pharyngula | April 12, 2007Remember "The Lost Tomb of Jesus"?
You can forget it now. Even some of the pro-Jesus documentarians featured in the show are backpedalling away from it.
evolvingthoughts | April 12, 2007
Suppose for a minute that everything the creationists say about evolution were true. Now suppose you had lost your mind... but I repeat myself. What would the history of that ersatz and terrible "science" be?
Wonder no more. Richard Forrest, who claims to be a paleontologist but is clearly a minion of satanic powers, has written the truth history of evilution, in The Truth: Being a TRUE and IMPARTIAL account of the history of that damnable religion, the great EVIL of DARWINISM, also called EVOLUTIONISM and it's attempts to bring the downfall of all moral and TRUE CHRISTIAN ™ virtue. Based…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
One of the best of all American writers - I'd put him up with Twain - has died, leaving us all the poorer.
HT: Dynamics of Cats
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones. So I thought I'd start blogging them as I find them. Today's suspects are Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (1735-1820) and Pierre Trémaux (1818-1895).
Robinet was one of the last and most comprehensive exponents of the Great Chain of Being. A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner. That most perfect…
pharyngula | April 11, 2007I've just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin's pangenesis was seen as a failure, and Mendel's genetics had just been rediscovered, but it wasn't yet clear how to incorporate them into evolutionary theory. In some ways, I can understand how Dennert might have come to some of the conclusions he did, but still … it's a masterpiece of confident predictions that flopped. It ranks…
oracknows | April 9, 2007Via Modern Mechanix, from the pages of Popular Mechanics, April 1924:
BEARD IS REMOVED WITH MUD AND USE OF X-RAYS
Shaving beards from men's faces, has been accomplished by a special mudlike paste that is undergoing experiments at the hands of a New York doctor. After the mass has been applied, it hardens and is torn off. To finish the operation, X-rays are then directed against the skin. The originator of the method claims that it is beneficial and if used regularly will remove scars and similar marks of long standing. It is also said that the sticky treatment does not leave any ill effects…
clock | April 3, 2007See, how retouching history works. Retouching, as in 'photoshopping' a photo of a soldiers in Union uniforms into Confederate uniforms, then using the photo as a propaganda material.
Hat-tip: Sally Greene
oracknows | April 3, 2007One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…
evolvingthoughts | March 29, 2007
In the very first page to the Origin, Darwin writes:
WHEN on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species - that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.
Who is this greatest philosopher, and what did he mean by that phrase?
I was moved to follow this up when I was challenged on my claim in a forum that…
oracknows | March 29, 2007I was going to try to be a good boy. Really, I was. I had been planning on answering a question about the early detection of tumors. It was an opportune time to do so, given the recent news of cancer recurrence in Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow, coupled with a couple of papers I saw just yesterday and the announcement of new screening guidelines for breast MRI. However, I was finding that writing the piece would be fairly complex (because it's a complex topic) and that it might even require a multi-post approach. There was no way to do it justice today; doing it over the weekend would make a…
evolvingthoughts | March 28, 2007
Many ideas in the history of biology get going for reasons that have to do with agendas, ideologies, and plain old bad scholarship rather than the results of research. In particular, myths regarding the motivations of historical figures. I well remember Erik Erikson's execrable attempt to psychoanalyse Luther from a distance of 500 years, culminating in the claim that he was anal retentive (and, therefore, so was his theology).
There are plenty of these myths in the history of biology. One of the longer lasting ones, although it turns out to be a late arrival, is the myth that Darwin didn'…
pharyngula | March 28, 2007He mangles science, now he defames history. Michael Egnor is like the Swiss army knife of creationist hackery.
Former Vice President Al Gore famously claimed to have invented the Internet because years ago he was in the Senate and sponsored a bill. The assertion that Charles Darwin's theory was indispensable to classical and molecular genetics is a claim of an even lower order. Darwin's theory impeded the recognition of Mendel's discovery for a third of a century, and Darwin's assertion that random variation was the raw material for biological complexity was of no help in decoding the genetic…
oracknows | March 26, 2007Ever since arch Holocaust denier David Irving was released from prison in Austria after being convicted of denying the Holocaust, I've been wondering how long it would take for him to reveal his true stripes and be up to his old tricks again.
The answer, not surprisingly, was: Not long. Witness this story:
ROME -- British historian David Irving, who was jailed in Austria for questioning the Holocaust, visited the Auschwitz death camp and renewed his claim that there was no proof it had gas chambers during an Italian TV program aired Friday.
In the Sky TG24 documentary program "Controcorrente…
evolvingthoughts | March 26, 2007
To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing, to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bull-rush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, 1757, Sect XI.
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2007A recent addition to the excellent Runeberg Project e-text repository is the 1931 re-issue of Sven Petter Bexell's 1819 work Hallands historia och beskrivning. It's a patriotic history and description of the province of Halland, a part of Sweden's southwest coast that belonged to Denmark for many centuries. Below is a fine example of just how fanciful early 19th century place-name scholarship and historical writing could be. Source-criticism hadn't really become a formalised set of techniques yet at this point.
"Already in the latter half of the ninth century, the Vikings of Halland,…