On this date in Rome under the authority of Pope Clement VIII, the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini, or, as he styled himself in his works, Giulio Cesare, had his tongue cut out and was strangled at the stake; his body then was burned to ashes. Like Giordano Bruno, though considered intellectually inferior to him, he was part of the movement to break with the dogmas of scholasticism and the authority of Aristotle, and made a courageous contribution to the foundations of a new philosophy.Vanini resembles Bruno, not only in his wandering life and in his death, but also in his unorthodox religious ideas. What is remarkable about Vanini is that he was the first person to theorize the evolution of mankind — the first since the ancient Greeks of the Miletus School around 800 B.C.E. Anaximander had posited that life began in the sea. Vanini should have gone down in history as a wonderful hero and tribute to human ingenuity, as the man who enlightened two thousand years of ignorance.
For Vanini, natural law was the divine. He rejected the idea of an immortal soul and was one of the first thinkers to view nature as (an entity) governed by natural laws. He also suggested that humans evolved from apes.
Born in 1585, Vanini studied theology and became an ordained priest. He went on to travel Europe promoting freedom of thought, rationalism, opposition to dogma, and opposition to the Catholic Church. After traveling Europe he returned to Italy, but was forced to flee for his life to avoid the Inquisition and charges of atheism. In an attempt to clear his name and satisfy the authorities he published a book of opposition to atheism in 1615, entitled Amphitheatrum Aeternae Providentiae Divino-Magicum, that ostensibly affirmed his belief in God. This was the first book he had ever published.
Once his name was cleared by this book, however, Vanini published another book in 1616, entitled De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis (Of the marvelous secrets of the queen and goddess of the mortal ones, nature), that made it clear his first book was a parody of religious belief and was not really reflective of his true views. This second book, which held that divinity could not be rationally conceived outside of Nature, triggered his condemnation and savage execution in Toulouse at age 34, just 19 years after Bruno’s martyrdom.
Vanini displayed incredible courage to the end — he pushed back a priest assisting the torturer and exclaimed “I’ll die as a philosopher!” Described as a charismatic man with verve, irreverence, and charm, who ‘collected patrons like flies around honey,’ many mourned his death.
References:
Richard Corfield, Architects of Eternity: The New Science of Fossils (London, UK: Headline Book Publishing, 2001).
Plate from Bates’ Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley: Heliconiidae (1862) illustrating Batesian mimicry between Dismorphia species (top row, third row) and various Ithomiini (Nymphalidae) (second row, bottom row).
On this date, the English entomologist Henry Walter Bates was born. Bates became friends with Alfred Russel Wallace when the latter took a teaching post in the Leicester Collegiate School. Wallace was also a keen entomologist, and he had read the same kind of books as Bates had, and as Darwin, Huxley and no doubt many others had – Thomas Malthus on population, James Hutton and Charles Lyell on geology, Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and above all, the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which put evolution into everyday discussion among literate folk. They also read William H. Edwards on his Amazon expedition, and this started them thinking that a visit to the region would be exciting, and might launch their careers. Bates accompanied Wallace on an expedition to the Amazon in 1848.
Whereas Wallace returned to England after four years in South America and then went on to Indonesia, Bates stayed in the Amazon for eleven years but continued to correspond with him, encouraging Wallace’s developing theories on organic evolution. Bates discovered that closely related species often were separated geographically by rivers, and later realized that this was evidence of geographical speciation. His 1862 study of color patterns in butterflies established what is now called Batesian mimicry, in which non-poisonous animals mimic the bright warning coloration of poisonous animals. Bates argued that this kind of mimicry could not be produced by Lamarckian use-inheritance and was clear evidence of selection. In his book The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863), he wrote:
… on these expanded membranes [i.e., butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings generally show, with great regularity, the degrees of blood-relationship of the species. As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole world.
Bates assumed the post of Assistant Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society in 1864 where he edited the society’s Transactions and organized expeditions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1881.
On this date, the English mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy was born. Although Hardy considered himself a pure mathematician, early in his career, he nevertheless worked in applied mathematics when he formulated a law that describes how proportions of dominant and recessive genetic traits will propagate in a large population (1908). Hardy considered it unimportant but it has proved of major importance in population genetics and evolutionary biology. Ironically, in his book entitled A Mathematician’s Apology (1940), he wrote:
I have never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.
As it was also independently discovered by Wilhelm Weinberg, it is known as the Hardy-Weinberg principle.
Hardy–Weinberg principle for twoalleles: the horizontal axis shows the two allele frequenciesp and q, the vertical axis shows the genotype frequencies and the three possible genotypes are represented by the different glyphs.
On this date, the English archaeologist and paleoanthropologist Mary Douglas Leakey was born. She made several of the most important fossil finds subsequently interpreted and publicized by her husband, the noted anthropologist Louis Leakey. For every vivid claim made by Louis about the origins of man, the supporting evidence tended to come from Mary’s scrupulous scientific approach. After Louis’ death in 1972, she enjoyed her most spectacular find: three trails of fossilised hominid footprints 3.6 million years old, which she discovered at Laetoli in Tanzania (1978-9). They incontrovertibly demonstrated that ancestors of Homo sapiens were walking upright at a much earlier period than previously believed.
On this date, the French mineralogist, geologist, and naturalist Alexandre Brongniart was born. He was the first person to arrange the geologic formations of the Tertiary Period (from 66.4 to 1.6 million years ago) in chronological order and describe them. He made the first systematic study of trilobites, an extinct group of arthropods that became important in determining the chronology of Paleozoic strata (from 540 to 245 million years ago). He also helped introduce the principle of geologic dating by the identification of distinctive fossils, called index fossils, found in each stratum and noted that the Paris formations had been produced under alternate freshwater and saltwater conditions. [Notice that the use of index fossils for the relative dating of rocks and fossils was established long before the use of radioisotopes for their absolute dating, contrary to what some "creationists" would have you believe.]
Illustration from Lindley’s book entitled Sertum orchidaceum: A Wreath of the Most Beautiful Orchidaceous Flowers (1837-41)
On this date, the English botanist and horticulturist John Lindley was born. His attempts to formulate a natural system of plant classification greatly aided the transition from the artificial system (considering the characters of single parts) to the natural system (considering all characters of a plant).
In 1818 0r 1819, Lindley went to London, where he was engaged by J. C. Loudon to write the descriptive portion of the Encyclopaedia of Plants. In his labors on this undertaking, which was completed in 1829, he became convinced of the superiority of the “natural” system of A. L. de Jussieu, as distinguished from the “artificial” system of Linnaeus followed in the Encyclopaedia; the conviction found expression in A Synopsis of British Flora, arranged according to the Natural Order (1829) and in An Introduction to the Natural System of Botany (1830).
On this date, the South African physical anthropologist and paleontologist Raymond Arthur Dart was born in Australia. His discoveries of fossil hominids led to significant insights into the evolutionary origins of human beings.
In 1924, working with students in the Taung limestone works in Bechuanaland, he was rewarded with the most interesting find. It seemed at first to be just another primate skull. Then, Dart noticed how amazingly close to human it looked. He recognized as a “missing link” in the evolution from ape to man. Dart had found the Taung child, only three years old at the time of death. He named it Australopithecus africanus, “australis” meaning south and “pithecus” meaning ape. His theory is now generally accepted, but was originally very controversial.
On this date, the Danish botanist and geneticist Wilhelm Ludvig Johannsen was born. His experiments in plant heredity offered strong support to the mutation theory of the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries (that changes in heredity come about through sudden, discrete changes of the heredity units in germ cells). Many geneticists thought Johannsen’s ideas dealt a severe blow to Charles Darwin’s theory that new species were produced by the slow process of natural selection.
Johannsen explained his ideas in his book entitled On Heredity and Variation (1896), which he revised and lengthened with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s laws and reissued as The Elements of Heredity in 1905. The enlarged German edition of this work was published in 1909 and became the most influential book on genetics in Europe. In it, Johannsen coined the terms “gene”, “phenotype”, and “genotype”.
On this date, the British physician, geologist, and paleontologist Gideon Algernon Mantell was born. He discovered 4 of the 5 genera of dinosaurs known during his time.
Illustration of fossil Iguanodon teeth with a modern iguana jaw from Mantell’s 1825 paper describing Iguanodon.
Mantell’s life-long hobby was all-consuming. While walking with his wife in 1822, he discovered fossils that he identified as teeth. When he saw the connection with teeth of the present lizard, the iguana, in 1825, he named the animal the Iguanadon (“fossil teeth”). Subsequently, he made additional finds of fossil bones of other large animals which he described accurately: the Hylaeosaurus, Pelorosaurus, and Regnosaurus. His contemporary, paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, coined the word dinosaur (“terrible lizards”). Mantell’s books include Medals of Creation (1844).
On this date, a report of a fossil closely related to humans, found by Raymond Dart in 1924, was published in a newspaper. The Star of Johannesburg, South Africa announced the find, instead of the professional journal Nature, when the editors of the journal changed their mind. With his students, Dart had made the discovery in the Taung limestone works in the Harts Valley of Bechuanaland. When an endocranial cast was found, at first it seemed to be just another primate skull. Then, Dart noticed how amazingly close to human it looked. He had discovered the remains of what came to be known informally as the “Taung child”, who was only three years old at the time of death. He named it Australopithecus africanus,” australis” meaning south and “pithecus” meaning ape. His theory is now generally accepted, but was originally very controversial.
Part 1. Fossil Mammalia (1838 – 1840), by Richard Owen (Preface and Geological introduction by Darwin).
Part 2. Mammalia (1838 – 1839), by George R. Waterhouse (Geographical introduction and A notice of their habits and ranges by Darwin).
Part 3. Birds (1838 – 1841), by John Gould.
Part 4. Fish (1840 – 1842), by Leonard Jenyns.
Part 5. Reptiles (1842 – 1843), by Thomas Bell (Darwin also contributed notices of habits and ranges throughout the text of Mammalia and Birds, and the text of the Fish and the Reptiles included numerous notes by him, mostly taken from his labels of specimens.).
In The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, Darwin described the habitats and behaviors of the living species he had collected, and the localities from which his fossils had come. For example, this is a life-sized lithograph by artist George Scharf of the fossilized skull of Toxodon platensis that appeared in the first volume. The skull of Toxodon, an enormous extinct mammal belonging to a group without modern descendants, was one of the many spectacular fossils Darwin sent home from South America. Some boys in a remote village in Uruguay had used the skull for target practice and knocked a tooth out with a stone. Darwin bought it from them and was pleased to find a “perfect tooth, which exactly fitted one of the sockets in this skull,” 200 miles away.
On this date, the Swedish geologist and paleontologist Gunnar Säve-Söderbergh was born. He took bachelor’s and licentiate’s degrees at Uppsala University in 1931 and 1933, respectively, and was appointed professor of historical geology at Uppsala in 1937.
In 1928, Säve-Söderbergh led a team that discovered extraordinarily fossiliferous beds in the upper Devonian of east Greenland. These 360-million-year-old rocks contained numerous fossils of bony fish and one set of particularly interesting remains. These latter fossils possessed a fish-like tail, ribs, and back, yet also had limbs with fingers and toes. This new species was dubbed Ichthyostega by Säve-Söderbergh in 1932 and was described in a series of papers by Erik Jarvik. It is widely featured in the scientific literature as the first “four-legged fish”. Although Ichthyostega may not be the ancestor of today’s terrestrial vertebrates, it no doubt is a transitional form.
The hind limb of Ichthyostega.
Ichthyostega’s combination of fish and amphibian characters led to speculation about how the origin of tetrapods and the invasion of land by vertebrates could be related. One hypothesis, formulated by Barrell and later revised by Romer, held that one group of fish, such as Ichthyostega, adapted to more terrestrial environments due to the drying of Devonian ponds. Recent discoveries have changed this conception entirely.
Säve-Söderbergh was made an honorary doctor at Uppsala in 1942 and was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1948. Unfortunately, tuberculosis put an untimely end to his career. He died in 1948 at Solbacken, a sanatorium in Dalarna, Sweden.
On this date, in a letter to J.D. Hooker, Charles Darwin made a prediction that was not confirmed until very recently. Darwin had recently received many orchids from James Bateman, including one very intriguing species called the star-of-Bethlehem or comet orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale Thouars). Native to Madagascar, the comet orchid blooms beginning in December and is phalenophilus, meaning “moth-loving”. Its waxy white flowers are scentless during the day and both highly visible and fragrant after dark to attract the night-flyers. Most notably, each flower has a remarkable spur or nectary up to 30 centimeters (12 inches) long, but only the tip of the spur contains nectar. In today’s letter, musing on what could suck the nectar from such a flower, Darwin predicted that an insect with an extremely long proboscis would be discovered and that it would be the major pollinator of the orchid.
In 1856, a sphinx moth had been discovered in southeastern Africa. It was named Macrosila morgani, Morgan’s sphinx moth. But no one associated the moth on the continent of Africa with the orchid on Madagascar. Charles Darwin died in 1882. Twenty-one years after his death, a subspecies of Morgan’s sphinx moth was discovered on the island. And it fit Darwin’s prediction, having a proboscis long enough to reach into the tip of the orchid’s nectary. In 1903, the sphinx moth’s genus was reclassified to Xanthopan and the ‘predicted’ Madagascan moth was named Xanthopan morgani subspecies praedicta (although the subspecies was later determined to be invalid, since it is identical to the mainland form of the species).
On this date, the first edition of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication by Charles Darwin was published. It is probably the second in importance of all his works. This was a follow-up work, written in response to criticisms that his theory of evolution was unsubstantiated. Darwin here supports his views via analysis of various aspects of plant and animal life, including an inventory of varieties and their physical and behavioral characteristics, and an investigation of the impact of a species’ surrounding environment and the effect of both natural and forced changes in this environment.
On this date, the Dutch surgeon, anthropologist, anatomist, and paleontologist Eugene Dubois was born. Dubois vowed to prove Darwin right by finding “the missing link”, the evolutionary connection between apes and modern humans. In October of 1891, while digging into fossil-rich ash and river sediments on the island of Java in what is now Indonesia, he found skeletal remains of what he later named Pithecanthropus erectus. The name meant “ape-human which stood upright.” Now known as Homo erectus or informally as “Java Man”, it is considered to be the direct ancestor of modern humans. Dubois was the first person to ever deliberately search for fossils of human ancestors. Only a handful of fossil humans had already been discovered, all Neandertals, and those were by chance.
The Homo erectusskullcap(Trinil 2, holotype) discovered by Dubois.
On this date, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown read his first scientific paper entitled “The botanical history of Angus“, to the Edinburgh Natural History Society, although it was never published in print in his lifetime. He was born on 21 December 1773, so that he was but a little over eighteen when he read this essay. Later in life, he made important contributions to science largely through his pioneering use of the microscope.
In 1827, while examining pollen grains under a microscope, Brown observed minute particles within vacuoles in the pollen grains executing a continuous jittery motion. He then observed the same motion in particles of dust, enabling him to rule out the hypothesis that the effect was due to pollen being alive. Although Brown did not provide a theory to explain the motion, and Jan Ingenhousz already had reported a similar effect using charcoal particles in German and French publications of 1784 and 1785, the phenomenon is now known as “Brownian motion.” [In 1905, Albert Einstein postulated that Brownian motion was direct evidence of molecular action, thus supporting the atomic theory of matter.]
Robert Brown is perhaps most famous for identifying a structure within cells that he named the “nucleus” in a paper read to the Linnean Society of London in 1831 and published in 1833. Furthermore, he suggested that the nucleus may be an essential component of the cell. He discovered the nucleus while studying orchids microscopically, in the cells of the flower’s outer layer. The nucleus had been observed before, perhaps as early as 1682 by the Dutch microscopist Leeuwenhoek, and Franz Bauer had noted and drawn it as a regular feature of plant cells in 1802, but it was Brown who gave it the name it bears to this day (while giving credit to Bauer’s drawings). Neither Bauer nor Brown thought the nucleus to be universal, and Brown thought it to be primarily confined to Monocotyledons.
On this date, the noted geneticist Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky was born in Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia). He emigrated to the United States in 1927. Dobzhansky was a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis.
On this date, the U.S. Supreme Court in Keyishian v. Board of Regents of University of State of New York ruled that faculty members’ First Amendment rights were violated by a state requirement that they sign a certificate stating that they were not and never had been Communists and by vague and overly broad restrictions on verbal and written expression. Specifically, political “loyalty oaths” required of New York State employees (including educators) under state civil service laws were declared void, and New York education laws against “treasonable or seditious speech” were found to violate the First Amendment right to free speech. Thus, the Court finally awarded to teachers and professors the full complement of free speech and political privacy rights afforded other citizens.
The Supreme Court famously emphasized the importance of academic freedom in higher education:
Our nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom. . . The classroom is peculiarly the marketplace of ideas.’ The nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.’
On this date in London was born Francis Bacon, an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. His works established and popularized an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method or simply, the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today. Francis Bacon influenced all of science, once proclaiming, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.”
Bacon’s works include his Essays, as well as the Colours of Good and Evil and the Meditationes Sacrae, all published in 1597. His famous aphorism, “knowledge is power” (scientia potentia est), is found in the Meditations. He also wrote In felicem memoriam Elizabethae, a eulogy for the Queen written in 1609. The principal work of Francis Bacon is Instauratio magna scientiarum (The Great Restoration of Learning), which was intended to embrace the entire field of knowables, both theoretical and practical. But of this vast work he finished only the first and second parts: De degnitate et augmentis scientiarum (Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, published 1605), and Novum organum scientiarum (New Organ of Learning, published 1620). Bacon left only notes for what was to have been the other parts of his monumental work. Interestingly, in the Novum organum he cites three world-changing inventions:
Printing, gunpowder and the compass: These three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, in so much that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.
Bacon is arguably also one of the few homosexual writers from periods as distant as the Renaissance for whom there is contemporary testimony about his sexuality. On April 17, 1593, Bacon’s mother wrote to his brother Anthony castigating Bacon for keeping a “bloody Percy . . . as a coach companion and bed companion.” “Bed companion” need not have implied eroticism since the nonsexual same-sex sharing of beds was common in the period, but “coach companion” would have been recognized as a sexual reference and thus defines “bed companion” here as one, too. Coaches were one of the few places in those times that provided privacy for a sexual liaison, and “coach” language was commonly used in the Renaissance to signify a sexual connection.
This blog includes posts on topics of interest to me and/or my students, especially history, evolutionary biology, and human rights. The content, views, and opinions in this blog are mine and in no way reflect those of my employer(s).
You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any work published on this blog under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original article on this blog are required.
Some of my Favorite Quotations:
My "perfect" reader is not a scholar but neither is he an ignoramus; he does not read because he has to, nor as a pastime, nor to make a splash in society, but because he is curious about many things, wishes to choose among them and does not wish to delegate this choice to anyone; he knows the limits of his competence and education, and directs his choices accordingly. -- Primo Levi ["This Above All: Be Clear", New York Times, 20 November 1988]
Remember, success is a journey, not a destination. Have faith in your ability. -- Bruce Lee (1940-1973)
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. --Siddhārtha Gautama [Buddha] (ca. 563 B.C.E. – 483 B.C.E.)
Through learning the past, we understand the future. --Confucius (551 B.C.E. – 479 B.C.E.)
There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. -- George Washington [address to Congress, 8 January 1790]
The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. -- Thomas Jefferson [author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence]
Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant. -- John Adams
It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals; for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat. -- Richard Hofstadter [Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, pp. 145-146]
Academic freedom is not a luxury or a special privilege. It is the necessary foundation of our educational system, one of the essential building blocks of our free society. -- Joan Wallach Scott, historian
The all-important fact in the situation is this; any time the college professors of America get ready to take control of their own destinies, and of the intellectual life of their institutions, they can do it. There is not a college or university in the United States today which could resist the demands of its faculty a hundred percent organized and meaning business. -- Upton Sinclair
I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country. -- Thomas Jefferson [letter to George Logan dated 12 November 1816]
Those who reject biological evolution do so, usually, not out of reason, but out of unjustified vanity. -- Isaac Asimov
It is, no doubt, a very laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them. But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them to learn anything but what has been made easy and interesting, one of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which however did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of anything which is disagreeable to them....A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can. -- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Autobiography
How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight while a lame mind says it is we who are limping. But for that we would feel pity and not anger. -- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. -- Carl Sagan
The young specialist in English Lit ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. ... My answer to him was, "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -- Isaac Asimov
Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms. -- Theodosius Dobzhansky ["Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher vol.35 (March 1973)]
I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field. --Albert Einstein, charter member AFT Local 552 Princeton University, comments in 1938 on why he joined the union. In addition, he had also joined the American Association of University Professors in 1935.
Brainmuseum.org A website devoted to the comparative anatomy of mammalian brains, including humans.
Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, The Only this site contains Darwin's complete publications, 20,000 private papers, the largest Darwin bibliography, manuscript catalog and hundreds of supplementary works: specimens, biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works, and much more.
Darwin Correspondence Project, The On this site you can read the full texts of more than 5000 of Darwin's letters, and find information on 10,000 more.
Decline in American Education This website critiques the use of Student Evaluation of Teachers (SET) data in colleges and universities.
Educational Games Play educational games about discoveries in medicine or physiology, courtesy of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Oslo, Norway.
eSkeletons Project, The A website devoted to the comparative anatomy of human and primate skeletons.
EvoS The evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University (SUNY).
Foundation for Critical Thinking, The A website to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking - thinking predisposed toward intellectual empathy, humility, perseverance, integrity, and responsibility.
Gravity: A Theory in Crisis (?) A satirical look at how evangelical scientists might refute gravity with a new "Intelligent Falling" Theory.
Human Evolution: Interpreting Evidence Explores how scientists understand our evolutionary history by considering the facts and interpretations of the human fossil record.
Huxley File, The The letters and publications by, and historic commentary on, Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as "Darwin's bulldog".
NCBI - Bookshelf A growing collection of biomedical books, free and full text.
Skeptic's Dictionary, The: Evaluating Personal Experience From the website devoted to debunking claims of the supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific comes an article pointing out the difference between data provided by anecdote and data from randomized, double-blind, controlled experiments.
Skeptoid Answers the question, "What is a Skeptic?"
Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies, A A collection of named fallacies, such as "ad hominem", and of fallacious arguments, that is, examples of reasoning that may commit one or more of the named fallacies, or are bad in some way yet to be classified.
Tree of Life Web Project Biologists from around the world provide information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history, and characteristics.
Virtual Fossil Museum, The An educational resource dedicated to fossils; high-quality pictures of fossils are presented that are organized by fossil sites and systematics.
On this date in Rome under the authority of Pope Clement VIII, the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini, or, as he styled himself in his works, Giulio Cesare, had his tongue cut out and was strangled at the stake; his body then was burned to ashes. Like Giordano Bruno, though considered intellectually inferior to him, he was part of the movement to break with the dogmas of scholasticism and the authority of Aristotle, and made a courageous contribution to the foundations of a new philosophy.Vanini resembles Bruno, not only in his wandering life and in his death, but also in his unorthodox religious ideas. What is remarkable about Vanini is that he was the first person to theorize the evolution of mankind — the first since the ancient Greeks of the Miletus School around 800 B.C.E. Anaximander had posited that life began in the sea. Vanini should have gone down in history as a wonderful hero and tribute to human ingenuity, as the man who enlightened two thousand years of ignorance.
