Darwin, Darwinism & Evolution / Natural Selection

[rynner2]

I expect everywhere from here to John O'Groats (and beyond!) will try linking to this anniversary:

Falmouth to celebrate Charles Darwin's birth
11:10am Wednesday 1st October 2008
By Stephen Ivall »

A successful application to the Heritage Lottery Fund has led the Falmouth Art Gallery to receive an award of £50,000 to undertake a year long project to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (1809-1882).

The vast majority of the money will be spent in Cornwall and will be for additional activities to those funded by Falmouth town council.

The most important journey of the nineteenth century – perhaps the most important journey ever – was undertaken by Charles Darwin on The Beagle between 1831 and 1836, says gallery director Brian Stewart.

“Little known is the fact that Darwin sent specimens throughout his voyage back to this country via Falmouth and the packet ships. The Beagle finally returned to Falmouth on the October 2, 1836, and so the town is central to the Darwin story and the publication of The Origin of Species, both of which are celebrated worldwide.”

The project will be mounted in partnership with Newquay Zoo, Penlee House Gallery & Museum and University College Falmouth. The partnership will host a season of exhibitions, events and community activities as part of the Darwin 200 celebrations.

The gallery is dedicating its 2009 exhibitions programme to the celebrations with four Darwin themed exhibitions. These will be Voyages of Discovery (14 Feb – 18 April), Species (25 April – 27 June), A Day at the Zoo (4 July – 5 September) and Expressions in Man and Animals (12 September – 7 November). John Dyer will be artist in residence for the Cornish Darwin 200 project working on a project at Newquay Zoo. Important Cornish artists including Susan Boafo, Vince Bevan, Robert Bradford, Kurt Jackson, Oxana Mazur, Paul Spooner, Carlos Zapata, and Keith Newstead will all exhibit work as part of the project. A special feature will be the showing of Underwater Cornwall photographs by award winning Mark Webster and the launch of his new book during the exhibition Voyages of Discovery.

An accompanying community education programme that will involve exciting animal and plant themed activities will also be held and Newquay Zoo will hold a series of events throughout 2009 including Darwin themed trails, exhibitions and family workshops. Falmouth artist John Dyer is to become the zoo’s artist in residence during the celebrations that will result in an exhibition of his animal inspired works. Penlee House Gallery & Museum will be celebrating Darwin’s birthday with an exhibition that looks at the flora and fauna of Cornwall through the eyes of artists, photographers, scientists and collectors. Wild Cornwall (21 March – 13 June 2009) will combine beautiful imagery with fascinating fact utilising pieces from the gallery’s own collection as well as loans from public and private collections.

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fp ... n_s_birth/

 

[rynner2]

God, Evolution and Charles Darwin
Ten surprising things Darwin said about religious faith
Nick Spencer

Next year is the big Darwin anniversary. Two hundred years after his birth and 150 after the publication of On the Origin of the Species, millions will celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin, one of the most brilliant scientists in history, and a man who was thoroughly decent, honourable and likeable.

Unfortunately, he has become caught up in the crossfire of a battle in which Darwin exhibited little personal interest. On one side of this cartoonish debate are the creationists. Their precise numbers, in the UK, are uncertain, although the major survey Theos /ComRes are conducting into the public's beliefs about Darwinism, creationism and ID, which will be published next year, should help us find out more. Numbers aside, the point is that creationists dislike Darwin and regularly criticise him for supposedly undermining their religious beliefs.

In the other trench lie the militant Godless who – bizarrely – wholly agree with the creationists. Darwinism, they proclaim, does indeed undermine religious belief and a good thing too. Darwin is their icon and they frantically genuflect before his image, in a way brilliantly parodied by the satirical magazine The Onion.

The truth is, as ever, more complex. Darwin was too interesting, too careful a thinker to be caricatured in these ways. He was a Christian and yes, he did lose his faith. But he was never an atheist. He engaged in religious debate with friends but confessed to being in a hopeless “muddle”. He agonised over whether the exquisite beauty of life on earth was worth the pain of natural selection. He hated religious controversy and was deeply respectful of others’ views. He took upon himself the duties of a country parson whilst living at Downe and contributed to the South American Missionary Society. And, to top it all, he often doubted whether, his mind being evolved, he could even trust it in such matters. All in all, he was too complex, too subtle a man to be left to the polemicists.


So, in the interests, of rescuing him from the no-man’s-land in which he has become trapped, here are 10 Darwin quotations, from his later years, which you are unlikely to hear from the mouths of either creationists or atheists in 2009.

1. “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” (Autobiography)

2. “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

3. “I hardly see how religion & science can be kept as distinct as [Edward Pusey] desires… But I most wholly agree… that there is no reason why the disciples of either school should attack each other with bitterness.” (Letter to J. Brodie Innes, November 27 1878)

4. “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

5. “I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

6. “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.” (Letter to Frederick McDermott, November 24 1880)

7. [In conversation with the atheist Edward Aveling, 1881] “Why should you be so aggressive? Is anything gained by trying to force these new ideas upon the mass of mankind?” (Edward Aveling, The religious views of Charles Darwin, 1883)

8. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Letter to Graham William, July 3 1881)

9. "My theology is a simple muddle: I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent Design." (Letter to Joseph Hooker, July 12 1870)

10. “I can never make up my mind how far an inward conviction that there must be some Creator or First Cause is really trustworthy evidence.” (Letter to Francis Abbot, September 6 1871)

Nick Spencer is director of studies at the public theology think-tank Theos which is conducting, in partnership with the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion a project on evolution, faith and Charles Darwin. Mr Spencer's book, Darwin and God, will be published in 2009 by SPCK.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 772296.ece

 

[rynner2]

Darwin at the Natural History Museum: the original of the species
Simon Barnes

[....]
It was with wonder, then, that in the Natural History Museum I gazed at the open page of one of Darwin's notebooks. It's a nice notebook, a sort of policeman's notebook, like the one I use for jotting notes in the field.

But Darwin jotted down the explanation of life. The page towards me was the one of the most significant doodles in the history of science, in the history of human thought. There are two words: “I think.” Underneath is a rough sketch of a branching tree. This is how life works: the stem is the common ancestor, the branches are different species. Not a ladder: a bush.

There is no purpose, no great goal, no race for perfection: just the one ambition of all living things, which is to become an ancestor. Every living thing on the planet is the result of this process: every single living thing, then, is equally triumphant, equally perfect. Humans are just one of the crowd, created not by Nature's crazed ambitions but by Nature's reliance on chance.

The Natural History Museum is one of London's and the world's great buildings, and, in the place of honour, looking down across the great Central Hall, Darwin offers his mild gaze in stone across to the prancing dinosaur Diplodocus. On Friday the museum is opening an exhibition on Darwin that will take in his 200th birthday, February 12, and end on the 127th anniversary of his death. Next year is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin, the book that shook the world - and is still shaking it.

It is a marvellous exhibition, not least in that it is full of marvels. Another Darwin myth: he went to the Galapagos Islands and shouted “Eureka.” But no, the process took years. The first inkling came with two mocking birds: and there they are, just as you go in, flat on their backs on a cushion, each bearing a little hand-written label, very much alike but subtly and unquestionably different. Separate bits of divine creation? Or do they share a common ancestor?

Thus the worm of questioning entered Darwin's mind. The exhibition tracks the worm's progress and catches some of his extraordinary meticulousness, his certainty that God dwells in the details - and if you are about to give voice to a heresy, you need all the details you can muster.

I was particularly glad to see a collection of the pigeons he worked with so painstakingly. Darwin became a pigeon fancier, breeding pouters and tumblers and fantails at Down House, his home in Kent. If humans can change the shape of a bird by selective breeding - artificial selection - then nature can do the same thing by means of natural selection. These stuffed birds are as eloquent to the visitor as they were to Darwin: a hymn to the polymorphous powers of life.

Once Darwin had cracked it, he did the oddest thing: he did nothing at all. He was silent until he was forced into going public because some one else had caught up with him. There are a million suggestions as to why he did so - out of fear of the furore he would create, because he was tender of his wife's untroubled faith; because he was always ill; because he wanted to perfect his theory; because he wanted more and more evidence; because he was waiting until he had got it right about human evolution, or because he needed to establish his own scientific street-cred. But sit on it he did, occasionally taking fellow scientists into his confidence, “like confessing to a murder”, as he said 8) . He added, with the confidence and the modesty that marked him: “I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become adapted to various ends”.

There was one species in particularly that troubled the world: one species in particular that is notable by its absence in Origin. It is humans. Darwin was at pains not to mention the war, as it were, but the implications for humans shouted from every page. By the time he published The Descent of Man 12 years later, however, the controversy had burnt itself out. Our apishness was now established.

The exhibition displays hominid skulls against a timeline, again demonstrating that life is not an irreversible tide of progress. Homo sapiens co-existed with the Neanderthals - there we are, on the exhibition wall, one among many. Our kinship with our ancestors, with all primates, all mammals, all vertebrates, all animals, all life, is incontrovertible. You can bring God into it anywhere you like, because God is outside the scope of science, unless you are Richard Dawkins. What is not in the realms of scientific doubt is the validity of the concept of evolution by means of natural selection.

The man that brought this about did so mostly by sitting at home at Down House in his armchair, scribbling away with his notebooks resting on a board across his knees. The chair had wheels so he could whizz about the room and examine specimens and consult volumes. This intimate and unpretentious study is lovingly reproduced at the exhibition: you feel he might drop in at any moment for a soothing chat about earthworms or barnacles, two of his major areas of work.

This exhibition is a vivid experience for anyone who has an interest in life. You can gaze on stuffed specimens of the animals that were part of the subtle and cumulative process of reaching his eureka. You can see demonstrations of its unquestionable validity in, for example, the bones of a human hand and arm, the wing of a fruit bat and the foot of a Komodo dragon: all showing their staggering similarities, their incontrovertible kinship.

The man - his life, his thoughts, the long process that led to his revelation - are presented for us to wonder at. The real implication of his work is something we have to work out for ourselves. Me, I cherish my kinship with the wild world, feel honoured to be a species among millions, and am greatly the richer for realising this. Far from feeling that Darwin's truth makes the world a bleak and depressing place, I believe with Darwin that there is grandeur in this view of life.

Darwin is at the Natural History Museum, SW7 (020-7942 5000) from Fri to Apr 19

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 131933.ece

 

[Anome]

And I'm leaving tomorrow. Bugger.

 

[rynner2]

Darwin art strikes wrong note
Robin McKie, science editor guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 16 2008

It is the ultimate, infallible tribute to a Briton: placing their portrait on a banknote alongside images of their life and work. But now a leading UK biologist has announced that pictures on the £10 note, which commemorates the achievements of Charles Darwin, are 'little better than fiction'.

Professor Steve Jones, of University College London, said putting a hummingbird on the current £10 note was a blunder. 'The note is supposed to encapsulate Darwin's trip to the Galapagos, with him looking at a hummingbird as a source of inspiration. But there are no hummingbirds on the islands,' said Jones at last week's opening of the Natural History Museum's exhibition, Darwin.

'Mockingbirds and finches were important in getting Darwin thinking about evolution, but hummingbirds played no role at all. Presumably the artist just happened to like them.' Jones said he had written to the Bank of England but had received no answer. A spokesman for the Bank referred The Observer to its website which insists the hummingbird was of 'the type characteristically found in the region of the Galapagos Islands'.

But hummingbirds are not even mentioned in On the Origin of Species, said Jones. 'So why depict them? This is not a trivial issue. We are surprised by the numbers of people who believe in creationism and rubbish like that only to find the currency in which we place our trust is telling us lies about evolution.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/ ... currencies

 

[rynner2]

Now I thought this story had been covered on this MB before,but I can't find it:

Hunting the lost Beagle
By Jeremy Grange
Producer, Hunting the Beagle

A muddy river bank in the flat, watery landscape of southern Essex may seem an unlikely place to find one of the most important ships in scientific history.

But a combination of painstaking detective work and archaeology have convinced maritime historian Dr Robert Prescott that the banks of the River Roach near the village of Paglesham are the last resting place of HMS Beagle.

The historic ship will be forever associated with Charles Darwin who served as its naturalist on her second great voyage between 1831 and 1836.

This journey sowed in Darwin's mind the seed of the ideas that would eventually become his theory of natural selection and revolutionise the way we look at the world and ourselves.

Dr Prescott, from the University of St Andrews, decided to find out what happened to the Beagle after she completed her third and final great voyage in 1843.

"The notion that there was this interesting ship which also had a very interesting connection with one of the major scientific developments in recent history was just too good to be true. I wanted to find out more," he told the BBC Radio 4 programme Hunting the Beagle.

His first port of call was the Public Records Office in Kew where old naval documents are stored.

In the Admiralty Progress Book for 1845, he came across a few lines of handwriting revealing that after refurbishment at Woolwich Dockyard, the Beagle was transferred to the Coastguard at Paglesham for duty as an anti-smuggling watch vessel.

The maze of creeks and inlets between the River Roach and the River Crouch was a smuggler's paradise in the mid-19th Century and a carefully positioned watch vessel was a valuable weapon.

A document records the ship was decommissioned as a coastguard watch vessel, and sold off in 1870 to "Messrs Murray and Trainer".

Dr Prescott believes this was probably an ad-hoc partnership of two local farmers who did not have any experience of ship-breaking and who would have salvaged what they could in difficult conditions.

"It would have been slippery, dangerous to work in and very difficult to dismantle," he explained.

"That's why I believe that the lower half of this vessel was probably abandoned and has slowly settled deeper and deeper into the mud," he added.

Tiny clues

Dr Prescott and a team of archaeologists discovered a structure buried which matches the size and shape of the Beagle, after using ground radar and other geophysical techniques at the Paglesham site.

He hopes that by the end of this year the ship will once again be brought to light after 140 years buried in the Essex mud.
Cores taken at the site have been examined for diatoms

But to find out if the timbers are indeed those of the Beagle, the ship's bilges are being tested for remains of tiny marine organisms called diatoms.

Certain species of diatom are specific to particular parts of the world and if the team could recover diatoms unique to the Pacific or Australian waters then the buried hulk had to be the Beagle.

The first set of cores taken at the site are being analysed using a scanning electron microscope by David Patterson, professor of marine ecology at the University of St Andrews.

The results so far have been very positive: the cores have brought to the surface diatoms and what appears to be Beagle's timber.

"It's very like a forensic investigation," Professor Patterson said. "If we can get one particularly well-recognised diatom species that we know to be tropical, that would be the 'killer's fingerprint'."

While the team at St Andrews has been searching for the killer fingerprint, Dr Prescott has been discovering what the most famous member of the Beagle's crew thought of the vessel that was his home for five long years.
Darwin's ideas have had a profound influence on scientific thinking

In later life, Charles Darwin acknowledged the importance of the ship in his life's work despite being plagued by seasickness during the voyage itself.

Professor Keith Thomson, author of HMS Beagle - The Story of Darwin's Ship, said: "When they were at sea, Darwin mostly lay in his hammock, seasick.

"I haven't been able to find a record of anyone else who, on a voyage of five years, was seasick from the very first day to the very last," he added.

But the fact Darwin suffered so badly throughout the voyage only makes his scientific achievements during that time all the more impressive.

Hunting the Beagle
Friday, 9 January 2009
2100 GMT, BBC Radio 4

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7819991.stm

 

[rynner2]

Major analysis of Darwinism today from New Scientist -
(I've just left the top and tail of the article below):

Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life
21 January 2009 by Graham Lawton

IN JULY 1837, Charles Darwin had a flash of inspiration. In his study at his house in London, he turned to a new page in his red leather notebook and wrote, "I think". Then he drew a spindly sketch of a tree.

As far as we know, this was the first time Darwin toyed with the concept of a "tree of life" to explain the evolutionary relationships between different species. It was to prove a fruitful idea: by the time he published On The Origin of Species 22 years later, Darwin's spindly tree had grown into a mighty oak. The book contains numerous references to the tree and its only diagram is of a branching structure showing how one species can evolve into many.

etc.....

Nobody is arguing - yet - that the tree concept has outlived its usefulness in animals and plants. While vertical descent is no longer the only game in town, it is still the best way of explaining how multicellular organisms are related to one another - a tree of 51 per cent, maybe. In that respect, Darwin's vision has triumphed: he knew nothing of micro-organisms and built his theory on the plants and animals he could see around him.

Even so, it is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works. "If you don't have a tree of life, what does it mean for evolutionary biology?" asks Bapteste. "At first it's very scary... but in the past couple of years people have begun to free their minds." Both he and Doolittle are at pains to stress that downgrading the tree of life doesn't mean that the theory of evolution is wrong - just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe. Some evolutionary relationships are tree-like; many others are not. "We should relax a bit on this," says Doolittle. "We understand evolution pretty well - it's just that it is more complex than Darwin imagined. The tree isn't the only pattern."

Others, however, don't think it is time to relax. Instead, they see the uprooting of the tree of life as the start of something bigger. "It's part of a revolutionary change in biology," says Dupré. "Our standard model of evolution is under enormous pressure. We're clearly going to see evolution as much more about mergers and collaboration than change within isolated lineages."

Rose goes even further. "The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that," he says. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change." Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says, and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.

If he is right, the tree concept could become biology's equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world. "The tree of life was useful," says Bapteste. "It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it's time to move on."

Full article here:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true

 

[OneWingedBird]

someone i used to work with is planing an event for darwin's 200th birthday on feb 12th, which apparently will involve lots of people getting tattooed with the image of an endangered species.

more on that when it's official...

 

[rynner2]

University statue portrays the original Darwin

Cambridge A statue of Charles Darwin to be unveiled on the bicentenary of his birth on February 12 portrays him as a young man rather than a “wizened, Victorian gentleman”. The sculptor, Anthony Smith, says he wants the work, to be displayed at Christ’s College, Cambridge, which the naturalist attended, to change the popular image of him. Mr Smith, the college artist, who has examined the features of Darwin’s descendants, said he shows the Darwin of 1831, when he was an undergraduate preparing to join HMS Beagle for the trip that led to the theory of evolution.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 587184.ece

 

[Jo_Craig]

Major analysis of Darwinism today from New Scientist -
(I've just left the top and tail of the article below):

Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life
21 January 2009 by Graham Lawton

IN JULY 1837, Charles Darwin had a flash of inspiration. In his study at his house in London, he turned to a new page in his red leather notebook and wrote, "I think". Then he drew a spindly sketch of a tree.

As far as we know, this was the first time Darwin toyed with the concept of a "tree of life" to explain the evolutionary relationships between different species. It was to prove a fruitful idea: by the time he published On The Origin of Species 22 years later, Darwin's spindly tree had grown into a mighty oak. The book contains numerous references to the tree and its only diagram is of a branching structure showing how one species can evolve into many.

etc.....

Nobody is arguing - yet - that the tree concept has outlived its usefulness in animals and plants. While vertical descent is no longer the only game in town, it is still the best way of explaining how multicellular organisms are related to one another - a tree of 51 per cent, maybe. In that respect, Darwin's vision has triumphed: he knew nothing of micro-organisms and built his theory on the plants and animals he could see around him.

Even so, it is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works. "If you don't have a tree of life, what does it mean for evolutionary biology?" asks Bapteste. "At first it's very scary... but in the past couple of years people have begun to free their minds." Both he and Doolittle are at pains to stress that downgrading the tree of life doesn't mean that the theory of evolution is wrong - just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe. Some evolutionary relationships are tree-like; many others are not. "We should relax a bit on this," says Doolittle. "We understand evolution pretty well - it's just that it is more complex than Darwin imagined. The tree isn't the only pattern."

Others, however, don't think it is time to relax. Instead, they see the uprooting of the tree of life as the start of something bigger. "It's part of a revolutionary change in biology," says Dupré. "Our standard model of evolution is under enormous pressure. We're clearly going to see evolution as much more about mergers and collaboration than change within isolated lineages."

Rose goes even further. "The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that," he says. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change." Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says, and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.

If he is right, the tree concept could become biology's equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world. "The tree of life was useful," says Bapteste. "It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it's time to move on."

Full article here:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true

It's a very interesting article that caught me off guard thanks to the "Darwin Was Wrong" headline emblazened across the front of the magazine. Obviously I knew there'd be some journalistic sleight of hand behind that quirky line, but I'm still surprised the editor thought it a good idea.

I felt it dwelt too long on the subject of horizontal genetic transfer in single-celled organisms, when the interesting angle was the extent to which this process disrupts the tree of life concept in "higher" creatures.

I mean, a type of cow, the genome of which features a random bit of snake DNA - WTF?!

But when the piece gets down to it, it's just saying that over time the gene content of an animal can be mixed up by processes other than sexual selection. For example, parasites that consume blood etc. That's very interesting, as are some of the NS's recent pieces on the crypto-Lamarckian nature of epigenetics, but this lay reader didn't come away with an appreciation of how this is supposed to affect the "tree of life" concept. Animals only give rise to other animals via reproduction. Therefore at the level of the organism, the tree concept is completely intact. What this story seems to me to be saying is that gene flow across evolutionary time won't immaculately trace the same path as the family tree of the animals themselves. No real surprise there.

But a bit mean of the NS to scream "Darwin was wrong", when the man himself didn't know about genetics as the method of inheritance, and therefore couldn't have speculated on the ins and outs of the process.

 

[ramonmercado]

Conference: The Evolution Of Human Aggression, Feb. 25-27
27 Jan 2009

As scientists celebrate 2009 as the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, experts in anthropology, biology, psychology and other fields will gather at the University of Utah Feb. 25-27 to debate how evolution has shaped human aggression and violence, from war to domestic abuse and homicide.

"What evolutionary forces underlie human violence, and how can we use this knowledge to promote a more peaceful society?" asks Elizabeth Cashdan, a conference organizer and professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Utah.

The conference - titled "The Evolution of Human Aggression: Lessons for Today's Conflicts" - is presented by the university's Barbara L. and Norman C. Tanner Center for Nonviolent Human Rights Advocacy.

It will be held at various locations - mostly at Fort Douglas on the University of Utah campus - from Wednesday evening, Feb. 25 through Friday afternoon, Feb. 27.

The public and news media are invited to attend the free conference.

Conference highlights include keynote lectures on the evolution of peacemaking among primates and the relationship between homicide and economic competition; panel discussions on conflict and reconciliation among great apes, violence and warfare, hormones and human aggression, and domestic violence; a scientific poster session; and a community forum on violence.

"This conference helps to bring science fully into the conversation about violence, conflict management and peacemaking," says communication Professor George Cheney, director of the Tanner Center for Nonviolent Human Rights Advocacy. "This gathering, which is the third in our annual series, will include provocative presentations, lively debate and a roundtable discussion of how current research might be used to reduce violence in our own and other communities."

200 Years after Darwin's Birth, Evolution has Lessons for Modern Conflicts

"Curbing human violence is one of the great challenges humanity faces in the 21st century," says David Carrier, a conference organizer and professor of biology at the University of Utah. "Many aspects of human aggression will be addressed at this conference: warfare, homicide, child abuse and domestic violence. We encourage public attendance because an increased understanding of the evolutionary basis of human aggression may help individuals prevent violence in their own lives and the lives of their friends and family members."

"Every adult on the planet has experienced anger," says Stephen Downes, a University of Utah philosophy professor and a conference organizer. "Some of us have committed violent acts against others out of anger. Why we feel this way and why some of us act in the way we do is a question that has consumed students of human nature for thousands of years."

"Evolutionary theory gives some of the most revealing insights into this issue," he adds. "Bringing together a group of the world's leading experts on evolution and aggression is an appropriate tribute to Darwin in this 'Darwin year'" - the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of his "On the Origin of Species."

While the modern view has grown more complex, Cashdan says that for decades, "there has been a lot of unproductive debate between people who argue that 'humans are naturally aggressive' and others who contend that 'humans are naturally peaceful.' There is plenty of evidence to support both claims: violence, reconciliation and cooperation are all part of human nature."

Cashdan adds: "We begin with the working assumption that natural selection has shaped human nature to be both violent and peaceful, and ask how evolutionary arguments can help us to understand the factors that lead to both violent and peaceful outcomes. This can help show which policy changes are likely to be successful, and where we can most usefully intervene to allow the better angels of our nature to prevail."

Abbreviated Conference Schedule:
7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25, Utah Museum of Fine Arts Dumke Auditorium - Opening keynote address by primate expert and psychology Prof. Frans de Waal from Emory University in Atlanta. De Waal's talk is titled, "Destined to Wage War Forever? The Evolution of Peacemaking among Primates."


9 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, Officers Club, Fort Douglas - Panel discussion, Conflict and Conflict Resolution in Great Apes. One panelist is Harvard's Richard Wrangham, who argues that power imbalances promote violence.


Noon Thursday, Feb. 26, Post Theater, Fort Douglas - Keynote lecture by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of McMaster University. They will discuss how homicide rates correlate with inequality of incomes, and how young men "who are most likely to kill or be killed are those with little to lose by competing dangerously."


2:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, Officers Club, Fort Douglas - Panel discussion, Coalitionary Violence and Warfare. Among the panelists is Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker, who contends: "Contrary to the popular impression that we are living in extraordinarily violent times, rates of violence at all scales have been in decline over the course of history."


4:15 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, Officers Club, Fort Douglas - Panel discussion continues, Coalitionary Violence and Warfare. Among the panelists, Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut will argue that conflict between groups generated the evolutionary pressures that favored the social forces holding together complex societies of hundreds of millions of people.


8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, Alta Room at the Alta Club, downtown Salt Lake City - Poster presentations of research dealing with evolution and aggression.


9 a.m. Friday, Feb. 27, Officers Club, Fort Douglas - Panel discussion, Hormones and Human Dominance and Aggression. Among the panelists is Aaron Sell, of University of California, Santa Barbara. Sell will discuss why physically stronger men are more prone to anger.


10:45 a.m. Friday, Feb. 27, Officers Club, Fort Douglas - Panel discussion, Domestic Violence, focusing on spousal-partner abuse. One panelist, Aaron Goetz of California State University, Fullerton, will discuss debate over the extent to which men view their partners "as an entity that they privately own and control."


1:45 p.m. Friday, Feb. 27, Officers Club, Fort Douglas - Panel discussion, Domestic Violence, focusing on child abuse. Panelists include keynoters Daly and Wilson, who will discuss the "Cinderella effect" - violence against stepchildren.


3:20 p.m. Friday, Feb. 27, Officers Club, Fort Douglas - Community Forum on Violence, including experts who deal daily with domestic violence.
The Barbara L. and Norman C. Tanner Center for Nonviolent Human Rights Advocacy promotes the understanding of human rights and encourages nonviolent conflict resolution and peacemaking. Founded in January 2006, the center is based in the university's College of Social and Behavioral Science. The center's previous annual conferences addressed migration, rights and identities, and the cultural and ethical values that drive terrorism.

----------------------------
Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
----------------------------

The conference Web site, with links to the full program and abstracts, is at: http://www.humanrights.utah.edu/forum/c ... _main.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article URL: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/136717.php

 

[Anome]

Major analysis of Darwinism today from New Scientist -
(I've just left the top and tail of the article below):

Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life
Full article here:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true

But a bit mean of the NS to scream "Darwin was wrong", when the man himself didn't know about genetics as the method of inheritance, and therefore couldn't have speculated on the ins and outs of the process.

It also shows sloppy thinking. The "Tree of Life" as a concept is still valid. There is still a path of descent through ancestor species, it's just a bit more tangled than Darwin could possibly know, since he didn't know about DNA.

In short, Darwin was right, but he didn't have the whole story. It's like saying Newton was wrong because he didn't come up with General Relativity or Quantum Theory. (Which some people have claimed.)

On the other hand, we wouldn't have as much of the story that we have now if Darwin (or Wallace, or even someone else) hadn't started us examining biology in the way we have for the past 150 years. For instance, who would have looked at DNA in such detail?

 

[rynner2]

Everyone's climbing on the Darwin bandwagon - next up, the Bhuddists! 8)

Charles Darwin 'may have been inspired by Tibetan Buddhism'
Mark Henderson, Science Editor

Charles Darwin’s moral philosophy may have been inspired by the writings of Buddhist monks, according to one of the world’s leading experts on the evolution of emotions.

Research by Paul Ekman, a psychologist whose work has shown how the facial expressions that signal emotion are universal across all cultures, has identified striking similarities between Darwin’s attitude to compassion and morality and that of Tibetan Buddhism.

Darwin, who was born 200 years ago last week, believed that compassion for other sentient beings was the highest moral virtue. This informed other aspects of his world view, such as his passionate opposition to slavery.

Dr Ekman, who recently edited a new version of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals, said that these views were in accord with those of Tibetan Buddhists. He had also found evidence that Darwin was aware of their philosophy.

“What I’ve become interested in in the last few years is Darwin’s work on compassion and morality, which is even less known than his work on expression,” Dr Ekman told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago. “And the amazing coincidence, if it is a coincidence, is that his views on compassion and morality are identical to the Tibetan Buddhist view.

“When I read to the Dalai Lama some of Darwin’s passages, he said: ‘I am now calling myself a Darwinian'.

“The Buddhist view, like Darwin, said that the seed of compassion is in mothering, global compassion: focus on others as mother. When I see you suffer it makes me suffer, and that motivates me to reduce your suffering so I can reduce my suffering. The Dalai Lama says compassionate acts help me more than the person I help. That’s identical in Buddhism and in Darwin’s explicit writings.”

Darwin knew of Tibetan Buddhism through several routes, Dr Ekman said. His close friend Joseph Hooker travelled to Tibet in 1847, and corresponded regularly with Darwin; Darwin’s wife, Emma, was also fascinated with Buddhism. She once described a grandson as the “grand lama” because he was so calm and solemn.

Dr Ekman said that he did not know whether Darwin derived his views from Buddhist influence, or whether the similarity was a coincidence. “I am certainly not saying Darwin was a Buddhist,” he said. “But his view on the nature of compassion is identical in almost the exact words to the view of Tibetan Buddhism.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 739057.ece

 

[ramonmercado]

Vatican hosts Darwin conference
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7920205.stm
By David Willey
BBC News, Rome

The Catholic Church never condemned Darwin
The Vatican is sponsoring a five day conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species.

The subject is the compatibility of evolution and creation.

It is one of two separate international academic conferences being sponsored by the Vatican this year.

They aim to re-examine the work of scientific thinkers whose revolutionary ideas challenged religious belief: Galileo and Charles Darwin.

Scientists, philosophers and theologians from around the world are gathering at the prestigious Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome to discuss the compatibility of Darwin's theory of evolution and Catholic teaching.

Christian churches were long hostile to Darwin because his theory conflicted with the literal biblical account of creation.

But the Catholic Church never condemned Darwin, as it condemned and silenced Galileo.

Pope John Paul II said that evolution was "more than a hypothesis".

The design of organisms is not what would be expected from an intelligent engineer

Prof Francisco Ayala

Yet as recently as 2006 a leading Catholic Cardinal, Christoff Schoenborn, of Vienna, a former student and friend of Pope Benedict XVI caused controversy by saying that Darwin's theory of natural selection was incompatible with Christian belief.

A leading American scholar of biology, Prof Francisco Ayala, plans to tell the conference that the so-called theory of intelligent design, proposed by Creationists, is flawed.

"The design of organisms is not what would be expected from an intelligent engineer, but imperfect and worse," he said.

"Defects, dysfunctions, oddities, waste and cruelty pervade the living world".

 

[rynner2]

How Darwin aped Da Vinci
Charles Darwin shocked the world by declaring humans and apes related – an idea Leonardo da Vinci had 350 years earlier

Charles Darwin is getting his due this year. His theory of evolution is being recognised as the most important idea of modern times. But was he the first person to believe that human beings are apes?

At the time, the most controversial aspect of Darwin's intellectual revolution was the conclusion that we, too, have evolved from earlier species, and that our closest relatives are our fellow great apes. DNA evidence has since confirmed exactly how similar we are to chimpanzees. Centuries before Darwin, however, another genius anticipated his discovery.

Leonardo da Vinci held it to be self-evident that we are closely related to apes. He didn't even present it as a case to be argued. In his notes in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, he simply observes, on the basis of his studies in comparative anatomy, that human beings and monkeys are close cousins. In a plan for a book on anatomy, he proposes to discuss "Man. The description of man, which includes that of such creatures as are almost of the same species, as Apes, Monkeys and the like, which are many".

He explicitly says "apes, monkeys and the like" are not merely related to humans but indeed "almost of the same species". In other words, Leonardo, writing simply on the basis of his own observations more than 500 years ago, says pretty much the same thing the modern science writer Jared Diamond, on the basis of DNA evidence, argues in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. Nor is this a stray observation. Leonardo says it again, in a note on internal anatomy: "Describe the various forms of the intestines of the human species (delle spetie umana), of apes and suchlike. Then, in what way the leonine species differ ... "

We revere Darwin for asking questions in the Victorian age that decentred human beings from their ancient delusion of biological uniqueness. How much courage and genius did it take to ask those same questions, as Da Vinci did, 350 years earlier?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ ... arwin-apes

 

[pTerryH]

It took Darwin 20 years to summon enough courage, being finally pushed into going public by Wallace's coming up with near-identical ideas, and by the consequent encouragement of scientific colleagues in whom he'd confided. Of course, he'd spent most of those 20 years gathering further evidence to bolster his case.

Leonardo, by contrast, didn't publish his ideas on this topic at all, despite apparent plans to. In fact, most of his ideas and discoveries never escaped from his secret, semi-cryptic notebooks and we've only learned of them comparatively recently: consequently he had relatively little input to the advance of scientific knowledge. Still, while Darwin only risked social opprobrium for him and his family, Leonardo would likely have risked torture and death.

If Leonardo had been able to successfully promulgate his knowledge, making himself a man of his time rather than ahead of it, how much more advanced might science and civilization now be?

 

[rynner2]

New voyage of Darwinian discovery
Wednesday, August 12, 2009, 10:00

AN AMBITIOUS round-the-world expedition following the route of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species voyage is to be launched in Plymouth next month.

The year-long project – which involves a descendant of Darwin, and renowned historians and scientists – will be filmed for a new series which will be broadcast to millions on Dutch and Belgian television.

Plymouth will once again take centre stage in the epic global expedition, with the voyage due to launch from the Sound on September 1.

Darwin's original five-year voyage on board HMS Beagle began in the city 178 years ago, in 1831.

Speaking from The Netherlands, Liza Geurts of VPRO TV said the voyage on the clipper Stad Amsterdam would be a truly exhilarating expedition.

"This series will be broadcast to millions of people in Holland and Belgium," Liza said.

"Viewers will get to see the historical value of Plymouth and we're very excited by it. It's a great opportunity for the city to shine and for us to tell a unique story."

Liza said the series – Beagle: On the Future of Species – had been more than a year in the planning.

The production team say they are expecting other Darwin descendants, and national and international press, to attend the official launch event on September 1. The Lord Mayor of Plymouth is expected to be invited, but a shoreside location is yet to be confirmed.

They are also encouraging boat owners to take to the water to help form an armada of boats to escort the vessel from Plymouth Sound.

Among the crew taking part in the expedition will be Sarah Darwin, great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, journalist and historian Christopher Lloyd, palaeontologist Peter Ward, anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells and Daniel Dennett, one of today's most prominent and influential American philosophers. There will also be fossil-hunters, DNA experts, geologists and archaeologists.

Liza said the team would attempt to answer a range of contemporary questions during the voyage such as "What is the true condition of the environment?" and "What will our future look like?"

The international crew will investigate the future of the planets' species and will also address topics such as history, language, religion and art in which Darwin's theory of evolution plays a role.

It's fitting that such a voyage should take place this year, as 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th year since the publication of his book On the Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection.

The expedition will take the crew across the oceans of the world, from Brazil to Patagonia, from the Andes mountain range to the Galapagos Islands and across the Pacific to Australia and the Cape of Good Hope.

The crew will visit research ships, swim with sharks and whales and explore plastic islands in the ocean and other fascinating areas.

Followers will be able to follow the journey live online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week at http://onthefutureofspecies.nl

http://www.thisiswesternmorningnews.co. ... ticle.html

 

[rynner2]

This is worrying

Charles Darwin film 'too controversial for religious America'
A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer.
By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor
Published: 4:53PM BST 11 Sep 2009

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin's "struggle between faith and reason" as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as "a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying".

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

"That's what we're up against. In 2009. It's amazing," he said.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... erica.html

PS: more info, and film review:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/en ... /creation/

 

[tastyintestines]

according to its producer

Is he trying to say that Hollywood is to religous to put his film out. :shock: What alternate dimension does he live in? All this "America is all fundie" stuff is self promoting, catch phrase exploiting garbage.

 

[rynner2]

Is he trying to say that Hollywood is to religous to put his film out. :shock: What alternate dimension does he live in? All this "America is all fundie" stuff is self promoting, catch phrase exploiting garbage.

Hmmm...

It certainly seems that America (even the intellectual and sensible part of it) does not see any way of making a profit from something that would probably offend large religious sections of the community in (say) the mid-west.

Hollywood itself is all for pushing new ideas, but only if they seem profitable... (Not that Evolution is exactly a new idea.. )

Still, I'm glad to hear that you don't think "America is all fundie"...

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

I'm moving this Thread out of, 'Urban Legends/Folklore', into, 'New Science', because it obviously still is, to some folks.

:lol:

 

[Analis]

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

The usual creationist ranting.
They put forward the usual accusations that the rise of racism was due to Darwin and evolutionism, while they had nothing to do with them. Racism was already widespread at the time, often with a religious connotation. Fundamentalist and creationnist Christians of the time were mainly racist. Today, the greatest proportion of racists is still found in the Bible Belt. Many white supremacists are creationnist.
Darwin opposed eugenics, he advocated that social relations were the prevalent factor in recent human evolution, and should remain.
His legacy was mass murder ? He was for nothing in the slaughtering of Amerindians ; this was the doing of often fundamentalist pionneers. Neither was he involved in the butchering of Australian Aboriginals. This (and many other colonial genocides) predated evolutionnism. Doesn't the Bible include chapters advocating genocide ?
Darwin giving birth to nazism ? Once more, he is innocent. Once and for all, Adolf Hitler defined himself as a creationist.

All this amount to is a good display of creationist ignorance (or bad faith).

 

[ramonmercado]

Darwin descended from Cro-Magnon man: scientists
http://www.physorg.com/print184484254.html
February 4th, 2010 in Biology / Biotechnology

The father of evolution Charles Darwin was a direct descendant of the Cro-Magnon people, whose entry into Europe 30,000 years ago heralded the demise of Neanderthals, scientists revealed in Australia Thursday.

Darwin, who hypothesised that all humans evolved from common ancestors in his seminal 1859 work "On the Origin of Species", came from Haplogroup R1b, one of the most common European male lineages, said genealogist Spencer Wells.

"Men belonging to Haplogroup R1b are direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people who, beginning 30,000 years ago, dominated the human expansion into Europe and heralded the demise of the Neanderthal species," Wells said.

Director of the Genographic Project, an international study mapping the migratory history of the human species, Wells said they took a DNA sample from Darwin's great-great grandson Chris Darwin, 48, who lives on the outskirts of Sydney.

A trace of Darwin's "deep ancestry" showed his forefathers left Africa around 45,000 years ago, splitting into a new lineage 5,000 years later in Iran or southern Central Asia, Wells said.

"Before heading west towards Europe, the next mutation, which defined a new lineage, appeared in a man around 35,000 years ago,' he said.

"Approximately 70 percent of men in southern England belong to Haplogroup R1b, and in parts of Ireland and Spain that number exceeds 90 percent", he added.

Chris Darwin, whose great-grandfather was Darwin's astronomer son George, is a tour guide and adventurer in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

He migrated to Australia in 1986 and tests of his maternal DNA showed he was likely directly descended from the women who crossed the rugged Caucasus Mountains in southern Russia to reach the steppes of the Black Sea.

"The Genographic Project is incredibly important," Darwin said.

"The project is one way to show us the true story of humanity, of how we migrated across the world and that we are all related, tracing back to a small group of men and women who lived in Africa".

Wells was presenting the findings ahead of the project's annual scientific conference, bringing together representatives from 11 regional teams to discuss their work in Sydney.

There are currently 265,000 members of the public taking part in the project, which is an initiative of National Geographic, IBM and the California-based Waitt Family Foundation charity.

Participation kits can be bought online for 100 US dollars, and proceeds go towards the research and to indigenous language and cultural projects.

 

[rynner2]

Darwin's Struggle: The Evolution of the Origin of Species

Documentary telling the little-known story of how Darwin came to write his great masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, a book which explains the wonderful variety of the natural world as emerging out of death and the struggle of life.

In the twenty years he took to develop a brilliant idea into a revolutionary book, Darwin went through a personal struggle every bit as turbulent as that of the natural world he observed. Fortunately, he left us an extraordinary record of his brilliant insights, observations of nature, and touching expressions of love and affection for those around him. He also wrote frank accounts of family tragedies, physical illnesses and moments of self-doubt, as he laboured towards publication of the book that would change the way we see the world.

The story is told with the benefit of Darwin's secret notes and correspondence, enhanced by natural history filming, powerful imagery from the time and contributions from leading contemporary biographers and scientists.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... f_Species/

 

[rynner2]

Fascinating story here, new to me:

Island holds Darwin's best-kept secret
By Howard Falcon-Lang, Science reporter, BBC News

A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin's best-kept secret.

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical "cloud forest".

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.

By a bizarre twist, this great imperial experiment may hold the key to the future colonization of Mars.

...

Everywhere, bright red volcanic cones and rugged black lava signalled the violent forces that had wrought the island.

Yet, thinks Professor Catling, amid this wild desolation, Darwin began to hatch a plot.

Out of the ashes of the volcano, he would create a green oasis - a "Little England".

Darwin's great buddy was Joseph Hooker, the intrepid botanist and explorer.

Only a few years after Darwin's return, Hooker was off on his own adventures, an ambitious slingshot around Antarctica aboard HMS Erebus and Terror. Mirroring Darwin's voyage, Hooker called in on Ascension on the way home in 1843.

Ascension was a strategic base for the Royal Navy. Originally set up to keep a watchful eye on the exiled emperor Napoleon on nearby St Helena, it was a thriving waystation at the time of Hooker's visit.

However, the big problem that impeded further expansion of this imperial outpost was the supply of freshwater.

Ascension was an arid island, buffeted by dry trade winds from southern Africa. Devoid of trees at the time of Darwin and Hooker's visits, the little rain that did fall quickly evaporated away.

Egged on by Darwin, in 1847 Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion an elaborate plan. With the help of Kew Gardens - where Hooker's dad was director - shipments of trees were to be sent to Ascension.

The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden.

So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.

Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, norfolk island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot.

...

Dr Dave Wilkinson is an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University, who has written extensively about Ascension Island's strange ecosystem.

He first visited Ascension in 2003.

"I remember thinking, this is really weird," he told the BBC.

"There were all kinds of plants that don't belong together in nature, growing side by side. I only later found out about Darwin, Hooker and everything that had happened," he said.

Wilkinson describes the vegetation of "Green Mountain" - as the highest peak is now known - as a "cloud forest". The trees capture sea mist, creating a damp oasis amid the aridity.

However, this is a forest with a difference. It is totally artificial.

Such ecosystems normally develop over million of years through a slow process of co-evolution. By contrast, the Green Mountain cloud forest was cobbled together by the Royal Navy in a matter of decades.

"This is really exciting!" exclaimed Wilkinson.

"What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error".

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable.

Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".

However, to date, scientists have been deaf to the parable of Ascension Island.

"It's a terrible waste that no one is studying it," remarked Wilkinson at the end of the interview.

Ascension Island's secret is safe for years to come, it seems.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11137903

 

[rynner2]

Crowdsourcing Darwin's experiment on human emotions
By Stephanie Hegarty, BBC World Service

One of Charles Darwin's lesser-known experiments, on the expression of emotion, is being re-run as an exercise in online crowdsourcing - and anyone can take part.
In 1868, Charles Darwin undertook a study to prove that humans, like animals, have an innate and universal set of emotional expressions - a code by which we understand each other's feelings.

The Darwin Correspondence Project, which is working to publish and digitise thousands of the scientist's letters, has recreated the experiment nearly 150 years later - to test his results, and draw attention to his contribution to psychology.

The experiment took place in the living room of Down House, Darwin's country home in Kent, during a series of dinner parties from March to November 1868, where he asked guests for their responses to photographs of a man with his face frozen into a range of different positions.
This was followed by a questionnaire that was distributed around the world - one of the first questionnaires ever printed.

"Mr Darwin brought in some photographs taken by a Frenchman, galvanising certain muscles in an old man's face, to see if we read aright [sic] the expression that putting such muscles in play should produce," wrote one of the guests in a letter to her sister.

It was somewhat unscientific by modern standards, with no control group and a very small sample, but it was revolutionary for its time.
"It was typical of Darwin that he used what was to hand," says Dr Alison Pearn of the Darwin Correspondence Project.
He used 11 black and white photographs originally taken by French anatomist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, to examine the movement of facial muscles.

According to Duchenne, the subject was "an old, toothless, man with a thin face, whose appearance, without being precisely ugly, was more or less nondescript". His "intelligence was limited", he added.
Duchenne used electrodes to manipulate the muscles on the man's face and contort them into various expressions.
While he appears to be in some pain, Darwin later wrote that the man was "little sensitive", as he had a medical condition that left his face numb.

Darwin showed the photographs to each of his guests individually, asking them what emotion the subject was feeling and collected their responses on a table, hastily scribbled on scrap paper.
According to these notes, his subjects agreed almost unanimously on certain photographs - those that betrayed fear, surprise, happiness, sadness and anger.

After the experiment Darwin distributed a questionnaire around the world - he couldn't send the pictures themselves as they were very valuable. He asked about facial expressions and gestures such as shrugging and blushing among different cultures.
He had a vast network of correspondents - more than 2,000 in his lifetime - and received replies from travellers and missionaries as far as South Africa, India, China, North America, and Australia.

Darwin wanted to prove that there is a series of "cardinal" emotions that are expressed and perceived by all humans in the same way, and that these are innate or biological.
The study formed part of his 1872 book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals in which he outlined his view that expression was a trait that humans shared with beasts.
He wanted to disprove one of the arguments against his theory of evolution - that the ability to feel, express and read emotion is unique to humans (so they could not have descended from apes).

But how accurate were his results? That is what Dr Pearn and her team have set out to discover.
They have created an interactive online tool that allows the public to look at each of the 11 portraits and give their own interpretations of the Frenchman's expression.
They will collate the responses and see whether the results from Darwin's small sample match their findings.

One interesting feature of Darwin's experiment is that he seems to have honed his method as he went along. At the beginning he offered his subjects a Yes/No option, but as the study progressed he began soliciting a whole range of responses.
His experiment evolved into a "single-blind" study - one which doesn't lead the subject to any particular response.
For the modern incarnation of the project, which will have a vastly bigger sample unit, this raises some problems - how to group the findings when the list of responses is unlimited.

To get around these issues the Darwin project has teamed up with the Computer Laboratory, another Cambridge-based project, which for the past two years has been using web-based tools to study people's response to facial expression.
They are developing a bank of common human emotions which will be used to programme computer systems - such as teaching tools or satellite navigation - to recognise human expressions.

"The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals was the seminal work in the field back when it was written in 1872," says Peter Robinson who heads the project. "Of course we all read it when we started working on this."
His project uses video images of real people evoking natural expressions and asks viewers to name them.
Like Darwin's study, it was developed to get as wide a sample as possible, regardless of cultural issues such as age, race or gender.

Today, few psychologists disagree with Darwin's theory of a universal set of expressions - it has formed the basis for an entire canon of psychological study.
But it was overlooked for nearly 100 years. It wasn't until the 1960s, that the experiment was revisited by psychologist Paul Ekman, who started out trying to disprove Darwin, but obtained results that merely backed him up.
Ekman travelled around the world showing photographs of facial expressions to people in various cultures, the majority of cultures tested read the five core emotions in the same way.

"[Darwin's] findings aren't just historically interesting they are actually still guiding our thinking about how we develop measures to study diseases right now," says Peter Snyder, Professor of Neurology at Brown University. "We're still using what Darwin found."

He has used Darwin's work to create a test for drugs developed to treat schizophrenia.
The study has also formed the basis of modern research into disorders such as autism.

"You can't help but realise when you study this that Darwin was absolutely an immense intellect," says Prof Snyder.
"Very few people really knew that he had done this experiment at all and the actual data tables were buried in a box in the library in Cambridge.
"He was truly a genius and he had influence across all sorts of fields, but one of the areas that he is not known for influencing at all is human psychology."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15600203

 

[Ghostisfort]

Darwin's Struggle: The Evolution of the Origin of Species

Documentary telling the little-known story of how Darwin came to write his great masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, a book which explains the wonderful variety of the natural world as emerging out of death and the struggle of life.

In the twenty years he took to develop a brilliant idea into a revolutionary book, Darwin went through a personal struggle every bit as turbulent as that of the natural world he observed. Fortunately, he left us an extraordinary record of his brilliant insights, observations of nature, and touching expressions of love and affection for those around him. He also wrote frank accounts of family tragedies, physical illnesses and moments of self-doubt, as he laboured towards publication of the book that would change the way we see the world.

The story is told with the benefit of Darwin's secret notes and correspondence, enhanced by natural history filming, powerful imagery from the time and contributions from leading contemporary biographers and scientists.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... f_Species/

The "death and the struggle of life" in the hands of modern science became a post mortem. All things are studied as if dead and a memorial is posted in the dusty archives of academia. Like a tombstone it remembers the life of the subject, now deceased.

A flower is dissected, analysed and its constituents catalogued, but the original essence, life, is lost. The beauty of a flower is gone and the life that sustained it is never mentioned.
Mort, death is the essence of science.
Nature is alive and gives the lie to science.

 

[rynner2]

The "death and the struggle of life" in the hands of modern science became a post mortem. All things are studied as if dead and a memorial is posted in the dusty archives of academia. Like a tombstone it remembers the life of the subject, now deceased.

You really ought to get your eyes tested - your specs are giving you an awfully distorted view of modern science.

Most modern biology is devoted to the study of living organisms and life processes, with the aid of modern technology. For example, we can track migrating birds or whales over thousands of miles by attaching transponders that report back via satellites. And we can see processes taking place inside living bodies by a variety of scanners. (These same scanners are of course used in medicine too - I had an MRI scan of my head not long ago.) Darwin would have loved it!

 

[Anome]

More to the point, these days scientists, if they want to any experiments on animals, have to go through an ethics committee that determines whether it's necessary, as opposed to just going ahead and doing whatever they want. This is a good thing.

Admittedly, the process is probably less arduous for animals than for work with human subjects, but that's a different discussion.

The problem is that there's only so much you can discover by observing animals while they are alive, and there's only so much you can discover through dissection. The two approaches compliment each other.

Then, of course, there's vivisection. (See above about a different discussion) You can learn a lot from that, but I believe vivisection is solely used where there is no viable alternative, particularly for research into human disease. (Again, a totally different discussion, and the ethics of this is hotly contested in the scientific community.)

So the idea that science is about studying dead things is no longer true, if it ever was. A lot of (probably most) research goes on with living subjects, and quite a lot without even removing the subject from its environment.

 

[Ghostisfort]

So the idea that science is about studying dead things is no longer true, if it ever was. A lot of (probably most) research goes on with living subjects, and quite a lot without even removing the subject from its environment.

Maybe you can enlighten us by pointing to a study of the essence of life rather than the chemical reaction. To discover what life is as opposed to inflicting preconceived materialist dogma.
I would bet your first thought is the bogus life creation experiments that are really devised for the ownership and patent rights to living organisms by large pharmaceutical companies?

Science has reduced our minds to to the level of fantasy computers and is in the process of reducing our bodies to chemical robots. The dehumanisation never ceases.