Carl Sagan tells us what we can yet lose to fanaticism and ignorance.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Carl Sagan tells us what we can yet lose to fanaticism and ignorance.
Find out for yourself. Darwin Online has acquired a huge digital collection of Darwin’s papers, everything from book drafts to personal letters, and has them scanned and available on the web. There they are in all their scribbled, crossed out, penciled over, rewritten glory — historians and antiquarians will drool over these, but me, I prefer the neatly typed versions.
The collection of family photos is pretty darned cool, though.
Wilkins tagged me. It’s all his fault.
This is supposed to be a historical meme…why bother me with this? I think it’s because philosophers have a professional obligation to annoy people with weird questions, and Wilkins takes personal pleasure in poking me now and then, the brute. Here’s what I’m supposed to do.
- Link to the person who tagged you.
- List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
- Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
- Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.
Favorite historical figure?? I don’t suppose I can name the progenote or urbilaterian, but because this was started by some historian somewhere, I have to restrict myself to some boring recent human being; and like Wilkins, I should avoid the obvious choices, although in his case Frederick II Hohenstaufen was a cool dude.
I guess I’ll name another cool dude…
Here’s a cool animation of the progress of the Civil War — it’s like the Confederacy is a giant gelatinous red blob spread over the South, punctuated with explosions as it occasionally makes amoeboid protrusions into the North, only to eventually succumb as it is driven back and chopped into bits.
Sorry, Southerners who read this blog, you may not want to watch. The Yankees will enjoy it, though. Except for the little meter with the casualty counts, which is spinning at a horrendous rate for both sides.
I have to consider this a rather dispiriting story:
In 1818, a whale oil dealer refused to pay a fish-product fine on whale oil, because a whale isn’t a fish. The inspector insisted on the tax, and a spirited court and public battle played out.
It’s dispiriting because you’d think the weight of scientific evidence (and if you prefer it, the testimony of no less an authority than Aristotle) would have settled this case easily, but no…the whale lost and was declared a fish.
Yesterday, I hopped into the black evo-mobile and made the long trek to Minneapolis to witness another creationist make a fool of himself. As is my custom when traveling alone, I like to crank up the car stereo until the road noise is beaten back, and the soundtrack for my trip was first, NPR’s Science Friday, and then Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, which I’d received in the mail earlier this week (thanks, Richard!). This was a mistake. This would have prepared me for science, complexity, and beauty, but all I was going to get at the end was ideological stupidity, simple-mindedness, and a particularly ugly dishonesty.
Today is the anniversary of the delivery of the Gettysburg Address, which, even if the content weren’t gloriously beautiful, would deserve eternal recognition as an exemplary reminder to speech makers of the virtues of brevity.
You should at least read it today.
People had some peculiar ideas in 1932. Try reading this wonderfully detailed diagram of evolution (if you’ve got the bandwidth, download the 3212×8748 pixel version).
The vertical axis makes sense: it’s a logarithmic scale of geologic time. It’s not quite right, since it has life arising about 1.6 billion years ago, when we now have good evidence that that occurred more than twice that long ago. I’m not going to complain about that — science does march onwards, and it probably represents the best estimates of that time.
The horizontal scale is a real problem, and is revealing something about early attitudes towards evolution. It’s completely unlabeled and poorly explained. Each of the bands of color is, apparently, a lineage; in the excerpt from the beginning of the histomap below, the light green are the bacteria, the dark green are the chlorophyllic plants, the yellow are the porifera, etc.
The extent of each lineage along the horizontal axis is drawn with some care, but it’s meaningless. The legend says, “The horizontal width of any strip at any time suggests in a general way the relative dominance of that type of life at that time.” It’s got the Porifera as the bulk of chart 900 million years ago, for example, with plants and bacteria as a narrow strip, tiny in proportion. It doesn’t even make sense to talk about “dominance” in these terms, and obviously there is no way to measure this.
Another problem with this particular rendering of evolutionary history is that almost every band arises independently from a spot on the left border. Read it literally, and this is a chart of sequential creation, with no detectable relationship between most lineages.
The absurdity grows increasingly apparent as we read down the chart. Here’s the bottom of the histomap; the modern era is completely dominated by the bloated bands of humans to a ridiculous degree.
The yellow (of course!) bands on the left are the Chinese and Japanese — the map is broken down by human races and nationalities by this point — the orange are the Russians, and that broad pink grouping near the middle are the Americans on the left, the English on the right, and a narrower lighter pink swath separating them representing Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans. Then the Germans in blue, the Latins in light green, etc. If you look way, way over on the right, you’ll find those unimportant bacteria, plants, insects, and mammals as teeny-tiny little ribbons which together compose about as much relative importance as the Greeks and Italians.
The focus of the entire chart is on two trivial and poorly defined entities: human “races” and “dominance”, with evolution as only a badly represented premise. All that impressed me is how badly it is done.
The creator, John B. Sparks, seems to have done a lot of this kind of visualization work. He also did histomaps of world history, religion, and who knows what else. The world history map seems to be uncritically praised, but what little I’ve seen of it looks like more of the same — charts with the author’s subjective impressions of importance illustrated over time. I don’t get it. They look utterly useless to me, except as pointless accumulations of words and a false representation of a few events in time. Oh, and as a historical curiosity. I hope no one is trying to learn history or science from these things.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but we’ve got a serial spammer in the comments. This twit, calling himself Peter Moore (also known as Ken DeMyer, or Kdbuffalo, as he was known on Wikipedia before being banned there), is repeating himself over and over again, asking the same stupid question, never satisfied with any answer anyone gives him. Forty nine insipid comments in three days is enough.
I will answer him one last time. Any further attempt to spam multiple comment threads with his demands (and this alone makes him an ass: an incompetent, unqualified hack like Moore is in no position to make demands) will result in his immediate banning.
The Beagle Project is having a fundraiser — they’re selling t-shirts and other gear to raise money for their project of reconstructing Darwin’s ship and sending scientists off to sea on it. I’m eyeing that large mug with the Beagle blueprints on it myself.
