Darwin

Posted on September 25, 2010 by John M. Lynch

Lectures #9 and 10 from my course History of Science II.

We have now caught up with the course. New material will appear on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

About John M. Lynch

teacher, historian, biologist, beer snob. not necessarily in that order.
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8 Responses to Darwin

  1. Marilyn says:
    September 26, 2010 at 3:01 pm

    It may be just my problem but I wondered if any one else was having the same loading of the lectures problem as me, they have appeared on occasions but Darwin is having real problems, perhaps you might have a solution but I’ll keep trying to load them anyway.

    Reply
    • Thony C. says:
      September 26, 2010 at 3:45 pm

      Some times the slide shows are very slow to load at other times not!

      Reply
    • Rebekah Higgitt says:
      September 26, 2010 at 5:14 pm

      I can’t load them on my work computer at all for some reason, and the iPad doesn’t support flash, so I presume that’s why I can’t read them on that either. Perhaps a low-tech back-up would be a good idea?

      Reply
  2. John M. Lynch says:
    September 26, 2010 at 6:01 pm

    Slideshare seems to be having problems but as Thony notes, they are sporadic. Problem is that the original Keynotes (and any generated Pdfs) are huge … 60 mb range, so a lower tech approach would be difficult. Let me see what I can do.

    Reply
  3. sbej says:
    September 27, 2010 at 10:43 pm

    I get slightly disgusted by older Edinburgh anatomy students although for diffrent reasons than Darwin. They did not bother to clean their hands when using library texts books and clearly used them while working.

    You can follow a trail of old bloody fingerprints all the way through the library copy of Tyson’s anatomy of the orang. Its somewhat unpleasant first time you go through it.

    Still you become aware of the many anonomous hands of the past that have poured over its bloody and heavily soot stained pages.

    Reply
  4. Marilyn says:
    October 10, 2010 at 3:26 pm

    In “The Origin of Species” Darwin mentions aboriginal stock quite a few times, the word aboriginal meaning “the first” and “earliest known” so what he is saying there was a first stage species before the point at which a variation occurred. Why does the first stage have to be an animal -in the human line of things- why not a human, why is it viewed that due to climate and food change we became human. Why is it automatically assumed that humans came from, for example apes, and not assumed apes came from humans. Is it from fossil dating alone that determines this. Darwin mentions “albinism”, that sound very much like ape to me, he describes them and expresses that people will know about them, but how does he know that the albinism would be an aboriginal state. I think that the genes must be in a very weathered state indeed to bring about such an aboriginal variation in human beings. If the being is not disabled in any way but it is only the appearance that set it apart then is not the being a variation only and not an inheritance or deterioration in species.

    Reply
  5. Marilyn says:
    October 19, 2010 at 10:38 am

    I would like to bring to notice this statement from the last paragraph in chapter 2 from “The Origins of Speices”
    “And we can clearly understand these analogies, if species have once existed as varieties, and have thus originated: whereas, these analogies are utterly inexplicable if each species has been independently created”.

    Reply
  6. sbej says:
    October 19, 2010 at 1:48 pm

    Marylin, I hope this may be of some help in identifying more fully the diffrence between youre own perspective and that of biology.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_%28biology%29

    Reply

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