Today I’m teaching a perilous topic: the eclipse of Darwinism. There was a period of several decades where you could make an honest intellectual argument against evolution, roughly from the time it was first published (1860) to the development of population genetics (say, roughly 1920). All the arguments since then are fundamentally garbage, but before then, some smart, reputable, qualified scientists did have sincere disagreements with the theory. Also there were some terrible arguments against Darwin, but I’m focusing on just the intelligent principled arguments.

One part of Darwin’s problem is that we have to admit that there were some gigantic holes in his theory — in particular, he didn’t have a good theory of inheritance. He tried to come up with one, his theory of pangenesis, which was a combination of Lamarckian and blending inheritance. It was wrong. It was also incompatible with his theory of evolution.

What I’ll be arguing, though, is that there was a greater problem than the flaws, and that was not that people were punching holes in The Origin. Good criticism is a treasured thing in science, and critical evaluation of an idea is essential to refining and improving it. Eventually, the people ripping on Darwin’s model of inheritance were going to produce a much more solid theory.

I’m going to make the somewhat controversial claim that the people who were burying evolution were the ones who were must uncritical and gung-ho about the idea — the ones who wholeheartedly embraced Darwinism, warts and all, and extended it in unproductive ways. That means that today I’m going to talk about two people who were disastrous to Darwinism while simultaneously acting as prominent cheerleaders for it.

So yeah, I’m going to rake a couple of historical figures over the coals, specifically Haeckel and Herbert Spencer. We’re going to discuss the positive claims of a couple of prominent 19th century boosters of evolution, and I’m going to make the case that their excesses were a contributing factor to the eclipse. Worse, their version of evolution was popular and persuasive and despite their rejection as good science, we’re still dealing with people who think recapitulation and “survival of the fittest” are great shorthand summaries of the principle of evolution.

The reading I’ve assigned for the week is this article, The Beauty and Violence of Ernst Haeckel’s Illustrations, which is an extremely harsh condemnation of Haeckel’s views. “Haeckel’s visions of nature were less objective depictions of life and more projected notions about the proper ‘order’ of nature,” it says. I’m telling the students to read Haeckel critically and also to regard this article skeptically. I’m hoping maybe they’ll be provoked into good, vigorous debate in the classroom, and that they’ll put together some thoughtful essays on the topic.

To some people, today is Columbus Day. Those people have a cultish dedication to believing that a rapist, a thief, a slaver, and an oppressor was a hero — I guess nowadays we can believe there will be subset of the citizenry who ignore the facts to invent a cherished symbol. To be fair, here’s a bit from the Friends of Italian-Americans.

Even by today’s impossible utopian standards, Columbus was without a doubt the greatest hero of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. He was a capitalist in the age of Empires, and what he did began the downfall of imperialism. He was a scientist in the age of superstition. He was a civil rights activist in the age of oppression. And he was a pacifist in the age of war-mongering. Thus, Columbus was an icon and a paragon.

For a quick dismissal of their claims, consider that they condemn Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States by citing a PragerU video.

I think this is a better summary of Columbus’s character.

Today is the anniversary of that day when people show paintings of the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, and I ask, “General Grant, why are you shaking hands with that piece of shit?” I also wonder if American generosity to bloody-handed traitors might have something to do with our current habit of appeasement to Nazis, anti-Semites, and insurrectionists.

Does anyone have a copy of the 1658 edition?

We need to bring back that style of title/title page for all of our texts. It got me hooked from the first line.

The last time I was in London, I was so tempted by all the ads for $30 flights to Rome — I could flit off for a weekend in Italy! I could also make a day trip by train to Edinburgh, which was a bit more expensive but a pleasant way to travel anyway. Let’s do a fantasy vacation and see what I could do. Here’s the Edinburgh trip:

What? The closest you can get me is to York, which the British manage to spell funny, and it’s going to take nine days? By donkey? British rail sure has gone downhill.

What about that weekend trip to Italy, instead? Cheapest route, please.

No direct flights available? I have to take a couple of sea cruises, another butt-busting ride on a donkey, and it’s going to take 37 days? I haven’t the slightest idea what the conversion rate for denarii is, so I’m not going to guess what it costs. Probably more than $30.

You’ve probably figured out that I wasn’t using Google Maps, but this cool webpage called Orbis, which uses a historical database to calculate routes and travel times to and from various destinations in 200CE. Apparently, there was no such thing as taking a three day vacation in a different country back then, when you either had to walk, ride a donkey, or pay a lot of money for a carriage.

I could see how fantasy novelists and fantasy gamers, as well as historians, could use this to get some perspective on how much work was required to move around in the ancient world.

Go back where you come from! You violate our traditions and are trying to replace us!

I guess that’s a familiar complaint. Britons were complaining about all those immigrants from the European mainland who were waltzing in, smug as you please, after the fall of Rome, and I presume they were taking all the jerbs. Now science demonstrates the takeover.

In the eighth century C.E., an English monk named Bede wrote the history of the island, saying Rome’s decline in about 400 C.E. opened the way to an invasion from the east. Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes from what is today northwestern Germany and southern Denmark “came over into the island, and they began to increase so much, that they became terrible to the natives.”

But in the later 20th century, many archaeologists suspected Bede, writing centuries later, had exaggerated the invasion’s scale. Instead, they envisioned a small migration of a warrior elite, who imposed their imported culture on the existing population. Now, a sweeping genomic study, published this week in Nature, suggests Bede may have been at least partly right. New DNA samples from 494 people who died in England between 400 and 900 C.E. show they derived more than three-quarters of their ancestry from Northern Europe.

It was the Angles and the Saxons!

“You can’t deny there was a big shift in material culture—Roman Britain looks very different from the Anglo-Saxon period 200 years later,” Hills says. In spite of that, “Most archaeologists have been critical of the idea of migration,” rejecting it as an overly simplistic explanation for cultural change.

But the new DNA analysis revives it. Together with previously published DNA, samples from more than 20 cemeteries along England’s eastern coast suggest a rapid, large-scale migration from Northern Europe, beginning by 450 C.E. at the latest. “Some Anglo-Saxon sites look almost 100% continental European,” says co-author Joscha Gretzinger, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “The only explanation is a large amount of people coming in from the North Sea zone.”

Anglo-Saxons go home! Pack up your things and move back to Germany. Or France. Or Poland. And take your foreign ways and your strange foods and your filthy habits with you.<

Except…here comes the kicker.

Traces of western British and Irish ancestry in people buried on the continent suggest a reverse migration, too, with migrants’ descendants moving back after generations in Great Britain. The results undercut the idea of Great Britain as an isolated island, upset only occasionally by invasions. “Actually, the North Sea was a highway, where people were coming and going,” Hills says. “Maybe mobility is a more normal human state than we think.”

So, like, maybe we should just get used to populations changing over time?

I suppose a woman could have carved this stone found along Hadrian’s wall, and from the 2nd century CE, but somehow I doubt it.

The stone is fairly small, measuring 40 cm wide by 15 cm tall (15 inches by 6 inches). Experts in Roman epigraphy recognized the lettering as a mangled version of Secundinus cacator, which translates into (ahem) “Secundinus, the shitter.” The penis image merely added insult to injury—a clever subversion of the traditional interpretation of a phallus as a positive symbol of fertility. The Vindolanda site now has 13 phallic carvings, more than have been discovered at any other dig site along Hadrian’s Wall.

The last laugh is on whoever carved it, because we remember Secundinus’s name and not his.