Domain: darwin-online.org.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to darwin-online.org.uk.
Comments · 4
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Re:It depends on what you mean
"[...] the kind of evolution and survival of the fittest that animals go through [...]"
Quoting Darwin ( Descent of Man , page 77):
Many animals, however, certainly sympathise with each other's distress or danger. This is the case even with birds; Capt. Stansbury11 found on a salt lake in Utah an old and completely blind pelican, which was very fat, and must have been long and well fed by his companions. Mr. Blyth, as he informs me, saw Indian crows feeding two or three of their companions which were blind; and I have heard of an analogous case with the domestic cock.
A more recent example contradicting "survival of the fittest" among animals:
Orca Whales Take Care of a Permanently Disabled Individual – For Years:
Stumpy was cared for by these whales – on at least two occasions other orcas brought him fish, and often they shielded him from passing boats.
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3 mentions of God- one in the textThe complete text is online, the word God appears only three times, two of which are in a quotation of Bacon on page ii before the title page. The only appearance of the word God in the actual text is:
He who believes that each equine species was independently created, will, I presume, assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary, both under nature and under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like other species of the genus; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus. To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore.
... which is not exactly an expression of faith.
Darwin did have deist beliefs at the time of the writing, which is reflected by his frequent references to a Creator, but that Creator is not necessarily theistic God. -
Principia Mathematica & On the Origin of Speci
My wife wants my 8 year old daughter to be a writer. (She is an English major who works at a hedge fund). I want my daughter to be scientist. (I am a psychology major, now building web apps).
Finally I realized: why not both?
In my opinion 2 of the top 10 most important books (in any field) written in the last 500 years are science books:
Newton's Principia Mathematica
and
Darwin's On the Origin of Species
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Darwin, Copyright held by Cambridge!
The works published are all long out of UK copyright, but Cambridge University asserts
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The User warrants to the University that the User will not infringe the University's intellectual property rights herein nor will the User breach the intellectual property rights of any third party herein."
This is their legal right, but it means, for example, that if Project Gutenberg wanted to mount these works, they would need to scan them proofread them and do all the work again. This seems to miss the point.
Anthony Staines