Quote: Eileen Whitehead Erlanson defining taxonomic inflation
I was reading today to find the origin of the term “taxonomic inflation”. This is a common idea today from people who criticize an overzealous attention to d...
All posts tagged with history of biology
Quote: Colin Groves on primate species
In 2001, the Australian zoologist Colin Groves published an essay in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology giving his perspective on classification in primat...
Quote: Darwin on the tree of life
Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, introduced the idea that the relationships between organisms form a tree.
McKenna and Bell on ranked categories
I learned mammalian systematics and cladistics around the same time that Malcolm McKenna and Susan Bell published their 1997 book, Classification of Mammals:...
Quote: Blumenbach looking for the horned rabbit
I have open Johann Blumbenbach’s A Short System of Comparative Anatomy, in the 1807 English translation by William Lawrence. The full text is on Google Books.
Quote: Darwin on the line of progenitors leading to humans
In the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin ends his discussion of the relationship of other animals to humans with this evocative paragraph:
Link: History of The Population Bomb
Charles C. Mann has written a historical account of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb as a part of Smithsonian magazine’s retrospective on the year 1968: “T...
Link: Article on the life and death of George Price
Michael Regnier has an article in Mosaic about the exceptional life and tragic end of George Price: “The man who gave himself away”.
Some early uses of the term ‘missing link’ in anthropology
I’ve been tracing some early uses of the term “missing link”. Paleontologists really hate this term today. It conjures the pre-evolutionary idea of a “Great ...
Link: A 137-year-old botanical experiment
On the subject of long-running experiments in biology, Atlas Obscura has a story about a 137-year-old experiment in the germination of common weeds: “The wor...
Link: Dark flies
A laboratory at Kyoto University has been maintaining a long-term evolution experiment on fruit flies that started in 1954. Now the flies are adapted to livi...
Link: William King, namer of Homo neanderthalensis
Paige Madison looks into the history of William King, a nineteenth-century geologist at Queens College in Galway, Ireland, who first published a name for the...
Link: On Huxley and Busk
Recommended: a post by history of science student Paige Madison on the forgotten George Busk: “On Being Remembered: Huxley, Busk, & Scientific Friendship...
Quote: Dobzhansky on the hope of human knowledge
Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Man and Natural Selection” (American Scientist 49:285, 1961):
Lewontin on Gould
David Sloan Wilson recently interviewed Richard Lewontin for the website, This View of Life: “The Spandrels Of San Marco Revisited: An Interview With Richard...
Theodore Roosevelt on human evolution
Once upon a time, the U.S. had a President who could write articles about human evolution: Theodore Roosevelt!
Link: Peter and Rosemary Grant in New York Times
Jonathan Weiner wrote a well-known book about the long-term field studies of Galapagos finches by Peter and Rosemary Grant, titled The Beak of the Finch: A S...
Would we fund past Nobel Prize winners in today’s climate?
An editorial by Stanley Fields in this month’s issue of Genetics asks, “Would Fred Sanger Get Funded Today?”. Sanger died last year at the age of 95.
A look at public perception of Darwinism, circa 1930
British Pathé, the famous newsreel producer, has released its catalog of film content to YouTube. There’s not a rich backlog of film footage pertinent to pal...
Remembering Wallace
Jerry Coyne has a guest post by Andrew Berry recognizing the history of Alfred Russel Wallace, co-innovator of the concept of natural selection: “A guest pos...
Shipwrecked Wallace
Jerry Coyne has a guest post today by Andrew Berry, who recounts an episode in the early life of Alfred Russel Wallace: “The most poignant episode in all of ...
"Where did it go wrong for Wallace's reputation?"
The BBC has an article by Kevin Leonard, pondering “Why does Charles Darwin eclipse Alfred Russel Wallace?” They both thought of the idea of natural selectio...
Starting my descent through The Descent of Man: Introduction
I have a number of goals for 2013. Several of them will play out here on the weblog, a few others will lead to publications. A handful have more speculative ...
Quote: Huxley on traveler's tales and primate discovery
Thomas Huxley devoted his 1863 book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, to describing what was then known about the anatomy and biology of the living apes...
Quote: Haeckel on our ape "heirlooms"
Ernst Haeckel, in the History of Creation, English translation in the Project Gutenberg version:
Darwin's primate phylogeny
I’m doing some reading and ran across a 2009 post by Brian Switek (“Darwin, Ardi and the African apes”), who touched on a little-appreciated aspect of Darwin...
Blumenbach, Haeckel, Dobzhansky
Here’s an illustration of the history of biology:
Quote: E. Ray Lankester on English for nomenclature
Here’s a sentiment for popular science from the Victorian Age, from the translation note on Ernst Haeckel’s The History of Creation, which was supervised by ...
Mailbag: Gill slits and Paley
From a reader:
Anthropology 105, lecture 8: Ears
This lecture uses the auditory system to illustrate Mendelian inheritance. First the earlobes – a classic example in teaching laboratories, where attached ea...
Darwiniana
Larry Moran posts a bit of Darwin history, focusing on a meeting with William Gladstone “Happy Birthday Charles Darwin”.
Steno: not just for stratigraphy
Matthew Cobb, guest-blogging at Why Evolution Is True, gives an appreciation of Nicholas Steno’s contributions to biology: “Googles doodle: women have eggs”.
A trip to Darwin's home
Today I visited Down House, Charles Darwin’s home southeast of London. Mark Pallen, my gracious host from the University of Birmingham, brought us to the hou...
Galton remembered
Steve Jones writes in the BBC News on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Francis Galton’s death: “Francis Galton: The man who drew up the ‘ugly map...
Split lumps
The Friends of Darwin blog notes that the terms “lumpers” and “splitters” in taxonomy go back to Darwin’s time. The example is a letter Darwin received from ...
Kin selection strikes back
Last year I noted the publication of a paper in Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson, which claimed that kin selection is not a suffic...
Reflecting on Nabokov
Carl Zimmer yesterday had a NY Times article about some new genetic work on butterflies – the interesting thing was that the work vindicated a scenario for N...
Species concept overview
John Wilkins is an expert on species concepts in biology; he has written a short piece for wide circulation on the topic which is archived at his blog: “How ...
Quote: Dobzhansky on the tropics
Theodosius Dobzhansky, concluding a paper titled, “Evolution in the Tropics”, which considered the role of physical environment versus other factors as evolu...
Quote: Huxley and the gorilla mystique
Thomas Henry Huxley, in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature:
Mailbag: Hiding balls
Re: “Darwin hides the ball”:
Inclusive fitness works
I can’t believe the amount of attention the paper by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson Nowak:eusociality:2010 has gotten. It was in last week...
Quote: Darwin hides the ball
Darwin, writing in his Autobiography about natural selection:
Quote: Huxley on traditions
Thomas Henry Huxley, the first line in On the Natural History of Man-Like Apes:
Gorillaz marching
Eric Michael Johnson, formerly of Primate Diaries, writes:
Darwin memoriam
Larry Moran posts a contemporary description of Darwin’s funeral: “Charles Darwin died on this day in 1882.”
A missing etymological link
I got a press question about the term “missing link” the other day. For obvious reasons. The question arose, where did the term come from?
We control the horizontal
New Scientist has an article by Mark Buchanan discussing horizontal transfer as a mechanism for the evolution of early life: “Horizontal and vertical: The ev...
Clearing the stack
Here are some links that have been piling up in my browser tabs this week: