Thomas Hunt Morgan was born OTD in 1866. If you're ever feeling that your work is uending and unedifying, remember that he once said this: "Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it." 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

“We must therefore try to establish a new standpoint which … takes account of organic wholeness, but … treats it in a manner which admits of scientific investigation.” 🐋🌱🦫🦋 #HistSTM #PhilSci #evolbio #STS 🧪

Ludwig von Bertalanffy—the architect of “General System Theory”—was born OTD in 1901. Mechanism “provides us with no grasp of … organic 'wholeness,’ … of organic 'teleology,’ or of the historical character of organisms.…” 🌱🐋🦫🦋 #HistSTM #PhilSci #evolbio #STS 🧪

Samuel Johnson was born OTD in 1709. Selecting one quote from my notes was a challenge, but here goes: “Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.” #PhilSky

Alexander von Humboldt was born OTD in 1769. “[My] principal impulse … was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces.” 🦋🦫🐋🌱🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci

Stephen Jay Gould was born OTD in 1941. “Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table.... Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.” 🦫🦋🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci #EvoBio

Charles Sanders Peirce was born OTD in 1839. I’ve always loved this quote: “We cannot begin with complete doubt.” It pithily captures the pragmaticist (as he would have it) rejection of the search for foundations—we are *always* in medias res. 🦫🦋 #PhilSky #PhilSci

Jon Hodge has died. A great scholar, and a lovely man. May his memory be a blessing. 🧪🐋🌱 #philsci #histstm

OTD in 1854, Charles Darwin began sorting his notes in preparation for writing a treatise with the working title “Natural Selection.” He would never publish the book, instead publishing a short “abstract”—titled “On the Origin of Species”—in 1859. 🐋🌱 #HistSTM #evolbio 🧪

The goal "is to identify each animal's perceptual cues among all the stimuli in its environment and to build up the animal's specific world with them.” 🌱🐋🦫🦋 #HistSTM #evolbio #philsci #psychsky 🧪

Jakob von Uexküll was born OTD in 1864. Each animal inhabits its own individual "umwelt," comprising only those aspects of the world that are relevant to its survival and flourishing. 🌱🐋🦫🦋 #HistSTM #evolbio #philsci #psychsky 🧪

Here are some of Leeuwenhoek’s sketches of the animalcules, from a different letter.

OTD in 1674, Antonie von Leeuwenhoek sent the first of many letters to Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society of London describing the “animalcules” he’d observed in rainwater using a microscope. 🐡🐋🌱 #HistSTM 🧪

Kurt Gödel presented his first incompleteness theorem at a conference in Königsberg OTD in 1930. Ironically, one of G’s principal goals was positive—to defend the Platonist view that some mathematical truths are perceivable by intuition, even if unprovable. 🧪🦫🦋 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Mary Midgley was born OTD in 1919. “Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something we have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.” “Animals are not machines…. Actually only machines are machines.” 🌱🐋🦫🦋🧪 #philsky #philsci

I can certainly confirm that this has proven true for my posts. Call this “qualitative data” or “mere anecdote,” according to your preference.

New study on #BlueSky for #SciComm. “Bluesky posts demonstrate substantially higher levels of interaction (likes, reposts, replies, and quotes) and greater textual originality than previously reported for X, suggesting both stronger interactive and more interpretive engagement.” 🦋🦫🌱🐋🧪 #philsci

A deep claim is being made here. Contra the block universe and other notions that treat time and history as epiphenomenal features of our subjective experience, Borges claims that history is a real and objective part of the world—that the world can only exist *in* time. 🦫🌱🗃️🧠 #PhilSci #Philsky

Jorge Luis Borges was born OTD in 1899. “Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” 🦋🦫🌱🗃️🧠 #PhilSci #PhilSky

Eunice Foote conducted an experiment showing that atmospheric CO2 traps heat. OTD in 1856, she listened to a man (John Henry of the Smithsonian) present her results to the American Acad. for the Advancement of Science. Henry downplayed the significance of Foote’s finding. #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM 🧪🌎

Thomas Lovejoy was born OTD in 1941 “Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping cranes in higher esteem than people.... [But] the choice is not between wild places or people, it is between a rich or an impoverished existence for Man.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

“The integration of the enormous number of bits of information … take place in our minds…. I doubt that there is such a thing as a correct view of nature, unless the rules of the game are stated clearly. Undoubtedly, there will later be other games and other rules.” 🐋🌱🦫🦋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Erwin Chargaff was born OTD in 1905. “Our understanding of the world is built up of innumerable layers. Each layer is worth exploring, as long as we do not forget that it is one of many.” 🐋🌱🦫🦋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM

J-B Lamarck was born OTD in 1744 A “prime cause … endows animal life with the power to make organization gradually more complex…. Occasionally a foreign, accidental, and therefore variable cause has interfered with the execution of the plan, without, however, destroying it.” 🐋🌱🧪🗃️🧠 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Thorstein Veblen was born OTD in 1857 Homo economicus is “a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains who oscillates like a homogeneous globule … under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor consequent.” 🦫🦋🧠🗃️ #HistSTM 📉📈 #PhilSci

Karl Popper was born OTD in 1902. “Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.” “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.” 🐋🌱🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Rosalind Franklin was born OTD in 1920. Her X-ray crystallography was key to discovering DNA’s structure (her student Raymond Gosling took photo 51). She also studied viruses. After her untimely death, a colleague Aaron Klug continued her work and won a Nobel. 🌱🐋🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM

Edward Hopper was born on this day in 1882. “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” Room in New York (1932) 🐡 #PhilSci (and, yes, I think that’s an appropriate feed for this)

William Sharp Macleay was born OTD in 1792. His Quinarian system launched a vogue in the 1820s-1830s for systems of biological classification based on the assumption that nature is so well ordered that animals can be classified in a nested hierarchy of simple, geometrical forms. 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

OTD in 1925 John Scopes was found guilty of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee statute that forbade the teaching of "any theory … that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The trial was as much an effort to bring tourist money into Dayton TN as anything else. 🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

The letters by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had been read before the Linnean Society. OTD in 1858, D abandoned the “Big Species Book” he had been working on and began a short “abstract” of his theory. It would go on to be published as On the Origin of Species. 🌱🐋🧪🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #EvoBio

Hunter Thompson was born OTD in 1937. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” #BookSky

For Kuhn's Bday resharing this paper on Kuhn's philosophy of data & fundamental constants, coauthored w/ my recent PhD student @federicabocchi.bsky.social, which has the cryptic title "Kuhn’s ‘5th Law of Thermodynamics’: Measurement, Data, & Anomalies" #philsci bokulich.org/wp-content/u...

Thomas Kuhn was born OTD in 1922. Historicity—over revolutions and paradigms—was core to his thought. “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” 🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #PhilSci 🦋🦫

Vilfredo Pareto was born OTD in 1848. His most famous quote is: "Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." But he never said it: quoteinvestigator.com/2024/08/02/f... 🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #HistSTM 📉📈

Walter Benjamin was born OTD in 1892. “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” #PhilSky 🧠🗃️

#philtech #philsci 🦋🦫

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

Henry David Thoreau was born on this day in 1817. “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #BookSky

Cormac McCarthy was born OTD in 1933. 🌱🐋🐡 #BookSky

Ernst Mayr was born OTD in 1904. “Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.” 🌱🐋🦋🦫🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Happy Fourth of July to those who celebrate. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

OTD in 1875, Charles Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants was published. These plants show “extreme sensitiveness,” more even than the human body, as well as “the power of transmitting various impulses from one part of the leaf to another,” all despite lacking “any nervous system.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Joseph D. Hooker was born OTD in 1817. Darwin’s best friend, and the period’s greatest botanist. Like D, H feuded with Richard Owen. O sought to bring H’s Kew Botanic Gardens under the authority of O’s British Museum, accusing H of “attaching barbarous binomials to foreign weeds.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

I think I can't do better with a poem about the #starscape than with "Murdered by light", published in the current issue of @suburbanwitchlit.bsky.social #vss365

Willard Van Orman Quine was born OTD in 1908. “Physical objects are … irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.” It’s just that they are “more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” #PhilSci #PhilSky

“Contemporary poetry is troubled. Its institutions are rickety, its audience is tiny and homogenous, and most of its products are crushingly orthodox. It increasingly resembles a community bake sale in which everyone’s cupcakes are agreed to be super-duper but nobody actually eats them.”

Two absolutely marvelous lines in this review. “Koethe is the only contemporary poet whose heavy use of [epigraphs] doesn’t make me want to revoke his library card, mostly because he’s actually doing something with them, rather than attaching them to poems like little Ralph Lauren polo players.”

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland climbed Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador on this day in 1802. Left: H, B, their guides, and I presume, their dog, with Chimborazo in the background, by Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1806). Right: from H’s Essay on the Geography of Plants (1805). 🐡🧪 #HistSTM