Greg Priest

An article I saw today details a debate (in Heisenberg’s old stomping grounds of Helogland) in which Carlo Rovelli and Chris Fuchs argue about how best to interpret Heisenberg’s intuition.

🦫🦋🧪 #philsci
https://www.science.org/content/article/100-years-quantum-mechanics-redefining-reality-us-center

On this day

Caricature of Didion by Fabio Miraglia for the Brazilian literary journal rascunho.

Joan Didion was born OTD in 1934.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live.... We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

#BookSky #Lit 🦋🦫 🗃️🧠

Caricature of Heisenberg by David Levine for The New York Review of Books.

Werner Heisenberg was born OTD in 1901.

“What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” We are “asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer … by the means that are at our disposal.”

🦋🦫🧪 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Claude the alligator’s cause of death revealed: ‘There was nothing we could have done’ As Bay Area residents mourned the death of Claude the albino alligator this week, the California Academy of Sciences received the results of a necropsy.

Claude the albino alligator, the unofficial but very real mascot of the California Academy of Sciences, has died at 30, apparently of liver cancer. I’m kind of broken up about it.

In all seriousness, may his memory be a blessing.

🧪🐋🌱

In honor of Tom Stoppard’s life and work, I just reread Arcadia.

Here’s Hannah: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”

🦫🦋 #PhilSky #BookSky

Mivart seemed to believe that Darwin‘s theory entailed that if a suite of traits would be advantageous to an organism, they would necessarily evolve. This was a misunderstanding of Darwin‘s ideas. Darwin pointed out that many advantageous traits will never appear in a lineage.

An AI (Perplexity)-generated giraffe/hippopotamus hybrid.

St. George Jackson Mivart, one of Darwin’s fiercest critics, was born OTD in 1827.

If long necks favor giraffes on the African savannah, M asked, where are the *other* long-necked ungulates? Why are there not vast herds of giraffopottamuses sweeping across the veldt?

#QED

🧪 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio

#HPBio

Expression was also important in the history of the book, being an early instance of a book that included photographs, notwithstanding publisher John Murray’s worry that including photos would “poke a hole in the profits.”

🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky

Darwin was a pioneer in experimental psychology, showing photos of human faces that had been galvanically stimulated to represent different emotions to visitors to Down House in an effort to determine which emotions could be reliably identified. 3/4

🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky

Darwin had earlier made detailed observations of the emotional displays of his “little animalcule of a son,” William Erasmus, which he used in Expression.

D’s wife Emma worried that if she were “out of temper,” he would just be “forming theories about me.”

🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky

Title page of Expression, copy held by Wellcome Collection.

Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions launched OTD in 1872.

Just as our bodily form has evolved from our animal ancestors, so too have our minds, including "the habit of expressing our feelings [or, in his title, "emotions"] by certain movements." 1/4

🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky

YouTube video by Global News Cameras capture BC sea wolf raiding crab traps in first possible ‘tool use’

Apparent case of learned tool use by wolves.

https://youtu.be/SiuQF68tdWI?si=k7DWNrI0y5jASt-o

#EvoBio #HPBio

John Beatty has a lovely chapter analyzing this topic in Kohn’s classic volume The Darwinian Heritage: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400854714.265/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOooCnjMcj4ghbwulYQebLeOoMOV168osG2dP9u5WXMt6pKE2LS0F

It’s not really that surprising that Darwin used the diagrammatic form in the Origin. In his private notes, he often scribbled diagrams to help him think through the general patterns that might be expected to emerge from evolutionary processes.

🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡

I also also have a standalone article, here: https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932718300528

Full disclosure: analysis to a certain extent changed by the time of the dissertation.

🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡

The diagram was more than a picture. He referred to it frequently in the text, clearly believing that the diagrammatic form rendered some aspects of evolutionary dynamics more clearly than text could. I’ve written about this in my dissertation, available on request.

🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡

Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, was usually quite generous about paying for maps, plates, and in-text images for D’s books, and D attended closely to his illustrations, so it’s surprising that the Origin featured only 1, a diagrammatic model of change through time.

🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡

Title page of the first edition of the Origin. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

OTD in 1859, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. He’d been working on a long treatise titled “Natural Selection,” but learning that Alfred Russel Wallace had developed a similar theory, he shifted toward a shorter “abstract.”

🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio

Asa Gray was born OTD in 1810. A devout believer in a personal God, G was also one of Darwin’s greatest champions.

In a correspondence spanning 12 years, G and D minutely explored what evolution says about God and free will. D could not accept G’s God, but was deeply torn.

🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci 🧪

Photograph of the cast of the original 1953 Broadway production of The Crucible (Fred Fehl/©NYPL for the Performing Arts).

Arthur Miller was born OTD in 1915.

He had a complicated relationship with The Crucible, never settling even on who was the central villain. But late in life, he offered this:

“I’m not really a moralist. I just make the assumption that certain things we do lead to catastrophe.”

#philsky #booksky

Sleeping Beauties Why do some of nature’s marvels have to wait millions of years for their time in the sun?Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted spe...

www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sleepi...

I haven’t had a chance to read the article yet, but the abstract makes me think of Andreas Wagner‘s idea of sleeping beauties, mutations that lie dormant in the genome until changes in environmental circumstances, which can be much later, suddenly make them ecologically relevant.

Boosting to 🦋🦫 and 🐋🌱

“To make a life of order out of the buzzing confusion in a wondrous but difficult world demands our best efforts.… Negotiating the physical world into a conceptual entity of some interest and dimension is a challenge of the championship level.”

T’s self-portrait as a one hundred year-old clown (2020).

Wayne Thiebaud was born OTD in 1920.

“You can do art history backwards or forwards; you can take your choice. Progress is not part of it. Variation, yes, and extension and all that, but progress? Phew. I don’t know how you’d beat any of that stuff, even from the cave period.”

Yes, but as I hope I convinced you, not Darwin, or at least not the later Darwin. 😉

As a consequence L believed that, like classical physics, geological dynamics are ergodic. In exploring a Newtonian state space, the earth system will return to a state in which iguanadons, ichthyosaurs, and pterodactyls roam the earth

Henry De la Beche mocked him here

🗃️🧠🧪 ⚒️ 🦋🦫 #histSTM #philsci 🐡

The frontispiece from Lyell's Principles of Geology (second American edition, 1857), showing a volcano and illustrating his theory of the contemporaneous origin of the different types of rock.

Charles Lyell was born OTD in 1797. L believed that geology could and should be made a Newtonian science: Just as “the fall of an apple ... assist[s] in explaining the motions of the moon,” so too “the laws of earthquakes ... throw light on the origin of mountains....”

🗃️🧠🧪 ⚒️ 🦋🦫 #histSTM #philsci 🐡