Down House proposal withdrawn

Darwin’s home was going to be submitted to UNESCO’s World Heritage committee for designation as a World Heritage site, but that application was withdrawn, to be resubmitted in two years after some reworking. Down House has some handicaps compared to other World Heritage sites:

But without natural wonders or spectacular architecture, Darwin at Downe does not tick obvious World Heritage boxes. Although he was surprised to hear of Downe’s difficulties, Geoffrey Belcher, site coordinator for the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site in London, thinks that “A site with a limited range of qualities will be at a disadvantage.” The inclusion of the Royal Observatory makes Greenwich one of the few World Heritage Sites to celebrate science, but the site boasts architectural splendour and naval history too.

It is a rather different site—it’s not famous for some major chunk of tangible real estate, something that visitors could touch and take photos of, but for being a place where one of the major thinkers of the 19th century did his research and writing and correspondence, a kind of locus of thought. It’s definitely an important place in the history of science.

Ian Robinson finds one unfortunate comment in the article—a comparison with religious sites. Bleh.

“I can’t think of anything more important to do for the history of nineteenth-century science than to protect the whole environment Darwin inhabited and exploited,” says James Moore, a Darwin scholar at the Open University in Milton Keynes and one of the first historians to explore the importance of this rural refuge to Darwin. “Muslims go to Mecca, Christians go to Jerusalem, Darwinians go to Downe,” he says.

That’s putting the wrong spin on it. Another World Heritage site is Independence Hall in Philadelphia; we don’t go there because we worship the declaration of independence, or because we think the founding fathers were gods (OK, some people do, but they’re insane). Another is the Olympic National Park—again, it’s not a holy place, it’s a natural wonder. I like both, but that doesn’t make me an Independencehallian or an Olympian…although the latter does have a nice ring to it.

Nicholls H (2007) Darwin down but not out. Nature, 20 June 2007, doi:10.1038/447896a

They were only athier, we’re the athiest!

Historical perspective certainly does change one’s views of our current little struggle with theism. Kieran Healy identifies the original atheists—those horrible people who were defying cultural mores and denying the traditional deities.

It was those uppity Christians.

Matters were very different with the Christians, who had ex hypothesi abandoned their ancestral religions … The Christians asserted openly either that the pagan gods did not exist at all or that they were malevolent demons. Not only did they themselves refuse to take part in pagan religious rites: they would not even recognize that others ought to do so. As a result … the mass of pagans were naturally apprehensive that the gods would vent their wrath at this dishonour not upon the Christians alone but on the whole community; and when disasters did occur they were only too likely to fasten the blame on to the Christians.

So, if they had a poll around 250AD, the most untrustworthy group in the Empire would have been those Christians? At least this is a historical example that shows the atheists can take over! Let’s just be sure we don’t make the mistake the Christians did.

Part of Ste. Croix’s larger argument is that pretty soon the boot was on the other foot, the persecuted became enthusiastic persecutors.

Bad history does not mean bad science

An article titled “Darwin misconceptions in textbooks slammed in biology journal” sure sounds like it ought to be a hard-hitting criticism—we ought to look into that. Larry Moran did, and wow, what a bust. It’s pathetic. It’s a list of seven “errors” made in discussions of Darwin’s biography in textbooks, which is little more than a lot of nit-picking over details that are not so important to a biologist, but are more a matter of historical accuracy. Some of them are trivial matters of emphasis—saying that Darwin published the Origin after he returned to England is quite correct, and unless they’re discussing what he did afterwards, saying that he waited 23 years to publish is irrelevant in the context of a biology textbook—and others, such as the statement that Wallace and Darwin presented their work together when both were presented in absentia are plain wrong, but again, do not affect the substance of the science. I agree that if they’re going to present that material, they ought to get it right…but I also wouldn’t object to stripping out all mention of Darwin’s name (except in the bibliography), and focusing on the evidence and experiment and theory. It’s not that I think the history is unimportant, but we’re already tightly strapped for time to cover the essentials in introductory biology; let’s set it aside in class, and instead tell the students to go read Janet Browne or Desmond and Moore in their copious free time.

I can sympathize with an expert insisting on holding textbooks to a better standard, and in that sense this is a reasonable work. However, it’s being pushed by hack journalist Denyse O’Leary and the British propaganda site “Truth in Science” as if it is a challenge to the science. It isn’t. It’s a criticism of lazy text book publishers, and that’s about it. Except when creationists distort a criticism of historical reporting into another reason to cast doubt on a science.

We aim to misbehave

Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden’s place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism ‘hurts the cause’, he brought up a historical parallel:

Here’s just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women’s right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.

This prompted the usual cry of the accommodationists: but feminists weren’t as rude as those atheists.

Were the women saying that men were stupid? Were they portraying them as rubes and simpletons? Were they falling into the trap of making themselves resemble the negative stereotypes of women at the time? IIRC, the answers are No, No, and No. Substitute “atheists” for “women” and “theists” for “men,” and the answers are emphatically Yes, Yes, and Yes. It is one thing to be assertive. It is another thing to be gratuitously rude.

[Read more…]

The death of Darwin

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

Today is the anniversary of Darwin’s death in 1882, and I am prompted to post this in response to a peculiar question. “Just read Carl Zimmers Evolution, a triumph of an idea. In it he states that Darwin, on his death bed cried out to god? How could this be if he had denounced religion and god?”

It’s quite true that Zimmer does briefly mention the death of Darwin:

…Emma caught him in her arms when he collapsed at Down House. For the next six weeks she cared for him as he cried out to God and coughed up blood and slipped into unconsciousness. On April 19, 1882, he was dead.

[Read more…]

Dennert and the deathbed of Darwinism

I’ve just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin’s pangenesis was seen as a failure, and Mendel’s genetics had just been rediscovered, but it wasn’t yet clear how to incorporate them into evolutionary theory. In some ways, I can understand how Dennert might have come to some of the conclusions he did, but still … it’s a masterpiece of confident predictions that flopped. It ranks right up there with bumblebees can’t fly, rockets won’t work in a vacuum, and no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM…he specifically predicts that ‘Darwinism’ will be dead and abandoned within ten years, by 1910.

Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past. A few decades hence when people will look back upon the history of the doctrine of Descent, they will confess that the years between 1860 and 1880 were in many respects a time of carnival; and the enthusiasm which at that time took possession of the devotees of natural science will appear to them as the excitement attending some mad revel.

[Read more…]