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.

Maurice Wilkins was born OTD in 1916. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the structure of DNA using X-ray crystallography. He did not start out in biochemistry. He changed fields after being disillusioned by his work on the Manhattan Project. 🐋🌱 #HistSTM #STS 🧪 🐡

Maxwell's Demon was born OTD in 1867 in a letter to Peter Guthrie Tait. M called it only a “finite being.” Lord Kelvin named it a “demon,” presumably referring to its apparent unearthly power to (locally and temporarily) violate the second law of thermodynamics. 🦫🦋 #HistSTM #philsci 🧪

An article I saw today details a debate (in Heisenberg’s old stomping grounds of Helogland) in which Carlo Rovelli and Chris Fuchs argue about how best to interpret Heisenberg’s intuition. 🦫🦋🧪 #philsci https://www.science.org/content/article/100-years-quantum-mechanics-redefining-reality-us-center

Joan Didion was born OTD in 1934. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live.... We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” #BookSky #Lit 🦋🦫 🗃️🧠

Werner Heisenberg was born OTD in 1901. “What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” We are “asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer … by the means that are at our disposal.” 🦋🦫🧪 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Claude the albino alligator, the unofficial but very real mascot of the California Academy of Sciences, has died at 30, apparently of liver cancer. I’m kind of broken up about it. In all seriousness, may his memory be a blessing. 🧪🐋🌱

In honor of Tom Stoppard’s life and work, I just reread Arcadia. Here’s Hannah: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” 🦫🦋 #PhilSky #BookSky

St. George Jackson Mivart, one of Darwin’s fiercest critics, was born OTD in 1827. If long necks favor giraffes on the African savannah, M asked, where are the *other* long-necked ungulates? Why are there not vast herds of giraffopottamuses sweeping across the veldt? #QED 🧪 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Expression was also important in the history of the book, being an early instance of a book that included photographs, notwithstanding publisher John Murray’s worry that including photos would “poke a hole in the profits.” 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky

Darwin was a pioneer in experimental psychology, showing photos of human faces that had been galvanically stimulated to represent different emotions to visitors to Down House in an effort to determine which emotions could be reliably identified. 3/4 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky

Darwin had earlier made detailed observations of the emotional displays of his “little animalcule of a son,” William Erasmus, which he used in Expression. D’s wife Emma worried that if she were “out of temper,” he would just be “forming theories about me.” 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky

Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions launched OTD in 1872. Just as our bodily form has evolved from our animal ancestors, so too have our minds, including "the habit of expressing our feelings [or, in his title, "emotions"] by certain movements." 1/4 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky

Apparent case of learned tool use by wolves. https://youtu.be/SiuQF68tdWI?si=k7DWNrI0y5jASt-o #EvoBio #HPBio

John Beatty has a lovely chapter analyzing this topic in Kohn’s classic volume The Darwinian Heritage: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400854714.265/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOooCnjMcj4ghbwulYQebLeOoMOV168osG2dP9u5WXMt6pKE2LS0F

It’s not really that surprising that Darwin used the diagrammatic form in the Origin. In his private notes, he often scribbled diagrams to help him think through the general patterns that might be expected to emerge from evolutionary processes. 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡

I also also have a standalone article, here: https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932718300528 Full disclosure: analysis to a certain extent changed by the time of the dissertation. 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡

The diagram was more than a picture. He referred to it frequently in the text, clearly believing that the diagrammatic form rendered some aspects of evolutionary dynamics more clearly than text could. I’ve written about this in my dissertation, available on request. 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡