Dairy

STS 112 Dr Adam Lucas

Portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, c.1792.

The goddess of poetry pulls aside the veil to reveal Artemis of Ephesus, the many-breasted goddess of wild nature.

Charles & Catherine Darwin, 1816

Portrait of Darwin by George Richmond, 1840

Devotee of French evolutionary thinkers Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck & Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Robert Jameson, Neptunist (1774-1854)

Neptunism

The oceans are responsible for the earth’s geology.

Plutonism

Volcanic activity is responsible for the earth’s geology.

 Stable monarchy under George III & George IV.

 Paragon of religious conservatism.

 Suspicious of free-thinking & political radicalism

coming from America & the Continent.

 Anglican Church controls intellectual debate.

 Church supports science that supports Creationism.

 Obsessed with justifying scripture and God’s

role in the Creation, which meant engaging

with scientific ideas & fighting against atheism.

 Many books published on physico-theology,

astro-theology, bronto-theology, hydro

theology, pyro-theology, etc, etc.

 William Paley (1743-1805)  William Buckland (1784-1856)

Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802)

 synthesis of natural history & natural theology with fixist

assumptions;

 extremely well written & logically argued;  remained a best seller throughout 19th century;  examples taken from medicine & natural history;  drew upon a wide range of metaphors & analogies, most

famous of which was the watchmaker analogy.

(1805-1865) Captain Robert FitzRoy

HMS Beagle in Sydney Harbour, January 1836

“These huge reptiles surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs, and large cacti, seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals. The few dull-coloured birds cared no more for me than they did the great tortoises.” - Charles Darwin, Beagle Diaries.

HMS Beagle in Sydney (above) & Hobart (below).

Catastrophism

 Fossils of species that no

longer exist have been wiped out by God in past catastrophes, e.g.Noah’s Flood.

 God then restocked the earth

with new species through multiple creations.

 Earth is only several

thousands of years old.

Uniformitarianism

 Copious evidence that

geological change has occurred through slow and steady natural processes.

 Even though fossil record may

support idea of many catastrophes in earth’s history, gaps in fossil record are just due to lack of knowledge.

 Earth is hundreds of thousands

or millions of years old.

 1831: Darwin thinks earth’s geology is result of major catastrophes.

 1835: Darwin now a

convinced uniformitarian & evolutionist, scrubbing out earlier diary entries & writing how foolish he was to think that.

 Catastrophist theories don’t address problem of

geographical distribution of similar species.

 How can very similar species exist very close to one

another geographically?

 Likewise, if organisms have been designed by God

to suit their particular environmental circumstances, why do introduced species flourish in environments for which they have not been specifically designed?

 What’s the relationship between species and their

environments?

 Populations grow in geometric ratios, i.e., 1,

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.

 But the means of subsistence only grow

arithmetically, i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.

 Competition for resources is therefore

inevitable, as resources are limited.

1. Evidence for the massive number of extinctions found through the fossil record at various sites.
2. The peculiar geographical distribution of species.
3. The curious adaptation of individual species to their ecological niches.

1. Organisms aren’t adapted by God to new environments.
2. Organisms adapt to environments through gradual responses to environmental change.
3. Organisms can choose to adapt, or move on, or face
   • blivion.
4. There’s a dialectical relationship between plants & animals responding to environments, & of the environment changing in response to activity of plants &animals within it.

 Adaptation seems to suggest that animals

can adapt to their environment.

 Transmutation suggests that ‘some kind of

selection is going on’, perhaps nature is selecting which individuals will survive and which will die. In other words, nature must

select.

 1838 Darwin reads Malthus  1842 Darwin produces a first sketch of his theory in 45 pp.  1844 Darwin produces a first draft of the book in 240 pp. In the same year, he reads Robert Chambers’ anonymously published Vestiges of Natural History, a massive and controversial bestseller which explains the development of the world. Attacked on all sides for being atheistic, materialistic and even ‘French’, Darwin realized that if he published the book at that time, he would get the same response.  1845 Alfred Russel Wallace begins to conceive of the origin of species via natural

selection in his personal correspondence.

 1855 Wallace publishes a paper in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History titled

“On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species”. His notebooks from Malaya during this period show that he was working on a book titled [On the]

Organic Law of Change.

 1855-58 Wallace sends material from the Malay Archipelago of his vision of evolution

by natural selection to Darwin. The combination of adaptation, transmutation and natural selection Wallace had written up before Darwin, so Darwin worked feverishly at getting his material into a publishable form before Wallace recovered from a bout of malaria and was able to complete his own work. Darwin later fudged on when he got Wallace’s work from Malaya.