New study challenges common view that some Ediacaran fossils are traces of complex worm-like animals, saying they are assemblages of bacteria and algae. If true, this would suggest that the Cambrian Explosion may have marked a more major transition than had recently been thought. 🧪🌱🐋 #EvoBio

"The division of the perceived universe into parts and wholes is convenient and may be necessary, but no necessity determines how it shall be done." 🦫🦋🧪🐋🌱 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Gregory Bateson was born OTD in 1904. “Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.” “Epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?” 🦫🦋🧪🐋🌱 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Thomas H Huxley was born OTD in 1825. The idea of “warfare” between science and religion is suspect, but it works for H. Protestantism lacks “a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters” from the Pope to the Bible. 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was born OTD in 1860. He conceived of organismal form as primarily a matter of physical forces, rather than natural selection. He used diagrams to represent how networks of physical forces could deform one body plan into another. 🧪🌱🐋🦋🦫🐡 #HistSTM

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was born OTD in 1860. He conceived of organismal form as primarily a matter of physical forces, rather than natural selection. He used diagrams to represent how networks of physical forces could deform one body plan into another. 🧪🌱🐋🦋🦫🐡 #HistSTM

Henri Poincaré was born OTD in 1854. Identical antecedents must lead to identical consequents. But our world is so complex that it is inconceivable that two situations should *ever* be in all respects identical. And so the principle of determinism has no application to us. 🧪🦋🦫 #HistSTM #PhilSci

New study claims that climate change and competition with H. Sapiens alone are not sufficient to explain why Neanderthals went extinct while Sapiens flourished. Sapiens’ stronger, more flexible social networks better equipped them to survive times of crisis, they claim. 🧪 🌱🐋

Kurt Gödel was born OTD in 1906. “If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.” John Barrow, The Artful Universe 🧪🦫🦋 #HistSTM #PhilSci

For #PhilSky aficionados, here’s a cartoon from a recent @newyorker.com:

The famous DNA diagram from the Watson/Crick paper was more than just a post-hoc visual representation. Diagramming DNA played a key role in their solution of its structure. On the role of diagramming in DNA research, and in science more generally, see below. 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio

OTD in 1953, J Watson and F Crick published a paper describing the double helical structure of DNA in the journal Nature. M Wilkins and co-authors, and R Franklin and R Gosling, published separate papers in the same issue with X-ray crystallography analysis. 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Leopold did not imagine nature as a pristine wilderness untouched by human hands. We are here, and have put ourselves in a position where we cannot but act in and on the world. But even if we have no option but to “tinker,” we must do so with reverence and humility. 🌱🐋🦋🦫🧪🌎 #HistSTM #PhilSci

“If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” 🐋🌱🧪🦋🦫 #HistSTM #PhilSci 🌎

For EarthDay, Aldo Leopold: “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.” 🦋🦫🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci 🌎

Vladimir Nabokov was born OTD in 1899. “I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.” “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” —Lolita #Philsky #Booksky

Darwin’s last publication was about sexual, not natural, selection: “After having carefully weighed to the best of my ability the various arguments which have been advanced against the principle of sexual selection, I remain firmly convinced of its truth." 🦋🦫🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #PhilSci

Charles Darwin died OTD in 1882. Stories of a deathbed renunciation of his doubts about Christianity and recantation of his theory circulated widely (mostly in the US, predictably). They were, however, lies. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to John Herschel. 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #PhilSci

There is “a kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can make as he tells the story of another’s life, and thereby make it both his own (like a friendship) and the public’s (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, what we can believe, and finally what we can love”

I’ve finished Richard Holmes’s biography of Tennyson. One of the great literary biographers. Pure coincidence, but I also just finished Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know. M’s epigraph comes from H’s joint biography of Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage meditating on the biographer’s art. #BookSky

Vincent Van Gogh was born OTD in 1853. “Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth.” —Paul Gauguin

Tennessee Williams was born OTD in 1911. “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” #Booksky

On this day of the Third Age of Middle Earth, the One Ring was cast into the depths of Sammath Naur, the Chambers of Fire of Orodruin, destroying it, and with it Sauron’s power. #BookSky

Stephen Toulmin was born OTD 1922. If we get to Heaven and are offered eternal residence with Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Montaigne, few of us will ask instead to join Descartes, Newton, and “the exact-thinking but darker-souled geniuses of the 17th century.” #Philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫 #Booksky

Patrick Suppes was born OTD in 1922. One of the great 20th century philosophers of science, Pat was an early critic of the semantic conception of theories, believing that theories are best conceived as sets of models. He was also accomplished in both empirical science and business. 🦋🦫 #PhilSci

John Herschel was born OTD in 1792. His 1831 Preliminary Discourse launched a flowering of reflection on the aims and methods of science among British thinkers that was so rich and influential that Charles Sanders Peirce would later dub it “the Age of Method.” 🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci 🐋🌱

Here’s a link to the full article (paywall): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/676147/pdf #HistSTM 🌱🐋 #evobio #philsci 🦫🦋

Darwin’s Descent of Man launched OTD in 1871. In it, D finally made explicit what had been obvious, if unstated, in the Origin: humans had evolved. And not merely bodily. Our minds, even our moral codes, evolved from animal sources. #HistSTM 🌱🐋 #evobio #philsci 🦫🦋

“[T]he very phenomenon being investigated may be changed by the inquiry itself. It is as if there were a principle of human indeterminacy at work.” “Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe the past.” #PhilSci #HistSTM 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧪🗃️🧠

Ian Hacking was born OTD in 1936. “There is no canonical way to think of our own past. In the endless quest for order and structure, we grasp at whatever picture is floating by and put our past into its frame.” #PhilSci #HistSTM 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧪🗃️🧠

Ian Hacking was born OTD in 1936. “There is no canonical way to think of our own past. In the endless quest for order and structure, we grasp at whatever picture is floating by and put our past into its frame.” #PhilSci #HistSTM 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧪🗃️🧠

“Human creativity stems from the ability to combine and recombine existing ideas in novel ways.” #Complexity #HistSTM #PhilSci 🧪

Douglas Hofstadter was born OTD in 1945. “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order—and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.” #Complexity #HistSTM #PhilSci 🧪

Gideon Mantell published his description of the iguanodon OTD in 1825. He had originally thought that the fossil teeth on which he based his description were those of a giant crocodile, but later determined that the creature was an enormous herbivore. 🐋🌱🗃️❤️🧪 #HistSTM

Jacques Monod was born OTD in 1910. “In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.” 🐋🌱 🦫🦋 #Philsci #HistSTM #evobio

Elizabeth Bishop was born OTD in 1911. She wrote the best poem ever inspired by a typo in a newspaper article—“man-moth,” when what was intended was “mammoth.” #booksky #poetry www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47537/...

New study finds that some dogs are able to learn new words from overhearing conversations not directed at them, with a facility comparable to that of 18-month old human infants. 🧪🐋🌱

“Reality, in its quantitative aspect, must be considered as a system of populations.… The general study of the equilibria and dynamics of populations … has probably reached its highest development in the biological study known as 'ecology,' [and] this name may well be given to it.” 🌱🐋 #philsci 🧪🌎🦋🦫

Kenneth Boulding—philosopher, #complexity theorist, and mystic—was born OTD in 1910. “The earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything … and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.” 🌱🐋 #philsky #philsci 🧪🌎 #STS

“Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.” #philsky #booksky

AA Milne was born on this day in 1882. “Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.” 🌱🐋🧪#PhilSci #booksky

OTD 1908 Willhelm Weinberg gave a talk to the Society for the Natural History of the Fatherland in Württemberg giving the population genetics equations GH Hardy would independently publish 5 months later. It was 35 years before his work was recognized in the Anglophone world. 🐋🌱🥢🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Paul Feyerabend was born OTD in 1924. Knowledge is not a body of consistent theories converging on truth. It is “an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible … alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth … forcing the others into greater articulation.” 🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #STS

William James was born OTD in 1842. As important as “pragmatism” to understanding James is “meliorism,” the idea that improving the world is possible, but not assured. We have to fight for it. “We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.” #philsky

An ecologist “lives alone in a world of wounds…. [He] must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” 🌱🐋🌎🧪

Aldo Leopold was born OTD in 1887. “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” #HpBio #HistSTM 🌎 #philsci #STS 🧪

Alfred Russel Wallace born OTD in 1823. He said he shared with Darwin “an intense interest in … the variety [of living things] that catches the eye of the observer even among those which are very much alike, but which are soon found to differ in several distinct characters.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

OTD in 1912, Alfred Wegener delivered a lecture propounding the theory that our modern continents were formed by the splitting and drifting apart of an ancient supercontinent, which he named Pangea. Due to his failure to offer a plausible mechanism, he was widely ridiculed. 🧠🗃️⚒️ 🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Arthur Danto was born Jan 2, 1924 To call a car “dented” is to implicitly refer to an earlier undented state. Stories “have a beginning, a middle, and an end. An [historical] explanation then consists in filling in the middle between the temporal end-points of a change.” 🧠🗃️ 🦋🦫 #PhilSsci #PhilSky

OTD in 1944, in Korematsu v. US, SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of FDR’s order that US citizens of Japanese descent be involuntarily interned. The decision has come to be seen as one of the lowest moments in the Supreme Court’s history.