Greg Priest

Loved Nagel’s essay, but his question was highly abstract. There’s something wonderful about G’s attempt to answer the question in a practical, empirical way.

🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Fig. 11 from Griffin, Echoes of Bats and Men (1959). “The frequency and wave length of a bat's sound vary during each chirp. This diagram, which is approximately to scale, illustrates the small amount of sound reflected by one insect.”

Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915.

I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.”

🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM

J-B Lamarck was born OTD in 1744

A “prime cause … endows animal life with the power to make organization gradually more complex…. Occasionally a foreign, accidental, and therefore variable cause has interfered with the execution of the plan, without, however, destroying it.”

🐋🌱🧪🗃️🧠 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Caricature of Veblen. Credit: https://ensaiosenotas.com/2017/03/03/veblen-a-ostentacao-da-classe-ociosa/

Thorstein Veblen was born OTD in 1857

Homo economicus is “a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains who oscillates like a homogeneous globule … under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor consequent.”

🦫🦋🧠🗃️ #HistSTM 📉📈 #PhilSci

This is a caricature by David Levine for The New York Review of Books. As a subscriber for decades, I take a comfort in them.

I think Popper was brilliant. But, like a lot of brilliant people, he has been so systematically misunderstood that much of what passes as “Popperian” in philosophy of science is pernicious nonsense.

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

Karl Popper was born OTD in 1902.

“Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.”

“Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.”

🐋🌱🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Boosting to 🐋🌱 and 🗃️🧠 and 🌎

Cartoon of Franklin with a microscope, while Crick and Watson drink beer and expostulate, at a bar stylized as a double helix. By Quentin Blake.

Rosalind Franklin was born OTD in 1920.

Her X-ray crystallography was key to discovering DNA’s structure (her student Raymond Gosling took photo 51).

She also studied viruses. After her untimely death, a colleague Aaron Klug continued her work and won a Nobel.

🌱🐋🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM

Scientist: The story of a word Published in Annals of Science (Vol. 18, No. 2, 1962)

Actually, Whewell did coin “scientist.” It was in a review of a popular science book by Mary Somerville. Here’s the classic account:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Image credit: Edward hopper.net.

Edward Hopper was born on this day in 1882.

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”

Room in New York (1932)

🐡 #PhilSci (and, yes, I think that’s an appropriate feed for this)

I do love the *** signifying that they must be there, even if we haven’t found them.

Yes. In the absence of a logic grounded in descent, *some* explanation for the observed orderly patterns of affinity needed to be defended. The patterns themselves are obvious, and he wasn’t wrong to think there had to be some explanation.

A diagram of Maclaey’s Quinarian arrangement of the Animalia from his Horae Entomologicae. Credit: Linda Hall Library.

William Sharp Macleay was born OTD in 1792.

His Quinarian system launched a vogue in the 1820s-1830s for systems of biological classification based on the assumption that nature is so well ordered that animals can be classified in a nested hierarchy of simple, geometrical forms.

🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

Cartoon with the city of Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes trail was held, represented as an organ grinder. The organ is labeled “Scopes trial,” and the grinder’s monkey is collecting dollars labeled “publicity.”

OTD in 1925 John Scopes was found guilty of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee statute that forbade the teaching of "any theory … that man has descended from a lower order of animals."

The trial was as much an effort to bring tourist money into Dayton TN as anything else.

🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Darwin’s manuscript of the title page to the Origin. Credit: Darwin Online.

The letters by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had been read before the Linnean Society.

OTD in 1858, D abandoned the “Big Species Book” he had been working on and began a short “abstract” of his theory.

It would go on to be published as On the Origin of Species.

🌱🐋🧪🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #EvoBio

Illustration by Ralph Steadman from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Hunter Thompson was born OTD in 1937.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

#BookSky

For Kuhn's Bday resharing this paper on Kuhn's philosophy of data & fundamental constants, coauthored w/ my recent PhD student @federicabocchi.bsky.social, which has the cryptic title "Kuhn’s ‘5th Law of Thermodynamics’:
Measurement, Data, & Anomalies" #philsci
bokulich.org/wp-content/u...

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

Thomas Kuhn was born OTD in 1922.

Historicity—over revolutions and paradigms—was core to his thought.

“History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.”

🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #PhilSci 🦋🦫

Of course, as Jorge Luis Borges would remind us, somewhere in the Library of Babel, there is a book written by “Ernest Rutherford” and another by “Vilfredo Pareto” that contain exactly the quotations “erroneously” attributed to them.

As with Pareto, I like to imagine that there is an alternate universe in which he actually did say that. It seems so right.

I had no idea that was a misquote. I thought it was Rutherford.

Vilfredo Pareto was born OTD in 1848. His most famous quote is:

"Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."

But he never said it: quoteinvestigator.com/2024/08/02/f...

🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #HistSTM 📉📈

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

Walter Benjamin was born OTD in 1892.

“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”

#PhilSky 🧠🗃️

Oddly, enough, when I saw the cartoon, I thought of a tech bro pitching Andreessen Horowitz with this fabulous innovation: ice-9.

#philtech #philsci 🦋🦫

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

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

Henry David Thoreau was born on this day in 1817.

“Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”

🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #BookSky

“Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.”

Cormac McCarthy was born OTD in 1933.

🌱🐋🐡 #BookSky

David Levine. New York Review of Books. A longtime favorite of mine.