November 11, 1572

On this date, the Danish nobleman, astrologer, and alchemist Tycho Brahe observed (from Herrevad Abbey) a very bright star, now named SN 1572, that had unexpectedly appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia.  Since it had been maintained since antiquity that the world beyond the orbit of the moon, i.e., that of the fixed stars, was eternal and unchangeable (a fundamental axiom, known as celestial immutability, of the Aristotelian world view), other observers held that the phenomenon was something in the Earth’s atmosphere.  Tycho, however, noticed that the parallax of the object did not change from night to night, suggesting that the object was far away.  He argued that a nearby object should appear to shift its position with respect to the background.  Tycho published a small book, De Stella Nova (1573), thereby coining the term nova for a “new” star (we now know that Tycho’s star in Cassiopeia was a supernova 7500 light years from Earth).  He knew the cosmological ramifications of his discovery and was strongly critical of those who dismissed the implications of the astronomical appearance, writing in the preface to De Stella Nova: “O crassa ingenia. O caecos coeli spectatores” (“Oh thick wits.  Oh blind watchers of the sky”).

Should Everyone go to College? (No. 2)

This is the second of a series of occasional posts that will deal with this question.

President Obama recently called on every American to receive at least one year of higher education or vocational training. However, there is no agreement among higher-education experts as to which students are most likely to succeed in college; what kind of college they should attend; whether the individual or society benefits more from post-secondary education; and whether college is worth the high cost and likely long-term debt.

In a current article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, several experts answer this question (among others): Who should and shouldn’t go to college? Charles Murray, political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has this to say:

It has been empirically demonstrated that doing well (B average or better) in a traditional college major in the arts and sciences requires levels of linguistic and logical/mathematical ability that only 10 to 15 percent of the nation’s youth possess. That doesn’t mean that only 10 to 15 percent should get more than a high-school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.

[I should point out that the American Enterprise Institute is a right-wing think tank established in 1943, whose scholars are considered to be some of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy. While I do not support or endorse the AEI or, for that matter, the second Bush administration's public policy, I think Mr. Murray's comments are worth consideration insofar as they appear to be objective.]

Marty Nemko, a career counselor who lives in Oakland, California, has an interesting response to the above question:

All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military. Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at “four year” colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won’t graduate even if given eight and a half years. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers. A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a non-college post-secondary option. Students’ lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets.

Another noteworthy response is by Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute:

In general, people benefit from education and should acquire as much as they can. Though there are many good reasons to do so, the best economic research suggests that the wage return for a year of college course work is more than enough to justify pursuing at least some higher education. That not all students have the skills necessary to keep up with college course work says more about the effectiveness of our K-12 education than about the cognitive ability of American students.

[The Manhattan Institute is a right-wing, free-market-oriented think tank established in New York City in 1978.]

Norton Grubb, professor of policy, organization, measurement, and evaluation at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, says:

Students should go to college if they understand (and want) the economic or occupational benefits of college, as long as they understand the length of time and difficulty of attaining a degree. They should also be college-ready, and they should be enthusiastic about the intellectual roles of college—the chance to take general-education courses, the intellectual and cultural life of most colleges, the opportunities to develop broad and curious intellects. Otherwise college is likely to be narrow and utilitarian.

Of course, many of the students I encounter have an anti-intellectual attitude, which obviously makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to succeed. More responses to this question and other questions can be found here.

November 10, 1834 (a Monday)

HMS Beagle picked up Charles Darwin (now in much better health) at Valparaiso, Chile, and headed south to survey the Chronos Archipelago and the waters around Chiloe Island as far south as the Tres Montes Peninsula.

November 9, 1934 (a Friday)

On this date, the astronomer Carl Sagan was born in New York City. He helped define two new disciplines: planetary science and exobiology. In terms of scientific achievements, Sagan is best known for his research on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan was also an advocate of the search for extraterrestrial life. He helped Dr. Frank Drake write the Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing extraterrestrials about Earth. Sagan also urged the scientific community to listen with radio telescopes for signals from intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms. So persuasive was he that by 1982, he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal Science, signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners. This was a tremendous turnaround in the respectability of this controversial field. Sagan believed that the Drake equation suggested that a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations would form, but that the lack of evidence of such civilizations pointed out by the Fermi paradox suggests technological civilizations tend to destroy themselves rather quickly. This stimulated his interest in identifying and publicizing ways that humanity could destroy itself, with the hope of avoiding such a cataclysm and eventually becoming a spacefaring species.

A professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University after 1968, Sagan was involved with numerous NASA planetary space probes and was the creator and host of the 1980 public television science series Cosmos. His publications include the book co-authored with the Russian astronomer I. S. Shklovskii Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966); The Dragons of Eden (1977; won a Pulitzer); a novel, Contact (1985); with Richard Turco, A Path Where No Man Thought (1990), on nuclear winter; with Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992); Pale Blue Dot (1994); The Demon-Haunted World (1996); and the posthumously published Billions and Billions (1997).

November 8, 1656

On this date, the astronomer Edmund Halley was born on the eastern edge of London, England. Although he is chiefly remembered for the comet which bears his name, he also made a mark for himself in geology. In 1715, he lectured the Royal Society of London that the age of the Earth could be calculated by measuring the ocean’s salinity since ocean salts result from sediments carried by rivers and streams. Interestingly, he began his talk by rejecting a literal interpretation of Genesis for the Earth’s age:

Whereas we are there told that the formation of man was the last act of the creator, ’tis no where revealed in scripture how long the earth had existed before this last creation, nor how long those five days that proceeded it may be to be accounted; since we are elsewhere told, that in respect of the almighty a thousand years is as one day, being equally no part of eternity; nor can it well be conceived how those days should be to be understood of natural days, since they are mentioned as measures of time before the creation of the sun, which was not till the fourth day.

Halley had no doubt that the Earth had existed long before the accepted date of the Creation, 4004 B.C., the date arrived at by Archbishop Ussher in 1620 by counting back all the generations in the Bible. It has often been thought that Halley was concerned about demonstrating a very old age for the Earth by making his proposal to the Society. However, he was actually trying to provide a maximal estimate of the Earth’s age. Halley objected to the notion that the Earth is eternal, as he later stated in his talk:

….the foregoing argument, which is chiefly presented to refute the ancient notion, some have of late entertained, of the eternity of all things.

Needless to say, these views led him to be regarded as something of a heretic by the Church authorities.

References:

• Edmund Halley, “A Short Account of the Cause of the Saltness of the Ocean, and of the Several Lakes That Emit no Rivers; With a Proposal, by Help Thereof, to Discover the Age of the World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1683-1775), Volume 29: 296-300.
• Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993) 168-180.

November 7, 1840 (a Saturday)

On this date, the Russian founder of comparative embryology and experimental histology Aleksandr Onufriyevich Kovalevsky was born. He was the first to establish that there was a common pattern in the embryological development of all multicellular animals.

Kovalevsky began by studying the lancelet, a fish-shaped sea animal about 2-in. (5-cm) long; he then wrote Development of Amphioxus lanceolatus (1865). In 1866, he demonstrated the similarity between Amphioxus and the larval stages of tunicates and established the chordate status of the tunicates. In 1867, Kovalevsky extended the germ layer concept of Christian Heinrich Pander and Karl Ernst von Baer to include the invertebrates, such as the ascidians, establishing an important embryologic unity in the animal kingdom. This was important evidence of the evolution of living organisms. In the Descent of Man (1871), Darwin took serious note of Kovalevsky’s interpretation of the embryonic development of ascidians, writing:

M. Kovalevsky has lately observed that the larvae of the Ascidians are related to the Vertebrata in their manner of development, in the relative position of the nervous system and in possessing a structure closely like the chorda dorsalis of vertebrate animals; and in this he has since been confirmed by Prof. Kupffer. M. Kovalevsky writes to me from Naples, that he has now carried these observations further; and, should his results be well established, the whole will form a discovery of the greatest importance. Thus if we may rely on embryology, ever the safest guide in classification, it seems that we have at last gained a clew in the source whence the vertebrates were derived. I should then be justified in believing that at an extremely remote period a group of animals existed, resembling in many respects the larvae of our present ascidians, which diverged into two great branches – the one retrograding in development and producing the present class of Ascidians, the other rising to the crown and summit of the animal kingdom by giving birth to the Vertebrata.

Kovalevsky was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1890.

November 6, 1913 (a Thursday)

On this date, the “Los Angeles County Historical and Art Museum“, the precursor to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, opened its doors.  On its fascade above these doors appears the museum’s motto, carpere et colligere, Latin for “to pluck and to gather”, an apt saying for a repository of approximately 33 million artifacts.

November 6, 1990 (a Tuesday)

On this date, Webster v. New Lenox was decided.  The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that school boards have the right to prohibit teaching creationism because such lessons would constitute religious advocacy.

November 5, 1892 (a Saturday)

On this date, British geneticist and biometrician John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born. He was one of the three major figures to develop the mathematical theory of population genetics. (He is usually regarded as the third of these in importance, after R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright.) Population genetics became one of the key elements of what would be called the Modern Synthesis. It revealed how mutations arise and, if they are favored by natural selection, can spread through a population, causing evolutionary change without the help of imaginary Lamarckian forces. Haldane also worked in biochemistry, and on the effects of diving on human physiology. He was the first to suggest that membranes played a role in the origin of life in his prescient note in The Rationalist Annual (1926). He wrote that “The cell consists of numerous half-living chemical molecules suspended in water and enclosed in an oily film. When the whole sea was a vast chemical laboratory the conditions for the formation of such films must have been relatively favorable . . .” In 1954, Haldane, speaking at the Symposium on the Origin of Life, suggested that an alternative biochemistry could be conceived in which water was replaced as a solvent by liquid ammonia.

J.B.S. Haldane began studying science at the age of eight, as assistant to his father (the noted physiologist John Scott Haldane). A Marxist from the 1930s, Haldane was well known for his outspoken Marxist views. He resigned from the Communist Party around 1950 on the issue of Lysenko’s claims to have manipulated the genetic structure of plants and “Stalin’s interference with science.” He became known to a large public as a witty popularizer of science with such works as Daedalus (1924), Possible Worlds (1927), and The Causes of Evolution (1932).

Purportedly, it is Haldane who made the famous comment that all that biology tells us about the nature of God is that he has “an inordinate fondness for beetles” (reported in G. E. Hutchison, 1959, Amer. Natur. 93:145-159).

References:

• J.B.S. Haldane, “The Origin of Life,” The Rationalist Annual 148: 3-10 (1929).

November 4, 1855 (a Sunday)

On this date, the botanist Frederick Orpen Bower was born in Ripon, England. His study of primitive land plants, especially the ferns, contributed greatly to a modern emphasis on the study of the origins and evolutionary development of these plants. A man who did not shy away from theorizing, one of his most productive “working hypotheses” was his application of the alternation of generations model to explaining the way the land was colonized by early plants. This subject was explored most completely in his book entitled The Origin of a Land Flora: A Theory Based upon the Facts of Alternation, published in 1908.

From his many years studying liverworts, mosses, and ferns, Bower concluded that they had evolved from algal ancestors. Bower’s hypothesis states, in essence, that the sporophyte generation (the conspicuous vegetative stage in familiar vascular plants) developed de novo from a haploid alga that lacked a diploid sporophyte generation but instead had merely a diploid zygote (a cell formed by the fusion of two gametes, such as sperm and egg). Before the evolution of embryos, this zygote would have immediately undergone meiosis (to relieve the diploid condition) and produced spores, the propagules of the next haploid generation. Growth of such a spore into a gametophyte is analogous to growth of an isolated human sperm or egg cell into a hypothetical haploid generation. Thus, the sporophyte generation first appeared as an added generation that came into existence as a result of delayed zygotic meiosis – sort of a delayed plant puberty. In other words, what might otherwise have become the new haploid cells of the next generation by chromosome reduction instead retained its diploid character and thus added, aà la Bower, a new generation to the life cycle. The final step of spore production still eventually occurred, but not until after the diploid cells had grown and developed into a new sporophyte generation, in essence an overgrown zygote.

Under Brower’s hypothesis, we suppose that, from the point of view of the gametophyte, the sporophyte generation is like a giant multicellular spore factory. For example, in Coleochaete pulvinata, a modern freshwater green alga, the surface of the mature zygote is covered by a layer of haploid cells, which form ingrowths that penetrate the zygote to provide nutrition. The protected diploid zygote in Coleochaete gives the aquatic alga advantages because many more spores can be produced from a single fertilization event than would be the case if the zygote hurried straight to meiosis and the formation of one of those four spore tetrads so common in the fossil record. Bower’s hypothesis remains to be tested, but if it is correct, the sporophyte generation (diploid cells) came to develop inside (and be protected by) the gametophyte generation (haploid cells) precisely because the arrangement ultimately benefited both generations.

An older, competing hypothesis dating back to 1874 held that the algal ancestor of embryophytes already had had alternation of two generations for a long time and was thus diplobiontic, as opposed to haplobiontic. Haplobiontic organisms, such as humans, have the gametes as the only haploid cells; diplobiontic organisms develop those haploid cells into a multicellular life stage. The diplobiontic hypothesis of 1874 is less favored now because it fails to explain how the sporophytes and gametophytes, which in modern diplobiontic green algae have no long-term physical connection, could have evolved the intimate physical connection, in both nutritional and developmental respects, shared by the haploid and diploid components of all embryophytes.

Bower’s other publications included Ferns (three volumes, published 1923-28) and Primitive Land Plants (1935). Bower was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1891 and was awarded the Linnean Medal in 1909, the Royal Medal in 1910, and the Darwin Medal in 1938, the latter “In recognition of his work of acknowledged distinction in the field in which Darwin himself laboured.”

November 1, 1880 (a Monday)

On this date in Berlin was born Alfred Lothar Wegener, a German meteorologist and geophysicist who first gave a well-developed hypothesis of continental drift. In 1912, he presented a paper entitled “Die Herausbildung der Grossformen der Erdrinde (Kontinente und Ozeane) auf geophysikalischer Grundlage” (“The geophysical basis of the evolution of large-scale features of the earth’s crust”) before the Geological Association of Frankfurt am Main. He suggested that all the present-day continents came from a single primitive land mass, the supercontinent Pangaea, which eventually broke up and gradually drifted apart about 250 million years ago. (A similar idea was proposed earlier by F.B. Taylor in 1910.) It was expanded in 1915 into Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans), the first comprehensive account of the theory of continental drift. Others saw the fit of coastlines of South America and Africa, but Wegener added more geologic and paleontologic evidence that these two continents were once joined.

From 1906, interested in paleoclimatology, he went on several expeditions to Greenland to study polar air circulation. On this day in 1930, his fiftieth birthday, while on an expedition to Greenland, Wegener left his base camp for the western coast and was not seen again.

October 31, 1992 (a Saturday)

Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition                          

On this date, the Vatican finally admitted erring for over 359 years in formally condemning Galileo Galilei for entertaining the scientific truth that the Earth revolves around the sun, which the Roman Catholic Church had long denounced as anti-scriptural heresy. After 13 years (!) of inquiry, the Pope’s commission of historic, scientific and theological scholars brought the pope a “not guilty” finding for Galileo. Pope John Paul II himself met with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to help set the record straight.

On the morning of June 22, 1633, at age 69, Galileo had been ordered by the Roman Inquisition to repent and spend the last eight years of his life under house arrest. His formal sentencing had concluded:

And, so that you will be more cautious in future, and an example for others to abstain from delinquencies of this sort, we order that the book Dialogue of Galileo Galilei be prohibited by public edict. We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure.

As a salutary penance we impose on you to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week for the next three years. And we reserve to ourselves the power of moderating, commuting, or taking off, the whole or part of the said penalties and penances.

This we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, order and reserve by this or any other better manner or form that we reasonably can or shall think of. So we the undersigned Cardinals pronounce.

Galileo was a seventeenth-century Italian mathematician, astronomer and physicist remembered as one of history’s greatest scientists. However, Pope John Paul II did not specify a penalty or penance for the Church.

October 30, 1844 (a Wednesday)

On this date, George Combe wrote a congratulatory letter that he sent to the anonymous author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation through the publisher of the book. Combe was a phrenologist, who claimed to be able to read a person’s character from the shape of his skull, and he was delighted that the unknown author shared his belief in the “truth” of phrenology.

Only two weeks earlier, while they were on a Saturday walk, Combe had told his friend, the English journalist Robert Chambers, that he should read the newly published book. Combe already had received one of the first free copies, which he had skimmed and partially read with care. Ironically, Combe had not known on that Saturday walk that he was speaking to the author of Vestiges in person, namely, Robert Chambers! Evidently, Chambers did not reveal his identity to Combe. In fact, Chambers revealed his identity to only seven people during his lifetime.

In his letter, Combe said that on turning the pages of the book, he experienced a sense of “pleasure and instruction” – that it combined “all the sublimity of a grand poem, and the sober earnestness & perspicuity of a rigidly philosophical induction.” His letter compared Vestiges to “a new sun” in the scientific firmament, which “will probably collect around it innumberable facts, until at length it shall develop itself into a Theory as perfect as a planetary system.”

This was the book that brought the notion of transmutation out into the public arena. It attempted to describe the entire evolution of the universe, from planets to people, as being driven by some kind of self developing force which acted according to natural laws.

Readers of Vestiges included Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Stuart Mill, although not all shared the same opinion of it. The politically liberal medical journal, the Lancet, said it was “like a breath of fresh air to workmen in a crowded factory.” On the other hand, Huxley wrote one of the most vicious book reviews of all time, describing Vestiges as a “once attractive and still notorious work of fiction” and its author as one of “those who…indulge in science at second-hand and dispense totally with logic.” Scottish journalist and geologist Hugh Miller even published an entire book, Foot-Prints of the Creator, to discredit Vestiges. Yet Vestiges sold remarkably well, one of the best-sellers of its time.

Robert Chambers

Chambers wrote that “My sincere desire in the composition of the book was to give the true view of the history of nature, with as little disturbance as possible to existing beliefs, whether philosophical or religious.” He wanted to open up the question of evolution by natural law to serious scientific discussion. In a supplement to the Vestiges first published in 1845 and entitled Explanations, he wrote, “I said to myself: Let [Vestiges] go forth to be received as truth, or to provoke others to a controversy which may result in establishing or overthrowing it.”

References:

• James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation () p. 264.

October 29, 1831 (a Saturday)

On this date, the American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh was born. He made extensive scientific explorations of the western United States and contributed greatly to knowledge of extinct North American vertebrates, although Marsh spent only four seasons in the field, between 1870 and 1873. “The Great Bone Wars” were the result of his rivalry with Edward Drinker Cope, America’s other great vertebrate paleontologist of the period. Both men hired field crews to unearth and ship back fossils as fast as possible. The rival crews were known to spy on each other, to dynamite their own and each other’s secret localities (to keep their opponents from digging there), and occasionally to steal each other’s fossils.

In contrast to Cope, Marsh was one of the first American converts to Darwin’s theory of evolution. As it turned out, he also gathered an immense amount of data to support it. Marsh’s enormous collection of fossils enabled him to fill in a number of the gaps in the fossil record that were troublesome for supporters of Darwinian evolution. One of Marsh’s most well-known finds were fossils illustrating the evolution of the horse. In an obituary written by Marsh to commemorate Thomas Henry Huxley’s life, Marsh made special mention of his horses:

One of Huxley’s lectures in New York was on the genealogy of the horse, a subject which he had already written about, based entirely upon European specimens. My own explorations had led me to conclusions quite different from his, and my specimens seemed to me to prove conclusively that the horse originated in the New World and not in the Old, and that its genealogy must be worked out here. With some hesitation, I laid the whole matter frankly before Huxley, and he spent nearly two days going over my specimens with me, and testing each point I made. He then informed me that all this was new to him, and that my facts demonstrated the evolution of the horse beyond question, and for the first time indicated the direct line of descent of an existing animal [emphasis added].

Darwin’s book Origin of Species was published in 1859, during Marsh’s senior year at Yale. In 1862 and 1865, Marsh had traveled to England, where he met scientists such as Charles Lyell, T. H. Huxley, and Charles Darwin himself. Two years after Marsh visited Darwin at Down House in 1878, Darwin wrote the following letter to Marsh on or about August 31, 1880:

I received some time ago your very kind note of July 28th, & yesterday the magnificent volume. I have looked with renewed admiration at the plates, & will soon read the text. Your work on these old birds & on the many fossil animals of N. America has afforded the best support to the theory of evolution, which has appeared within the last 20 years. The general appearance of the copy which you have sent me is worthy of its contents, and I can say nothing stronger than this. With cordial thanks, believe me yours very sincerely,

Charles Darwin

References:

• David Rains Wallace, The Bonehunters’ Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Guilded Age (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

October 24, 1960 (a Monday)

Today is the birthday of Asian-American actor B[Bradley]. D[Darrell]. Wong, who was born in San Francisco in 1960. The only actor to win the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Clarence Derwent Award, and the Theater World Award for the same performance, he came to prominence with his extraordinary performance in the title role of David Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988).

Wong is a fourth-generation Chinese-American who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. Following high school graduation, he traveled to New York City to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. His career did not shift into high gear until he returned to the West Coast as a member of the cast of the Los Angeles production of the Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein musical La Cage aux Folles.

In his subsequent Broadway debut in M. Butterfly, Wong played a male Chinese spy who successfully poses as a woman in a twenty-five year relationship with a French male diplomat. He conveyed the racialized stereotype of the Asian man as an emasculated “sissy” and the Asian woman as a submissive object of desire, while also turning the stereotypes on their heads.

Wong is a notably versatile actor who, despite the paucity of roles specifically written for Asian Americans, has kept busy on both the large and small screens. He has taken seriously his status as one of the few well-known Asian-American actors in Hollywood. He told an interviewer that he is very much connected to his Chinese heritage “but in a very American way.” He frequently lectures on diversity issues, particularly on the problem of racial self-hatred and rejection.

 

 

Wong also very strongly identifies as a gay man. Hence, he has been a visible presence at AIDS-related charity functions and in gay and lesbian community events, as well as at events sponsored by the Asian Pacific Islander communities. He has appeared at the GLAAD Awards, made promotional spots for the gay and lesbian television newsmagazine In the Life, and worked in various ways to further understanding among both Asians and non-Asians, gays and non-gays, about the experience of being both gay and Asian. In 2003, Wong published a memoir, Following Foo: (The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man), which tells the story of how he and his life partner, talent agent Richie Jackson, created their family. The couple later broke up but they still share joint custody of their son, Jackson Foo Wong.

 

 

I am grateful for the work Mr. Wong has done, both as an actor and in helping to eradicate stereotypes of Asians and gay men.

October 24, 1632

On this date, the Dutch microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek was born.  He made some of the most important discoveries in the history of biology.  During his lifetime, Leeuwenhoek ground over 500 optical lenses and created over 400 different types of microscopes, only nine of which still exist today.  Leeuwenhoek was the first person to see bacteria, free-living and parasitic microscopic protists, sperm cells, blood cells, microscopic nematodes and rotifers, and much more. His researches on lower animals refuted the doctrine of spontaneous generation, and his observations helped lay the foundations for microbiology.

October 22, 1996 (a Tuesday)

On this date, Pope John Paul II, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said:

In his Encyclical Humani generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation, on condition that one did not lose sight of several indisputable points…Today, almost half a century after the publication of the Encyclical, fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favour of this theory.

October 22, 1783 (a Wednesday)

On this date, the naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque was born in Galata, a suburb of Constantinople. Throughout his life he traveled extensively, collecting specimens wherever he went, and wrote and published constantly. He was an overly enthusiastic but accurate observer driven by a monomaniacal desire to name every object he encountered in nature. His scientific work has been gaining more and more recognition in recent years.

Rafinesque’s family moved to France the year following his birth, and at age nineteen Rafinesque became an apprentice in the mercantile house of the Clifford Brothers in Philadelphia. He returned to Europe in 1805 and spent the next decade in Sicily, where he was secretary to the U. S. consul. During this time his first scientific books were published. He returned to the United States in 1815 and remained in America the rest of his life, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1832. He was professor of botany and natural science at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky from 1819 to 1826.

The early conclusion by Rafinesque that the taxonomic categories called species and genera are man-made generalizations which have no physical existence led to his deep appreciation of variation in plants. He understood that such variation, through time, will lead to the development of what we call new species. But he had no explanation for the cause of variation, though he did consider hybridity a possible mechanism and, without calling it that, he had what appears to be some perception of mutation. Hence, he never developed a theory of evolution earlier than Darwin, as sometimes has been claimed, because Rafinesque had no inkling of natural selection and his understanding of geological time was far too shallow.

October 20, 1833 (a Sunday)

On this date, Charles Darwin arrived near the mouth of the Parana River, not far from Buenos Aires. He went ashore and discovered that a revolution had broken out at Buenos Aires, making further travel on the river impossible. So, the next day Darwin proceeded overland and with some difficulty made it to Buenos Aires. Two weeks later he “escaped” from Buenos Aires amid much civil unrest and boarded a packet ship en route to HMS Beagle at Montevideo. As was usually the case, when he arrived a few days later the Beagle was not there to pick him up.

October 20, 1790 (a Wednesday)

On this date was born the Scottish fruit-grower Patrick Matthew, who later proposed the principle of natural selection as a mechanism of evolution over a quarter-century earlier than did Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. However, Matthew failed to develop or publicize his ideas and Darwin and Wallace were unaware of Matthew’s work when they synthesized their own.

Matthew’s work entitled, On Naval Timber and Aboriculture, which was published in 1831, presented in sufficiently recognizable detail “this natural process of selection among plants” (see pages 307 to 308). In an appendix to the book, he wrote:

There is a law universal in nature, tending to render every reproductive being the best possible suited to its condition that its kind, or organized matter, is susceptible of, which appears intended to model the physical and mental or instinctive powers to their highest perfection and to continue them so. This law sustains the lion in his strength, the hare in her swiftness, and the fox in his wiles. As nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time’s decay, those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing—either a prey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generally induced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind, who are pressing on the means of subsistence . . .

There is more beauty and unity of design in this continual balancing of life to circumstance, and greater conformity to those dispositions of nature which are manifest to us, than in total destruction and new creation. It is improbable that much of this diversification is owing to commixture of species nearly allied, all change by this appears very limited, and confined within the bounds of what is called species; the progeny of the same parents, under great differences of circumstance, might, in several generations, even become distinct species, incapable of co-reproduction.

In 1860, Matthew read a review of Darwin’s Origin of Species in the Gardeners’ Chronicle, including its description of the principle of natural selection. This prompted him to write a letter to the publication, calling attention his earlier explication of the theory. Darwin then wrote a letter of his own to the Gardener’s Chronicle, stating:

I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection. I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, has heard of Mr. Matthew’s views, considering how briefly they are given, and that they appeared in the Appendix to a work On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. I can do no more than offer my apologies to Mr. Matthew for my entire ignorance of his publication.

However, there are nearly as many deep differences between Matthew’s theory and Darwin’s as there are similarities. Matthew was a catastrophist; his geological theories were very close to those of Cuvier. According to Matthew, the earth had periodically been rocked by upheavals, which left an “unoccupied field. . . for new diverging ramifications of life.” Evolutionary change took place right after these upheavals; between catastrophes, species did not change,and natural selection would act to stabilize species, not alter them:

A particular conformity, each after its own kind, . . . no doubt exists to a considerable degree. This conformity has existed during the last 40 centuries [4,000 years]. Geologists discover a like particular conformity – fossil species – through the deep deposition of each great epoch, but they also discover an almost complete difference to exist between the species or stamp of life on one epoch from that of every other.

Matthew’s theory lacked Darwin’s concept of evolution as an ongoing, continuous process. Matthew did not see evolution as the gradual accumulation of favorable variations leading to adaptation, nor did he believe in extinction except by catastrophe. Matthew saw species as classes of similar organisms, not as interbreeding populations. He also never relinquished his belief in natural theology; he wrote to Darwin in 1871 that “a sentiment of beauty pervading Nature. . . affords evidence of intellect and benevolence in the scheme of Nature. This principle of beauty is clearly from design and cannot be accounted for by natural selection.”