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Charles Darwin Online
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Oct 19, 2006 04:51 PM
from the got-a-darwin-sticker-on-my-car dept.
from the got-a-darwin-sticker-on-my-car dept.
eldavojohn writes "The entire works of Charles Darwin have been made available online. It includes scanned works that were owned by his family — many of which were signed by the author. The University of Cambridge hopes to have this completed by 2009 and is only estimated to be about half way done. If you have any love for books whatsoever, I suggest you take a look at how they present the user with each book. Take the very first edition of On the Origin of Species, for example, where they use frames to display the text on the left with the original image on the right. From the Reuters article: 'Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.'"
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The biggest surprise? (Score:5, Funny)
Flame on! (Score:4, Funny)
Oooh, good, I've been looking for some new fiction to read.
(Let the flamewar commence.)
New fiction to read (Score:2)
Re:Flame on! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Flame on! (Score:5, Informative)
Contrariwise: Darwin's theory made no mention whatever of God, as he felt it unnecessary to postulate the involvement of such an entity. What more do you ask of atheistic evolution? It's evolution happening without the involvement of a god. That's the whole point. If you're going to allow for evolution 'helped over the jumps', in Dawkins' phrase, by some magician, then why bother at all? Why not have the magician create the universe last Thursday? It's just as scientific.
As Darwin wrote in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell,
"If I were convinced that I needed such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish ... I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent."
(see Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.249)
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Burden of proof... (Score:5, Insightful)
In-order to invalidate the "theory [wikipedia.org] of evolution", the burden is on YOU to come up with a better theory.
Your new theory must also have falsifiable or testable predictions about things not yet observed.
I look forward to reading your paper.
Parent
"Creation" is not a theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Creation" is not even a "theory [wikipedia.org]", as it makes no falsifiable or testable predictions about things not yet observed.
If you have a reproducable test where you get "God" to create new life forms I think you should publish a paper.
As it stands, in the context of science, you have failed to provide a new "theory" of our origins.
(please try to avoid logical fallacies [wikipedia.org])
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
don't forget the false dilemma fallacy. just because all the evidence we've seen so far points to evolution as the creator of mankind, doesnt mean that further evidence wont show up that suggests a different as yet unimagined mechanism.
you cant try to rubbish evolution to prove creationism. even if it turns out evolutionary theory is one giant mistake, that wont prove creationism is true.
Re:Flame on! (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolute proof that the base laws of the universe are random rather than intelligently ordered, of course.
But that would be atheistic cosmology. Evolution says nothing about the laws of the universe; that's physics, not biology, and Darwin wasn't involved in that end of things at all.
It's evolution happening without the involvement of a god. That's the whole point. If you're going to allow for evolution 'helped over the jumps', in Dawkins' phrase, by some magician, then why bother at all?
Because it's a damned interesting engineering method; one that could prove highly useful in the sciences of Artificial Intelligence, biology, robotics, and maybe best of all, environmental cleanups.
An intellgently guided environment for mutations to live or die in is a highly powerful idea.
True, we could learn to apply the theory. Let us say, we create by genetic engineering some species or strain and set it to work, and use our understanding of evolution to predict its effect on the ecology. But that doesn't make much difference to evolution as an explanation of our origins. If we're reduced to postulating miraculous interventions, we're not doing science.
...
The descent for a theistic evolutionist comes *after* the miraculous additions. Without the miraculous addition, there'd be no life because the Big Bang itself would have collapsed back in under it's own gravity and chaos. The descent Darwin wrote about happened at least 15 billion years later by what we now know- the physical laws that govern it were already in place by then, having been decided during that strange injection of information and energy during the Big Bang. When we figure that out (if we ever can) we will know the face of God that was the original reason for scientific research to begin with.
Ah, we've been at cross-purposes. What I understand by 'theistic evolution' is that evolution proceeds naturally, but that God intervenes from time to time to adjust its direction, like an alien with a Monolith, with some ultimate aim in mind. What you have there is something different, which I'd call 'deism': God rigs the universe at the outset, presses the detonator switch for the Big Bang, and then walks away. That's another issue entirely, all about the fine-tuning of universal constants and so forth, and I'd class it as part of cosmology, not evolution. It's something to take up with Einstein, not Darwin.
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Re:Flame on! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Theistic evolutionist" means a theist who believes in common descent through evolution. It includes ID types who believe in common descent with God miraculously tweaking the process, but it also refers to people who believe God created life entirely through the secondary cause of natural laws. Yes, the latter sounds sort of like deism. But there's a major difference. IIRC, deists believe that God set up the universe and walked away, and does not interact with humanity in any kind of personal way--the deist God is entirely impersonal. (There may be exceptions to that. At the least, deists don't believe in miracles.) Theistic evolution only refers to the development of life. Christian theistic evolutionists still believe that God really did pick out Abraham and the Jews to bless all humanity (ultimately through Jesus), and some will believe that most of the Bible after Genesis 11 is true history.
Even young-earth creationists believe that God can (and does) act in that so-called "deistic" fashion. For instance, they believe that God knits us together in our mothers' wombs, makes the grass grow, and clothes the daisies in splendor. But that doesn't mean he interrupts natural law--he made and sustains the universe, including natural law. (The biggest problem creationists have with evolution is that it doesn't fit with a straight-forward reading of Genesis as a historical account.)
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Re:Flame on! (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a more rigorous form of 'theistic evolution' which takes into account quantum mechanics. From quantum theory we know that the world we live in is one of many possible worlds and that there are many possible futures. There are three possible explanations for this. The first is that the universe if fundamentally stochastic and governed by chance this is essentially Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation. The second approach is that all possible universes are physically real which is the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The third approach is that God chooses which of the possible worlds is made manifest.
The third position is quite rational and consistent with modern science and does give rise to a 'theistic evolution'. It is quite different from intelligent design which is the last refuge of those that have a primitive and fundamentalist theology but who are sophisticated enough to try to pass it of as "science".
By the way there is a combination of the last two interpretations that leads to a modern form of Bishop Berkeley,s idealist philosophy and can be summed up in popular terms that we are living in God's matrix. The interesting question is are these different approaches mere metaphysics or do they ultimately lead to experimental tests. In which case an experiment to determine the existence of God would be possible.
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Re:Flame on! (Score:4, Funny)
Boulderdash, you know as well as I do that those who attack it don't think for themselves, they just flame with what they were told to say when they were in that big room with the guy up front telling them what to think.
Reading it would be a waste of time, they have a much more efficient system: One person does the thinking, and distributes it to a group.
Think smart, not hard, dummy!
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Re: (Score:2)
What do you mean by 'transitional'? If you mean, say, transitional between H. sapiens and H. habilis, I present to you H. erectus. Or on a larger scale, how about between dinosaurs and birds? I gather there's quite a lot been discovered in
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html [talkorigins.org]
Re:Flame on! (Score:5, Informative)
Tetrapods:
Panderichthys, Sauripterus, Elginerpeton, Obruchevichthys, Hynerpeton, Densignathus rowei, Ichthyostega, Acanthostega and Pederpes finneyae, Tulerpeton, Elpistostege, Tiktaalik roseae.
Land to air: birds, perhaps?
Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus, Ceratosaurus, Allosaurus, Compsognathus, Sinosauropteryx, Protarchaeopteryx, Caudipteryx, Velociraptor, Sinovenator, Beipiaosaurus, Sinornithosaurus, Microraptor, Rahonavis, Confuciusornis, Sinornis, Patagopteryx, Hesperornis, Apsaravis and Ichthyornis.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose that depends on whether you ask a scientist who specializes in biology or a scientist who specializes in... well... things not relevant to evolutionary theory. If you pare it down to the people who actually study the bones rather than those who have looked at a few pictures on the Internet, you'll find the breakdown is strongly in favor of one side over the other.
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Hey!? It's been half an hour, where are all the obcurantism proponents at?
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Tense Confusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
vs.
English has a future tense for a reason. Please learn to use it.
Your post is too clean. (Score:2)
-Rick
Re:Tense Confusion? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Tense Confusion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Counters lol (Score:4, Funny)
Gentle website, prepare to evolve or perish.
Dust bowl connectivity issues (Score:5, Funny)
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*golf clap*
Open Darwin? (Score:3, Funny)
Generic creationism troll (Score:2, Funny)
Please respond with generic evolution flame.
thankyou.
Re:Generic creationism troll (Score:4, Informative)
Please respond with generic evolution flame.
Blah blah blah, talkorigins.org.
Wow. Glad we've got that out of the way. We've spared this thread a good thousand posts now :-)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Blah, blah, blah, evolution.
Blah, blah, blah, Richard Dawkins.
Blah, blah, blah, Burgess Shale.
Blah, blah, blah, Steven Jay Gould.
You're welcome.
A great tribute! (Score:5, Insightful)
Charles Darwin, should, regardless of your personal belief of the veracity of evolutionary theory, be regarded as on of the greatest men to have ever lived. He, in the face of tremendous religious and scientific adversity, put forth an astounding scientific theory worked out through great diligence.
In the Origin of Species, with relentless precision he works his way through the variation of domesticated and wild animals and plants, and eventually culminates in a very strongly supported theory which is almost elegant in its simplicity. He even anticipates many challenges to his theory, in the aptly named chapter, Difficulties on theory. Darwin's accomplishment is perhaps even more impressive when you take into account that he had no knowledge of genetics or the mechanism of inheritance, and was most certainly not aware of anything such as DNA. His writing is precise and lively; even today, 150 years later, the Origin of Species is easily followed by a layman.
This site is an honour to Darwin's efforts and I hope it will inspire some people to read his works.
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Those who's "personnal" belief go contrary to his theory happen to view his religious adversity as a reason to villify, not celebrate him.
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Open Books (Score:2)
Of course, selectable revisions/annotations, and hyperlinking the origina
For those interested in a modern intro to the man (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly, since estimates of the opinions/beliefs of the US population usually hit around 40% "young earthers" and 45% "guided by the great spirit in the sky," this may be of interest to only a relatively small segment of the population
Re:For those interested in a modern intro to the m (Score:2)
Are you sure about those figures? I would have thought more like 25% "Young Earthers", 50% "guided by the great spirit in the sky", and 25% "I only believe in what I can touch and see". These works would be of interest to anybody in the second two groups- since Darwin's
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The "guided by the great spirit in the sky" camp isn't much of a problem; I believe that's the Catholic Church's position as well, that there's nothing saying the G/god didn't have some part in guiding the process, or setting it in motion. Darwin's theory doesn't concern these anyway, it just describes the evidence and makes predictions.
Luckily, you're right about t
Re:For those interested in a modern intro to the m (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Hey, here's something (Score:5, Funny)
Behold!
Proof of the existence of God by the Banana Argument. [google.com]
(and here's the entire episode [google.com] if this sort of TV evangelism tickles your fancy)
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Re:frames (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Oddly enough, it's the same thing that would prove Evolution itself (and just about every other scientific theory that has risen to the predictability of a law) wrong: ID is incompatible with a random universe. If you can show me a commonly accepted physical law changing at random, say the gravitational constant of the universe or agrivado's number, or some such thing; that would prove ID wrong because it would postulate
Re:If giving credit, give credit accurately (Score:5, Informative)
Darwin did not "degrade life to an accidental tissue mass." He only made some observations about nature, and formed some theories based on those. As it turns out, these theories do a pretty good job of explaining how species change over time, and how new species are formed-- in fact, they've pretty much become the backbone of evolutionary biology.
Darwin himself was not a fascist or a rightist as you allege. In fact, he was a Christian, and he was as much troubled by questions of how to reconcile faith and reason as others. Hitler came to power almost a century later, and was influenced as much by nationalism and mysticism as by science. Stalin never accepted Darwinism-- in fact, he strictly prohibited it from being taught in Russia while he was in power. Instead, he favored the pseudo-scientist Lysenko. Try reading something about history before you spout this kind of nonsense. Assuming that history doesn't hurt your feelings too much!
Finally-- there is a lot of good evidence that man has transcended biological evolution. The whole point of having a big brain and a complex social structure is so that you don't have to make up a new gene each time you learn a new trick. And of course, in the future, genetic engineering will allow us to have whatever genes we desire.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Darwin was on the verge of becoming a minister in the Church of England before we went on the Beagle.
You cannot reject the Bible, or any portion of it, and claim to be Christian.
Sure you can. All you have to do, like many sensible Christians have already done, is realize the Bible is not meant to be taken word-for-word literally. Even the Pope admitted that evolution happens, unless you want to say the Pope isn't Christian?
it was to point out the *consequences* of that belief.
E
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Re:If giving credit, give credit accurately (Score:4, Interesting)
Did you think this through at all? The Bible didn't EXIST during the time of Christ: how could Christ have endorsed a full literal reading of the Bible, including the NT, when it didn't even exist yet? How can Catholicism not be Christian according to the Bible when it was Catholicism that compiled the Bible in the first place? Good grief. Most of the traditions that Catholics hold that are extra-Biblical existed even before the Bible existed.
The view of of the Bible you are pushing didn't even emerge until just a few hundred years ago, and you want to pretend that it's the Original Gangsta Christian view? Come on: that's ridiculous.
Of course that's your opinion and religious belief. You don't get to personally define what Christianity is.
"I was saying that for those who have already accepted Darwinism, then they ought to examine the consequences of those beliefs and their contemporaries, and that is that regardless of their perceived (or hoped for) differences, Darwinianism puts them in the same philosophical category as those who committed those atrocities."
"It is unimportant whether Hitler and Stalin professed Darwiniianism, as their actions were consistent with the consequential philosophy, which is "whatever goes"."
Look, I really hope this gets through to you somehow: evolution is not a philosophy of "Darwinism." By and large, the only people who ever talk about Darwinism are creationists trying to make evolution sound big and bad. But evolution is NOT A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. It's a scientific description of how life developed on this planet.
"My interest is in intellectual honesty"
Well, you aren't doing a very good job of it, I'm afraid.
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Stupidity meter went off the dial (Score:4, Insightful)
While you're at it, make sure to blame Newton for the improvements in artillery that ensued due to a better understanding of kinetics. Or blame Mendeleev for devising the periodic table, since improvements in chemistry led to mustard gas.
"Social Darwinism" was never part of Darwin's work. It's a fraudulent extension of it, and to blame Darwin for that is ludicrous.
And Darwin never said that any species, race, or specimen "deserved to die". He only described why some did and why some didn't. Almost every trained biologist buys into Darwin's theory of natural selection, and they all abhor the destruction of the environment.
I blame Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the destruction of the environment on ignorance, the kind that Darwin fought so effectively against, the kind you are propogating right now.
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how do you get to be wrong on EVERYTHING? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't act like the title is a hush-hush secret, because that title is printed in the Penguin edition I bought from Amazon a month ago. And by "races," he meant what we call species. This is obvious to anyone who reads the first few pages of the book, which tells me you didn't read the book. Let me be more clear by quoting from the book you denigrate, but never read:
Oh my, Darwin was a cabbage racist! Stop the presses! Oh wait, that's stupid. You saw the word "races," thought "aha, ammunition" and went running. Here's a hint--don't trust creationist web-pages, because they'll give you a misleading, caricatured idea of what Darwinism means. They'll make you look like an idiot because you'll run around calling him a racist, when anyone who even reads chapter 1 of the book knows he was talking about varieties, or species, not races like the KKK gets hung up on.
I'm not clear why I would credit Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot et al to Darwin since all of these dictators were motivated by a lust for power, not because they were convinced of common descent. Are you calling everyone who believes in common descent a Nazi? "Those murderous dictators" weren't perfect Darwinists, because nothing they did was "Darwinian." Darwinism is based on variation in the gene pool, acted upon by a selective force, leading to diversity. Oppose that to Hitler, whose philosophy was based on the idea of a "pure race." It's obvious that Hitler's views were not based on Darwin's ideas. In fact, both Stalin and Hitler actually banned Darwin's works. Stalin banned the teaching of Darwinian evolution. So by what stretch of the imagination were they "perfect Darwinists"? If a political leader banned the bible, would you infer from that that he was a perfect Christian?
Since Darwin died long before Hitler or Stalin came to power, how could he keep their company? Even if they based their policies on his ideas, which they clearly didn't since they banned his works, what control does a naturalist have over a wacko who kills people 70 years later?I don't ask that you suddenly change your mind. I do ask, however, that you stop being an idiot, and make an effort to think your arguments through. It takes one Google search and 30 seconds of reading to refute every single point you made. It's not that I think I'm smart, only that your arguments are so embarrassingly bad that people will inevitably conclude that you're stupid. If you aren't stupid, then stop being intellectually lazy.
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