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Syndicate
Michio Kaku said there was a joke among physicists in the 1970s that asked where could you find a string theorist? A: In the unemployment line.
Today string theory and M theory are leading edge science. Science journals Nuclear Physics B and Physical Review D are now taken up with reviewing all manner of high energy physics theories, string theories and the like.
I think the world is on the verge of a new scientific Rennaissance and that new laws of nature will be discovered at CERN and other labs, and perhaps confirmed with the use of newer and more sensitive telescopes. Europe will become the new centre of science and technology, and from that will come new technologies to benefit everything from medical research to advances in new and sustainable energy sources. At some point we will no longer need to draw on energy from dead plants. It's going to be really big. Every time new laws of nature were discovered, it marked the start of significant things to come, like the industrial revolution and later the age of electronics and telecommunications. This could be even bigger.
I predict the opposite. Most scientists are somewhat betting the farm these days that all matter arranged according to the rules of atomic structure, every thing we see all around us, me, you, the planets, stars and visible galaxies, represents only about 4% of all matter in the universe. And 99.999999999999 percent of atoms is nothing, dead space. It's certainly not the indestructible, inanimate bits of matter predicted by Newtonian atomic theory.
They don't know much about dark matter. They know even less about dark energy, or the other 73% of total mass energy of the universe. Haven't even classified it yet. Lord Rees thinks it's possible that our human sensory perception may only have evolved to detect atomic matter. Perhaps it requires an advanced state of human evolution before we will understand everything there is to know about the universe.
Physicists bid farewell to reality?
Waving one hand...the half-read copy on my bookshelf is not well-thumbed. But sections like "Imperfections of the Geological Record" would indicate that he knew what lay in store in the way of controversy and debate: "But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor a record of the mutations of life, the best preserved geological section presented, had not the difficulty of our not discovering innumerable transitional links between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory."
Not to mention the problem of still-closed minds a century and a half later.
Have you a link to any of the others?
Well, within Darwin's own era, I believe his grandfather Erasmus Darwin came up with a similar theory, though I don't really know the details.
I know for a fact that the French scientist Lamarck devised a theory of evolution, but he didn't have natural selection as part of the mix, he just kinda posited that organisms can be born with new features to adjust to their surroundings, without quite explaining why.
Also, I think there was some guy named Wallace who came up with natural-selection evolution at the same time as Charles Darwin, and there was a bit of a rivalry between them as to who would publish first.
Erasmus Darwin
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
And I vaguely recall reading that some of the ancient Greek philosophers posited the idea of evolution, but I have no idea which ones.
Wasn't it Lamarck's idea that if you cut the tail off of a mouse, its offspring would also be tail-less? I guess he didn't bother testing that last one.
Wasn't it Lamarck's idea that if you cut the tail off of a mouse, its offspring would also be tail-less? I guess he didn't bother testing that last one.
That sounds like Lysenko, the Soviet guy who thought that acquired traits could be inherited. I'm not sure if Lamarack thought that as well, or if he just figured that the new offspring would be born with features their parents didn't have, as a result of a changing envoronment.
It's been suggested upthread that Darwin was simply the first person to get the theory of evolution accepted.
Who were the others who arrived at the same idea, but were unable to get the same theory accepted?
Okay, according to this Lamarck believed that giraffes who strain their necks to eat fruit could have offspring with longer necks. I guess that's similar to the theory about the mice with their tails removed.
By "theory of evolution", do you mean via natural selection? If so, I don't know if anyone really came up with that prior to Darwin. Maybe someone did. But if they didn't, part of the reason that earlier theories would have been rejected(apart from religious objections) might be that the other guys couldn't fully explain how it worked.
What difference does it make if Darwin was the first or not? Whether the theory of evolution is sound or not is the question.
Just reading throught the whole thread now...
This is about pointing out that when you go around waving Darwin flags and spitting on all the non-believers you are participating in a reformed version of a continuous attempt at global domination by a small minority of humans.
Personally, I don't go in for "spitting on", ridiculing, or otherwise degrading people who disbelieve Darwinism, whether they be fundamentalist Christians or Hare Krishnas. Heck, I have dear loved ones who think that the Virgin Mary appears at shrines throughout Europe, and I'm certainly not going to get kicked out of the next family reunion by laughing at them over it.
Where I draw the line is over what is acceptable to teach in an academic setting. And as far as I can tell(full disclosure: I never could pass Grade 12 biology) Darwinism is currently the best game in town, as far as providing a coherent, scientifically based explanation goes, and people advocating that Old Testment or Hare Krishna theories be taught should be politely told to piss off.
But I can't control what people believe in the privacy of their own homes, churches, synagogues, temples, etc, so I don't really see the point in ridiculing them over it.
Well, I think the argument is not so much a scientific one, but an historical one. People seem to be saying that other thinkers in other cultures came up with evolution before Darwin, but he gets all the credit because he was a white male European.
I don't have the background to critique that argument either way. But the wikipedia article on History of evolutionary thought might be a starting point.
According to that article, Anaximander and Empedocles were the Greek philosphers who came up with evolutionary ideas, and there was a guy in China named Zhuanghzi who also did. Whether these guys had natural selection as part of their schemata, I don't know. It doesn't really sound like it from the article.
People are wrong. It would be the equivalent of giving credit for a flying car not to the person who develops it, but to the first person who thought that such a vehicle were possible. I think that it is possible too..so I guess I too should get priority over the person, or persons who eventually develop a flying car.
Darwin gets the credit because he didn't just throw out an idea into the world, but actually compiled the evidence that brought it from being a simple thought experiment to a science - and a well established science at that. There is simply no comparing the two. In the process he looked at the all of relevant information from very diverse fields and he looked at the mountains of evidence which he had collected and compiled himself, and the results of the countless experiments he had used to test and refine his theory, and used all that to develop new ideas like sexual selection and deliver a scientific theory that was solid, testible and could withstand all the objections that were thrown at it. That is why Darwin gets the credit and that is why Wallace, despite having his paper read at the same time, felt from the beginning that this was Darwin's theory - Wallace and those before them put forward ideas - Darwin put forward a mature scientific theory that was backed by a pile of evidence so solid and undeniable that most of his scientific ideas were adopted, despite being so revolutionary, by the scientific community almost over night.
I think, trevor, that it's terms like "the scientific community" that are being called into question. What you mean by that is a bunch of privileged, nineteenth-century British pseudo-aristocrats. It was hardly a worldwide community.
I also find it interesting, with all this emphasis on "materialism," that the materialist history of Darwin's discovery doesn't seem to enter into it. The fact is that the nineteenth century and its incredible, dazzling scientific discoveries in medicine, electricity, chemistry, astronomy and of course evolution, are intrinsically and inextricably tied to colonialism. What was Darwin doing in the Galapagos? What were the material (i.e. imperial) conditions which made that trip possible? I don't mean to put all this on Darwin (I'm one of those who have read most of Species), because c-19 British science is all coloured by colonialism. Why was Britain putting in observatories in Africa? Just to study the equator? Why were they conducting medical experiements in the Amazon and the South Pacific? Why was there an entire industry based on foreign and exotic scientific placements worldwide?
Yet somehow, when the "science" comes back to us, it is stripped of all this material and colonial history. It's just "truth," and it just happens to "belong" to the West. To our white geniuses. It's a neat trick, isn't it? This neutral "science" which was just going about its business while its founding nations were turning the world into a bloody, impoverished pestilence.
What's with this whiteness introspective? Sins of the fathers and all that. Why don't we just look at Homo sapiens as the true source of our problems, get around all this racial stuff in one fell swoop? Bury relativism in the process.
Once it was in print didn't the knowledge belong to anyone?
Did anyone else hear the ideas program that talked about how Darwin brought his biases to the study. That because of his British male upbringing he developed a theory for development that wasn't far from Tom Brown's School Days. The program spoke of a book that talked about how the focus of the theory would have been subtley but importantly different if it was written from feminist perspective. Survival of the fittest would have been compared with alternative routes of change (I only caught the first few minutes of the program, so that is all I got)
I love the etymological irony
I didn't say that the scientific community at the time was a worldwide community, nor do I see how it is relevant in any way. Evangelical Christians claim that the world is about 6000 years old. Lots of other communities have traditional beliefs that the world is much is much older than that. Does that mean that they were better scientists than the evangelical christians? No, because none of them were doing science. They were all basing their time-frames on mythology and not evidence. I don't care where scientific evidence comes from today. It could come from the US or the Middle East or China or where ever. The quality matters not the skin colours or cultures of those who present the evidence. Science is not a "western" or "white" tradition (I reject the traditions of my white, western European culture), it is method. I have friends of all backgrounds and cultures who understand it and use it, and I have friends of all backgrounds and cultures who either don't understand it, or reject it. Nor do I care where scientific evidence comes from in the past. Only the quality of that evidence matters.
Hee. Anyone who could read English and had access to a copy. Print has its own relationship with empire (cf. Benedict Anderson): why are the best "classics" all English? Of course, Species didn't have "anyone's" name on it--it had Charles Darwin's. That's what I mean by "belonging."
Survival of the fittest was Spencer's phrase, not Darwin's. Nor is it used much by biologists (more commonly by the lay public who misuse it more often than not) as a scientific term although it never meant that the "strongest" are the ones that will survive. Natural selection means that those most suited to their environment are more likely to pass on their genes.
This popular refrain is exactly the kind that erases Western science's debt to colonialism and other forms of historical oppression. I can see that I'm not going to get you to recognize it, but Western science has the privilege to be able to ignore "where scientific evidence comes from" (even as it pushes for us to affirm Darwin's supremacy with a national holiday). There is always resistence to pointing out the whims of hegemony, but the fact is that this urge to embrace the myth that "the quality matters not the skin colours or cultures" is ideologically motivated. It's no accident that Faraday, Maxwell, Hershel, Darwin, however brilliant they were are the ones remembered by science and not the colonized which made room for them to take the acclaim.
Kuhn points out that Scientifc paradigms are always hegemonic. That said the scientific method is a method; and, yes a hegemonic one.
Perhaps, but if The Origin had been written from a feminist perspective than it seems to me that Spencer's phrase could still have become embedded in the popular imagination.
KUUUUUUUUUHNNNNNNNN!!!!!!
It`s much more clear now how so-called Science (capital S) can reflect social and ideological biases than it was in the 19th century. And I think the new critical eye in this regard is positive. There is science that makes napalm and GMOs and there is science that develops new methods of water filtration, cleaner energy sources, and deeper understanding of society necessary to change it.
However, it ought to be mentioned that ever since Einstein and Russell made their famous appeal in 1948 it is a given that science, like the state, is a terrain over which the right and the left fight and treating it like some sterilized objectivity void of value is just wrong. Science is in the service of humanity or in the service of profit, death, and the like. This doesn`t nullify genuinely scientific arguments or conclusions but we all know how lies can be dressed up as the truth in a white lab coat, by a government bureaucrat, an Olympic administrator, a Minister of the Crown, and so on.
There are two streams of science, basic and applied research. Applied research is what produces the technology for the widgets, the weapons of mass destruction for oppressing the masses and resource grabs, and basically results in technology with a capitalist view to profiteering.
The other stream of science is basic research. Basic research answers the whys? Why is nature the way it is? The right seems to be attacking this branch of science for a variety of reasons. Firstly, they seek to introduce "intelligent design" into the discussion for purposes of attacking evolution. They want to continue using religion to exploit the masses and dumb them down and to destabilize other regions of the world. Perhaps. But they also want to shape basic research toward their ends. If it doesn't make money or show promise for instant results and therefore profit, then it's of no use to them. I think it's partly why we have pills and potions to treat side effects of illness and cosmetic fixes for things like baldness. Male pattern baldness is actually considered a disease today and big pharma had something to do with that. And Ralph Nader warned Americans and Canadians a long time ago as to the dangers of allowing academia to be influenced by private enterprise. Add military interests, and the whole thing is a large conflict of interest. It's not science anymore so much as corporate sponsored science, and it's not what we need or want.
But let us not let an ahistorical relativism replace the rationality that must underlie science! Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell never wanted science to disapper down a cultural sinkhole created in a politically correct academic mind.
This is where it ends:" the nineteenth century and its incredible, dazzling scientific discoveries in medicine, electricity, chemistry, astronomy and of course evolution, are intrinsically and inextricably tied to colonialism. What was Darwin doing in the Galapagos?"
Darwin, of course, was studying. Comparing, Theorizing. Doing science. The silly fellow was NOT wearing a hair shirt.