Annie’s death was not the cause of Darwin’s agnosticism 6 Jul 2009 That rough punk of evolution, Mark Pallen, has a table up documenting the formulation and spread of the story that it was the horrible death of Darwin’s favoured daughter, Annie, which, he reckons, is not true. He’s working up a paper on the matter, he says. But Darwin’s stated reasons in the Autobiography, that he found the Christian religion morally outrageous and intellectually unconvincing, and that he was older when he gave up his religion, say otherwise. We’ll have to wait for Pallen’s article, but some people find it hard to accept that anyone, let alone one of the clearest thinkers of all time, might choose a religious position for intellectual reasons. Keep an eye out for it. Evolution History Religion
Education My Absent Career 2: From theolog to undergrad 6 Dec 20221 Jan 2023 Since my mother worked, I would stop at the local library on my way home. I had until she got home about an hour and a half later. So I would read books in an hour and a half, since the ones I liked were adult books and I was… Read More
Administrative Slowly being seduced by Portugal 22 Apr 2009 I gave my talk today on tree thinking at the local science museum for kids and the general public, which is amazingly popular. The Portuguese seem to hold science and knowledge in high esteem. Which is great. The Ciências Viva helped pay for my ticket, so I hope they liked… Read More
Evolution Quetelet and the origin of statistical and population thinking 4 Jun 2009 Adolphe Quetelet is a much overlooked figure in the history of scientific methodology: he marked that populations had distributed properties that were largely constant, even though individuals varied in ways that seemed indeterminate. He noted that hat sizes and belt sizes were constantly distributed in different samples. Will Thomas at… Read More
The autobiography is – as you know – a very imperfect source of information about Darwin. Pallen’s going to have to do a lot better than that if he’s going to correct Moore. Unless he can actually do some digging in the letters, my gut feeling is that he’s fighting a losing game here. (And if he wants to get this published in an historical journal, it’s best to avoid the “spread of a myth” angle. It’s just not interesting.)
If you have evidence of a positive sort that A believed X for reasons R, and a hypothesis that A actually believed X for nonreasons Y, and the argument requires that you must not only disbelieve the evidence, but do so in several instances, because of a prior commitment to the view that people don’t believe things for stated reasons but rather because of emotional and economic forces they are partially if at all aware of, then I would say there’s something wrong here. The Autobiography is not, as I happen to know, all that Mark is relying upon; and the myth is interesting because of who said it and why. And it’s not for a history journal (I also happen to know 🙂 ).