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gregpriest.bsky.social
History & philosophy of science: biology, complexity, diagramming. Philosophy of history. PhD candidate (ABD) Stanford. Curates these BlueSky feeds: History and Philosophy of Biology Complexity Science Philosophy of History and Historiography
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The blog post was based on an article (which though behind a paywall, is here): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/676147/pdf

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

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 🦫🦋

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

One of the most important lessons in #philbio, and #philsci generally: Whenever you get a great, and original, idea always remember that Bill Wimsatt had it first, in the 1980s.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Edward Gorey was born OTD in 1925. "I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring." #BookSky

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

“Trying to fix the proper meaning in our minds is like coaxing the gull to settle in the rigging, with the rule that the gull must be alive when it settles: one must not shoot it and tie it there.” 🗃️🧠🦋🦫 #booksky #philsci

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

RG Collingwood was born OTD in 1889: “The proper meaning of a word … is never something upon which the word sits perched like a gull on a stone; it is something over which the word hovers like a gull over a ship’s stern….” 🗃️🧠🦋🦫 #booksky #philsci

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

“Nearly 30% of the identified species are rare, endemic, or threatened, meaning vital geomorphic processes could cease before their full significance is understood.” 🌱🐋🧪🌎 #STS

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

I knew, of course, that William Whewell first coined the word “scientist,” but I had no idea that the idea remained so controversial that Nature was still weighing in on the appropriateness of the term at least as late as 1925. https://www.nature.com/articles/115253a0.pdf #HistSTM #PhilSci #STS

submitted 8 days ago • 8 comments

“[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 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧪🗃️🧠

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

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 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧪🗃️🧠

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

“[S]tudents get thumbnail versions of things. They see the Cartesian grid, the lines on a map that chart the ocean, but they ‘don’t see the waves….’ They see ‘the metrics that can be measured rather than the reality that those metrics are simply trying to approximate.’” #booksky

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

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

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

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 🧪

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Carl Sagan’s famous quote about the photo, and an excerpt from his manuscript: 🐡🧪 #HistSTM #STS MS from Library of congress: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss85590.042/?sp=18&st=image&r=-0.712,-0.046,2.425,1.412,0

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

OTD in 1990, Voyager 1 took the “pale blue dot” photo of earth. The spacecraft was about 6 billion kilometers away from earth at the time. Traveling at the speed of light, it took almost 5 and a half hours for the photo to transmit from Voyager to NASA. 🐡🧪 #HistSTM #STS

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

In celebration of Darwin Day 2025, Darwin Online has issued the largest collection of Darwin caricatures ever assembled, including, they claim, 30 that were previously unknown. Here’s a link: https://darwin-online.org.uk/Caricatures.html 🌱🐋🧪🐡 #HistSTM #EvoBio

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

Charles Darwin was born OTD in 1809. Though best known for evolution by natural selection, I’d venture that he devoted more time, and more published pages, to plant physiology and behavior than any other subject. It was all to serve his evolutionary project, but still. #HPBio #Evobio 🧪 #HistSTM

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

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

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

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

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

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 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47537/the-man-moth

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

OTD in 1970 John Maynard Smith published a letter to Nature on “Natural Selection and the Concept of a Protein Space.” Its conception of genetics was, in a word, hermeneutical, making the *meaning* of nucleotide sequences central to their ability to evolve. 🐋🌱🧪#philsci #HistSTM #evobio

submitted 19 days ago • 2 comments

John Stevens Henslow, Cambridge botanist and geologist, was born OTD in 1796. Below, a botanical diagram and his map of Anglesea. H was also instrumental in Darwin going on the Beagle. H was offered the berth. After he refused (family obligations), he suggested that D go in his stead. #HistSTM 🌱🐋🧪

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments