Feminine complaints and masculine emissions

Tild uncovers a real treasure: a book from the heyday of patent medicines, full of advice specifically for women, and loaded with testimonials for Dr Pierce’s ‘prescription’. When you find out what was in the concoction, you’ll understand why all the accompanying photos show women looking both cheery and glazed.

The results were startling. Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters had 47.5 percent alcohol; Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44.3 percent; Boker’s Stomach Bitters, 42.6 percent; Parker’s Tonic, “purely vegetable,” 41.6 percent. Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound had relatively little—20.6 percent.

Bok saw a real problem. Women were doctoring themselves and their families with dangerous alcoholic nostrums. Temperance women were turning to “bitters” to cure their sluggishness. Pregnant women used “Doctor Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”, which contained digitalis, opium, oil of anise and alcohol (17 percent).

Ladies, go read it. You’ll get the impression that early 20th century women were all sick and diseased, and also all doped to the gills.

Gentlemen, though, might want to read another link Tild provides. Fellows, do you suffer from Spermatorrhea, or the emission of semen without intercourse? I get the distinct impression from that libertarian thread that there are many here who have not ejaculated healthily into a vagina in quite some time. This is bad news.

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Another reason to love the Irish

Adam Cuerden sent along this old political cartoon that doesn’t really make much sense to me. Are we supposed to sympathise with William Gladstone? He’s the guy with a big knife trying to murder the lovely creature who just wants to cling to his rock and be left alone. Tattooing his tentacles with the the words “rebellion,” “lawlessness,” “outrage,” “sedition,” etc. doesn’t change the action we’re witnessing.

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(click for larger image)

D.B. Cooper: the Morris connection?

I knew of D.B. Cooper, the famous mystery man who jumped out of a plane with a few hundred thousand dollars ransom money, and was never seen again — I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, so of course I was familiar with the story. Now here’s a weird little twist: there’s a new suspect in the crime, and he’s the brother of a fellow here in Morris, Minnesota.

Not me, I didn’t do it. I was only 14 when D.B. Cooper made his jump.

(Hat tip to Jeffrey Shallit)

Come on down to Ridgedale

You’ve still got time — I’m in the Ridgedale public library, and Hector Avalos is getting ready to give his talk on “How archaeology killed biblical history”…come join the crowd if you’re somewhere in the Twin Cities area.

You’re too late now! I saw several familiar faces at the talk, and there was a huge crowd — Minnesota Atheists has to be growing, because every meeting I go to is larger than the last one. We got a good discussion of the increasingly evident failure of archaeology to back up any of the claims of the Bible. Whereas once upon a time, serious scholars argued that portions of the Bible actually echoed real historical events (and even today, many less informed evangelical/fundamentalist Christians still do), virtually all of it is considered ancient myth-making nowadays. No Exodus. No empire of Israel spanning a big chunk of the Middle East. No Solomonic fortress building. No Solomon. No David. Quite possibly no Jesus, and definitely no primary sources describing his existence. I thought the comparison of Solomon and David to King Arthur quite apt — they were inventions after the fact, legends built up to illustrate beliefs about a past golden age. It was subject matter that is quite different from my usual approach to debunking religion, so it was useful stuff … and I picked up copies of Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and his latest, The End of Biblical Studies(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), so I can do a bit more digging into the details.

Hector Avalos gets up into the Twin Cities now and then (his drive from Iowa is about the same length as mine from Morris), and if you get an opportunity to hear him speak, I recommend it!

Laws of correlation and the derivation of evolutionary patterns from developmental rules

Cuvier, and his British counterpart, Richard Owen, had an argument against evolution that you don’t hear very often anymore. Cuvier called it the laws of correlation, and it was the idea that organisms were fixed and integrated wholes in which every character had a predetermined value set by all the other characters present.

In a word, the form of the tooth involves that of the condyle; that of the shoulder-blade; that of the claws: just as the equation of a curve involves all its properties. And just as by taking each property separately, and making it the base of a separate equation, we should obtain both the ordinary equation and all other properties whatsoever which it possesses; so, in the same way, the claw, the scapula, the condyle, the femur, and all the other bones taken separately, will give the tooth, or one another; and by commencing with any one, he who had a rational conception of the laws of the organic economy, could reconstruct the whole animal.

Cuvier famously (and incorrectly) argued that he could derive the whole of the form of an animal from a single part, and that this unity of form meant that species were necessarily fixed. An organism was like a complex, multi-part equation that used only a single variable: you plugged a parameter like ‘ocelot’ into the Great Formula, and all the parts and pieces emerged without fail; plug in a different parameter, say ‘elephant’, and all the attributes of an elephant would be expressed. By looking at one element, such as the foot, you could determine whether you were looking at an elephant or an ocelot, and thereby derive the rest of the animal.

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Young master Darwin

Tristero makes a few points that are exactly what I’ve been trying to get across in my introductory biology class this week, where we’re covering Charles Darwin and the evidence for evolution. The first is that we do not rely on Darwin’s authority; there is no cult of personality, no reliance on the master’s word, no simple trust of anything or anyone. The other, though, is that Darwin is still a fascinating and important figure, and it’s not just that he was an old guy with a white beard who lectured the law.

Darwin’s not a stuff-shirted Nigel Bruce pip-pipping his way across the Empire. He is a young kid on a ship who once had the gall to grab a sailor’s dinner from his plate because he (the sailor) was about to eat a very rare ostrich Darwin had been searching for in vain for months. He’s a fellow who, when learning to use the bolas from Argentinian gauchos, managed to lasso his own horse, and he’s willing to write about it. Later, as he worked through his theory, which took him over 20 years to announce, he was tormented by the implications if it was misconstrued (as it was, right from the beginning). He developed a cautious style that is a model of arguing and inferring from the evidence. And, by all accounts, Darwin was a man devoted to his family and friends, deeply considerate and generous.

Yes, Darwin had his faults. But anyone with ten times his faults and one tenth of his talent would easily win a Nobel or Macarthur. That kids don’t have a chance to learn who this guy was – that’s a real crime.

One thing I tried to get across to my students was how much he was like them. He went off to Cambridge when he was about their age, and on graduation, a position they’ll all be in in a few years, had to wheedle his father into letting him go on this exotic sea voyage instead of settling down. Darwin really was a young fellow when he went off on the Beagle, in his early twenties.

Despite his charming youth, though, I still have to explain the list of things he got right and the list of things he got wrong. It’s the evidence and the ideas that matter, not the lovely personality behind them.

The hollow man

Yowza. Vox Day tried to pull his usual ahistorical, illiterate, ignorant schtick, blaming Nazis and Communists on ol’ Chuck Darwin, and Ed Darrell completely eviscerated him. I mean, it’s like all that’s left of Day is a few tattered scraps of skin hanging from a stick, drying in the wind.

Vox Day is a rather cheap and easy target, I know, but still … it’s frightening to see. It’s so thorough.