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 🐡

Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, was usually quite generous about paying for maps, plates, and in-text images for D’s books, and D attended closely to his illustrations, so it’s surprising that the Origin featured only 1, a diagrammatic model of change through time. 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡

OTD in 1859, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. He’d been working on a long treatise titled “Natural Selection,” but learning that Alfred Russel Wallace had developed a similar theory, he shifted toward a shorter “abstract.” 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio

Asa Gray was born OTD in 1810. A devout believer in a personal God, G was also one of Darwin’s greatest champions. In a correspondence spanning 12 years, G and D minutely explored what evolution says about God and free will. D could not accept G’s God, but was deeply torn. 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci 🧪

Arthur Miller was born OTD in 1915. He had a complicated relationship with The Crucible, never settling even on who was the central villain. But late in life, he offered this: “I’m not really a moralist. I just make the assumption that certain things we do lead to catastrophe.” #philsky #booksky

“To make a life of order out of the buzzing confusion in a wondrous but difficult world demands our best efforts.… Negotiating the physical world into a conceptual entity of some interest and dimension is a challenge of the championship level.”

Wayne Thiebaud was born OTD in 1920. “You can do art history backwards or forwards; you can take your choice. Progress is not part of it. Variation, yes, and extension and all that, but progress? Phew. I don’t know how you’d beat any of that stuff, even from the cave period.”

As a consequence L believed that, like classical physics, geological dynamics are ergodic. In exploring a Newtonian state space, the earth system will return to a state in which iguanadons, ichthyosaurs, and pterodactyls roam the earth Henry De la Beche mocked him here 🗃️🧠🧪 ⚒️ 🦋🦫 #histSTM #philsci 🐡

Charles Lyell was born OTD in 1797. L believed that geology could and should be made a Newtonian science: Just as “the fall of an apple ... assist[s] in explaining the motions of the moon,” so too “the laws of earthquakes ... throw light on the origin of mountains....” 🗃️🧠🧪 ⚒️ 🦋🦫 #histSTM #philsci 🐡

Kurt Vonnegut was born OTD in 1922. “And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.” “See the cat? See the cradle?” #Philsky #BookSky

See the chords connecting with the genes to each other and to the phenotype in the righthand image? This is an early depiction of gene regulatory networks. More on this here. academic.oup.com/ije/article-...

I wanna invite Pope Leo to my Intro to Science and Technology Studies class

Pinball model of development and reprogramming. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I loved reading Waddington's essays. I think he presented such a nuanced and easy to understand metaphor for gene regulation. I made a model of his landscape to demonstrate how it could be used in an education setting. It doubles as a marble toy for my daughter. www.printables.com/model/671135...

Conrad Hal Waddington was born OTD in 1905. His “epigenetic landscape” is a diagrammatic representation of the constraints influencing embryonic development. On his 50th birthday, his colleagues gave him a pinball machine on the model of the epigenetic landscape. 🧪 🦫🦋 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci #evobio

Because plants move so slowly relative to human time scales, Darwin developed a diagrammatic system to make their movements more easily perspicuous to us. Below is a cartoon of the apparatus, and one of Darwin’s diagrams. 🧪🌱🐋 #philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫

It was no “mere” metaphor: “plants do not … possess nerves or a central nervous system; and we may infer that with animals such structures serve only for the more perfect transmission of impressions, and for the more complete intercommunication of the several parts." 🧪🌱🐋 #philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫

OTD in 1880, Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants. D believed that plants are active agents in the world: “A radicle may be compared with a burrowing animal such as a mole, which wishes to penetrate perpendicularly down into the ground.” 🧪🌱🐋 #philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫

OTD in 1977 Carl Woese and George Fox redrew the tree of life. They proposed a third “urkingdom”—the “archaebacteria”—in addition to eukaryotes and bacteria. Woese later called this taxon “Archea.” AFAIK, he didn’t publish his famous tree diagram until the late 80s. 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM 🗃️🧠 #evobio 🐡

During this month in 1887, the public first learned of the investigative exploits of the amateur detective, Sherlock Holmes. The first memoir of one of his cases, penned by his colleague Dr. John Watson, was published as A Study in Scarlet in the November 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. #BookSky

Kinky Friedman was born OTD in 1944. “I rarely meddled in the cat's personal affairs and she rarely meddled in mine. Neither of us was foolish enough to attribute human emotions to our pets.” 🐋🌱 #BookSky

John Keats was born OTD in 1795. #BookSky #Poetry

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was published OTD in 1953. “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.” #booksky 🐡

And here (free): https://jhiblog.org/2017/11/13/what-if-humans-were-raised-like-bees-charles-darwin-and-the-evolution-of-morality/ 🌱🐋 #histSTM #philsci #psychsky #evobio 🧪

Indeed, years before Genealogy of Morals, Darwin had argued that our moral principles had evolved from social instincts. I wrote about that here (paywall): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/676147/pdf 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci #psychsky #evobio 🧪

Friedrich Nietzsche was born OTD in 1844. He derided Darwin’s theory, but On Truth and Lies explores the human mind as evolved. And Genealogy of Morals treats the evolution (“genealogy”) of our moral principles as more deeply revealing than their content. 🌱🐋 #histSTM #philsci #psychsky #evobio 🧪

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published OTD in 1979. Douglas Adams: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” #litsci 🐡 #BookSky

OTD in 1881, Charles Darwin published his last book, on earthworms. It reflected a long interest in animal minds: “One alternative alone is left, namely, that worms, although standing low in the scale of organization, possess some degree of intelligence.” 🧪 🌱🐋🦋🦫 #HistSTM #philsci #pschsky #cogsci

Niels Bohr was born on this day in 1885. “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.” 🧪 🦋🦫 #histSTM #philsci #PhilSky

A new study claims that male mice who exercise pass micro-RNAs to their offspring through their sperm that increases the aerobic capacity of the offspring. The claim is of epigenetic inheritance of a phenotype from the male parent. #EvoBio 🌱🐋🦋🦫🧪

It’s National Poetry Day (UK). What are your favorite poetic openings? #Poetry #BookSkyn

OTD in 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. #polisky