Darwin's Private Papers Get Released To The Internet

bibekpaudel writes "ScienceDaily reports that a wealth of papers belonging to Charles Darwin have been published on the internet, some for the first time. Some 20,000 items and 90,000 images were posted today to http://darwin-online.org.uk/. The new site is the largest collection of Darwin's work in history, according to organizers from Cambridge University Library 'This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,' said John van Wyhe, director of the project. The collection includes thousands of notes and drafts of his scientific writings, notes from the voyage of the Beagle when he began to formulate his controversial theory of evolution, and his first recorded doubts about the permanence of species."

Comments

How fitting...

[Kingrames]

...that his works would be the ones to survive.

Re:How fitting...

[Rei]

What truly is the underpinning for any morality at all if everything exists because of random chance?

Read some Nietzsche. Learn about existentialism, perspectivism, nihilism. Questions on the existence of meaning in a world devoid of objective truth have already been asked and answered a countless times over throughout the ages.

My story? As a teenager (unversed in philosophy), I reached the same point as Kierkegaard's "Young Man":

How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the managerI have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?

In a world devoid of objective truth, rationalism leads to an inherent contradiction. Love is meaningless, hate is meaningless. Joy, what people strive for, meaningless. Given this, what meaning is there to any choice? None. What reason to not, say, walk around naked all the time? None. What reason to live at all? None. No *inherent* meaning. Yet, choices are continually taken. To stop living, that *too* would be a choice. No matter what you choose, there are ultimately meaningless consequences associated with it.

To make a choice, I independently invented existentialism. No choice you make has an inherent meaning. But you can *create* meaning. In fact, you don't need to create meaning for every individual action; all you need is to create overarching principles, and everything else falls from that. Yes, your principles are utterly meaningless. In existentialism, you know this and you accept this. Note that the only difference between existentialism and a standard theistic viewpoint of a universe of objective truth is that someone else told you a particular set of principles and you accepted them without question. At least in existentialism, you have a choice.

My choice began with what I'd term "lazy existentialism". Going with the flow; it's the easiest way. Adopting the general basic principles of society around me -- not every nuance, many of which are contradictory, but the overarching elements. This quickly formed into the independent invention of humanism. The morality of humanism would be quite familiar to most people with a religious worldview -- except that it's a lot less self-contradictory and judgemental ;). A religious person adheres to their beliefs because of a sense of divine punishment. A humanist adheres to their beliefs because to violate them is to betray one's self revert to nihilism.

But this is a brief summary, and just my particular case for the evolution of my worldview evolution. Philosophy is a far broader topic.

I wonder how much the theory has changed

[Devin Jeanpierre]

Considering the 'evolution' (in the loosest possible sense) of his own theory, I'm wondering, first of all, how much it's really changed, and second of all, how many people will either get confused, or deliberately cause confusion, using these documents. It's not unheard of for certain creationists to misrepresent the theory, and the original flawed drafts and theory seem like fuel for this.

Re:I wonder how much the theory has changed

[MightyMartian]

Using Darwin's theory to attack evolutionary theory is rather like using Newtonian physics to attack General Relativity. Like physics, biology has grown substantially since both men's time.

Darwin did get some things run. Most obvious was the means of heredity. He was not aware of Mendel's work. In fact, Mendelian genetics pretty much eclipsed Darwinian selection early in the 20th century. That, not Natural Selection, was the origin of a lot of the Social Darwinist/Eugenics movements; the application of barnyard selective breeding to humans, something that's quite opposed to Darwin's fundamental point that species could become better adapted to their environments naturally, whereas eugenics/social darwinism was more in the mode that a species needed active improvement, because the natural state was towards degradation.

That's why Expelled and all those nuts out there trying to associate Darwin's theory with the eugenics movement and with Nazi race theory are completely off base. Darwin's theory is in opposition the very idea that a population's reproduction needs to be rigorously managed (as a farmer would do) for a "better" (which, in Darwinian selection, is always a relative, statistical view, and not an absolute one as it was with the eugenics proponents) species.

Re:Survival

[boris111]

Then there is no hope for us.

Re:Controversial?

[king-manic]

Oh, the eternal burden of white man... surviving as a race. His Assertion: For all civilized parts, evolution controversy = no.
Your Assertion: For all civilized parts, people = white
Counter point:
In parts of the US, evolution controversy = yes.
Those parts people = mostly white.
Thus your assertion creates a contradiction.

Not really.

[jd]

Adaptation implies a flawed transfer, as a perfect transfer cannot yield the ability to adapt, only the ability to perpetuate. It may be a different permutation of traits, but the traits must already exist. The most adaptable, therefore, are those with the greatest number of flaws in the transfer of traits, as that will yield the greatest number of candidates with greater fitness for a new environment than the previous generation. Well, up to an extent. If the process exceeds an error rate proportional to the rate of change of the environment, you'd decrease the odds of holding onto traits that actually are useful/optimal. However, as the rate of change of the environment also changes, the ideal error rate changes, therefore what constitutes ideal adaptability must also change. This means that a species that is near-perfect in its ability to adapt at one point in time may be completely unsuitable at another point in time. It follows that the ability to adapt is a trait that itself must be held subject to the ability to adapt.

I'd therefore rewrite the last piece to say something like "those with an ability to adapt most closely aligned with the pressure to adapt at that time, including those pressures exerted by changes within the pressure to adapt". Well, except that it's longer, less succinct, and less obvious in meaning to those not already familiar with the idea of evolution.

It's not really a tautology. It's recursive and reversible (and therefore provable by induction from first principles) but the statement isn't necessarily true simply because of itself, mostly because "adapt" does not have a constant definition.

Re:Survival

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Actually, that's a load of crap. Pure, pure crap. Assume an environment where changes are small and strength affords a huge advantage. In such a circumstance, the minor changes are just noise and the physically stronger species get their genes into next generations better, in direct contradiction of the "most adaptable" principle.

Actually it's not crap, although it is not really something Darwin ever said. Your example above is true only for the geologically short period of time where the environment remains stable. Change always comes, sooner or later. When the environment changes, your example species must either change with it or become extinct. Some species retain a great deal of genetic variability, while others do not.

But can it be proven?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone on this post or anywhere else for that matter prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a new species has been formed in this lifetime? Using Darwin's theory of constantly adapting species, surely at least one species would have adapted in this lifetime to external pressures of the changing environment which would have resulted in the creation of another species. If Darwin is correct in his theory, species should be changing constantly, not simply "growing" within the same species. While Darwin's theory certainly sounds reasonable, and even sounds like a logical explanation about the changing environment and even about how multiple species have formed, it lacks evidentiary proof.

Re:If that's the case...

[mrbooze]

Really? After 15+ years in IT, I haven't noticed that much adaptability to change in most IT folk. Confront a Windows admin with the need to work on UNIX, or a UNIX admin with the need to work on Windows, and hair starts falling out. Heck, sometimes asking a Linux admin to work on a commercial UNIX product gives them fits, and vice versa.

And it goes on, make the sendmail person switch to postfix. The CVS expert switch to Subversion., etc etc.

My experience leads me to believe that almost nobody hates change more than many IT professionals. Presumably because it means more hassles and work in a job where many are already overworked, maybe?

Just in time

[Plazmid]

Excellent, they released them just in time, that Expelled movie comes out tomorrow. Hopefully someone can convince Ben Stein that evolution isn't lightning striking a mud puddle.

Re:Survival my @ss

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, for Creationists, it's about GOD being the creator and author of life, rather than an unimaginable number of coincidences that somehow turned muck into everything you see around you. Of course Creationists seem reactive and angry... this "theory of evolution" has been crammed down everyone's throats for so long without regard to it being "only a theory" ... the very science of evolution has all but ceased to be scientific but rather has "evolved" (couldn't resist) into a religion all of its own.