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...

[Sabz5150]

...that his works would be the ones to survive. Naturally :)

Re:How fitting...

[Rei]

Now, quickly, everyone search through the papers for Swastikas or Nazi propaganda. I hear Ben Stein would sell out his dignity for something like that.

Re:How fitting...

[CowTipperGore]

I hear Ben Stein would sell out his dignity for something like that. He can't sell something that he doesn't have. Wouldn't that be fraud?

So...

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Should we tag this one "privacy"?

Re:So...

[orkysoft]

You've never been to the Head Museum? It's free on Tuesdays!

Survival

[wombatmobile]

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

--Charles Darwin

Re:Survival

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

A little off-topic, but this just looks like the epitaph on the RIAA's grave :)

Re:Survival

[hansraj]

Exactly. Quite often I am amazed at how much misunderstanding there is about Darwin's theory. The part about who survives is pretty much tautological: "Whoever survives, survives", and hence not the interesting part. The interesting part is how big changes in species (even birth of completely new species) can be seen as aggregation of minor changes that increase the odds of one's survival, and the changes themselves do not always necessarily reflect our notion of "stronger" or "better".

It is a pity really that many people have fallen in the social interpretation of Darwin's theory and more than once we have seen ugly consequences of that.

Re:Survival

[mikelu]

The evolutionary tautology is more, "Organisms that survive long enough to reproduce, reproduce."

The only question was how organisms transferred traits to their offspring, and this has since been answered to the professed satisfaction of even the creationists. Genetic passage of traits is indisputable, and evolution is a straightforward corollary.

Re:Survival

[MightyMartian]

That completely depends on which Creationist you're talking to, and with the leaders and thinkers of the ID movement, it often depends on the audience they're talking to.

Some Creationists still pretty much deny anything but some sort of weak microevolution, insisting that species (or "kinds", a favorite term because it's so weakly defined) are the direct creation of God. Others are willing to accept a certain amount of macro-evolution, often simply by enlarging "kinds" into a nebulous grouping that can be as big as "birds" and "fish", but always with humans being completely separate from any other group, regardless of any genetic, developmental and morphological relationship that you can point out.

The one key thing that seems to unite virtually all Creationists is a rejection of humans as being a product of any evolutionary process. It seems to boil down, for them, to denial of the "specialness" of humans, and in their minds to be descended from an ape-like animal is an affront to their religious and moral beliefs.

Re:Survival

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of "Creationists" who accept humans as being a process of evolutionary process. In fact, this is the official stated position of the Catholic Church.

Even among the "Intelligent Design" crowd (well, the less fanatical part), "Intelligent Design" is basically "guided evolution". It's not that there is no evolution, but they hold the belief that certain 'irreducable complexities' in some structures (Which, to my knowledge, all of the examples they give have been reduced to lower complexities quite easily) show that 'survival of the fittest' wouldn't explain those structures as reducing them, in any way, would make the organism 'less fit', and thus evolution, in the hypothesis, would be shown NOT INCORRECT, but rather incomplete.

Again, I'm not an 'intelligent design' proponent, but people who misrepresent the hypothesis (And I mean both those for it and against it) annoy me.

Re:Survival

[MightyMartian]

This seems to be a confusing of the term. The term "Creationist" when used by almost everyone in discussion of evolution refers to those who advocate one form of special creation or another. Yes, you could probably lump in various types of theistic evolutionists, but Creationism almost always is used to refer to those who deny one of a number of key principals of evolutionary theory including Common Descent, faunal succession, and in particular that humans themselves are the products of a long evolutionary line that includes ape-like ancestors.

What you're invoking appears to be a private definition. Theistic evolutionists (which is what I would count most Catholic theologians) are explicitely not included in this category, because they do not deny any of the above things, but rather add a sort of "guiding" force principle. YOu will find, almost to a man, that Creationists deny not only evolution beyond the species/kinds level, but expressely deny any sort of universal common descent (all organisms having a common ancestor) and specifically that humans are, in fact, simply a relatively hairless, bipedal ape.

As to Intelligent Design advocates, what they believe is cleverly altered depending on who they're talking to. If they talk to someone who accepts evolution, they don't deny the underlying principles of biological evolution, but rather, like theistic evolutionists, invoke some sort of prime mover/grand tinkerer. Inevitably, when they're talking to a Creationist crowd, they pretty much become Special Creationists. That's because ID (as opposed to Theistic Evolution) is a political movement, one of the key constructs of the infamous Big Tent, which is supposed to unite Special Creationists (Young Earth and Old Earth Creationists and everything in between) and Theistic Evolutionists. For the most part, Theistic Evolutionists, including many Catholic thinkers (save for a notable few like Cardinal Schoenborn) have not entered the ID camp, so, other than a small number like Michael Behe, you're dealing with Special Creationists.

So, to put the long to short, when discussing evolution, the title "Creationist" is usually confined to variants on Biblical Literalist Special Creationists (though it also includes Muslim Creationists and other groups that make similar anti-evolutionary claims). It does not include Theistic Evolutionists, who, for the most part, reject the Creationist tenets and have refused to enter the Big Tent alongside these individuals and to lend credence to what is clearly a legalistic attempt to get by the First Amendment.

Controversial?

[KDan]

...when he began to formulate his controversial theory of evolution...

Maybe it was controversial back then, but it sure as heck isn't now (not in civilised parts of the world, anyway). Should have phrased that "his then-controversial theory" - might have been a less controversial turn of phrase!

Daniel

Re:Controversial?

[FurtiveGlancer]

Does civility advocate|excuse dismissing opposing|differing opinions as meritless simply due to an innate sense of superiority? I've always believed that truly civilized indivduals have learned to disagree without being disagreeable. The quote was from John van Wyhe, director of the project. I'd think his opinion would hold some value in this dicussion. We seem to have a difference of opinion over controversy; how odd.

Re:Controversial?

[UnknowingFool]

I think the GP was stating that in the field of science and especially biology there is no real controversy about the acceptance of evolution. There is a controversy in the acceptance of evolution in politics, education, and society. There may be some smugness by scientists about evolution but the main reason why most scientists dismiss alternates (creationism, intelligent design) is that those alternates are not grounded in science at all. Science generally welcomes differing opinions if they are grounded in good reasoning and are testable(and/or falsifiable). Anti-evolutionists do not present such opinions.

Darwin to file DMCA C&D Notice.

[Anonymous Coward]

News Item: Enforcement of 19th-century copyright precludes evolution of evolutionary sciences.

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.

Did you RTFA?

[QuantumHobbit]

"Some 20,000 items and 90,000 images were posted today"

I'll assume this means that no one read the article before posting, although that isn't anything new.

I can't say this enough....

[zappepcs]

THIS is what the Internet is about. This is why information wants to be free.

Just 100 years ago, maybe less, you would have had to be someone very special to see this much information from one scientist, and most probably have to be vested in whatever answers or information can be gleaned from it.

Now, however, the Internet allows us ALL to enjoy the privilege of reading his works, notes, and seeing his drawings... for free, at will, at home.

If knowledge is power, this is some really powerful stuff. Forget listening to anyone tell you what he said, just look it up in HIS notes. I wonder how many college papers were written about Darwin and the fallout from this information to date? Wonder what future papers will look like?

The Internet, for all its down sides, is a great thing....

Re:Expelled

[Reality Master 101]

When is someone going make a movie about the persecution of cartographers who believe in a flat earth? WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE MAP MAKERS??

spluff!

[spazdor]

That sound you just heard was the collective orgasms of the entire RichardDawkins.net forum membership.

Wow, that's a lot of stuff

[sootman]

20,000 items and 90,000 images were posted today... The new site is the largest collection of Darwin's work in history...

Wow, quite a feat. Must have taken some really intelligent design to put all that together and make it work.

Controversial? sad...

[interactive_civilian]

when he began to formulate his controversial theory of evolution It really seems sad to me that it is still considered "controversial".

The theory of evolution through natural selection, while it has been modified to more accuracy through advances in genetics and our understanding of environmental science and ecology, is one of the best supported theories that science has to offer about how ANYTHING works. It's up there with things like "Ohm's Law" (E=IR), Newton's Laws of Gravity and/or Einstein's Theories of Relativity, the kinetic theory of gases, etc.

People don't question the scientific understanding about what makes our computers, mobile phones, PDAs, microwaves, etc. work, yet they still have issues with evolution, despite the fact that it is all based on EXACTLY THE SAME scientific method (in a nutshell, "observe - question - hypothesize - test - analyze - repeat") as the those things. It really boggles the mind.

I'm not saying the theory of evolution should not be questioned. ALL SCIENCE should be questioned, periodically even, but it should be questioned scientifically (i.e. does my hypothesis fit the data better, and can I devise a test to show this?) But, is it really so hard to accept the idea that we may not be "God's gift to the universe" and are only as important as we make ourselves to be, rather than relying on some higher power, some creator to make us the most important thing around? Honestly, and I grew up with religion, it is a concept that I can no longer understand (and I doubt I ever understood it in the first place)...

What is it? Fear that there may be nothing but what we leave behind after we die? Fear that if we are the product of an unimaginable amount of interactions over a difficult to imagine number of years and nothing more than that? Is it hubris? Fear that we may share the same ancestors as gorillas and orangutans?

Why is the theory of evolution still a controversy? As far as science goes, there is no other hypothesis that even comes close to explaining biology as well. How can so many people (and, honestly, mainly in the United States) still reject at most and at least question based on unscientific ideas -- i.e. not based on the scientific method -- the theory of evolution?

I have no problems with the idea of questioning the theory of evolution, if you can do it on scientific grounds. But doing otherwise is the same (to me) as questioning gravity, electronics, chemistry, etc. If one can accept those things, then why is evolution so hard to accept?

Re:Controversial? sad...

[SpinyNorman]

It's worse than that - evolution isn't just up there with things like Ohm's law and the law of gravity... it ceased being a theory/law altogether when DNA was discovered thereby making Darwin's hypothesized inheritable traits a reality.

Given the now known existence of DNA & mechanisms of genetic variation, the tautology "the fittest survive" points out that evolution HAS to occur.

variation + the fittest survive + hereditory traits => successive generations become fitter

How could they possibly NOT become fitter (evolve)?!!

Speciation is similarly unavoidable. Population genetic drift comes about by interbreeding, so lack of interbreeding will lead to diverging sub-population genetics, and there is nothing to stop this proceeding past the no-turning-back (speciation!) point of no longer being able to interbreed.

Some of the reasons why some people find it hard to accept are :

- It's personal - it clashes with their religious beliefs

- It's personal - it clashes with their egotistical belief of being special, not an animal

- Evolution of large animal species happens to slowly to observe, and most people are not familiar with other forms of evolution (e.g bacterial, or genetic design) that do happen observably quickly

- It's taught horribly in schools. When you are taught properly about population speration and genetic drift, environmental change and punctuated equilibrium, speciation as evolution past the point of inability to interbreed, it makes sense. If you instead believe evolution happens to individuals vs populations, or that all genetic changes are claimed to be incrementally beneficial (vs punctuated equilibrium, or even Lamarkian drivel like giraffe's necks getting longer because of their stretching for leaves, then you will be very confused!

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:If that's the case...

[MightyYar]

Not if you have a sister.

Micro vs. Macro is fiction

[interactive_civilian]

If you have a problem with so-called "macro-evolution" then I contend that you cannot possibly conceive of 1 million years. It does not take that long for speciation (which you call macro-evolution, though I contend that there is only evolution). We have witnessed speciation. We have caused speciation in the lab. What more do you need?

You live for maybe 70 years, yet you have a hard time with the idea that several MILLION years ago, humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor?

Hell, we are close to speciation of dogs. Though still genetically compatible, it shouldn't be hard to argue that St. Bernards and Chihuahuas are reproductively isolated. If we could both be around to see the outcome, I would bet on complete reproductive genetic isolation within a few thousand years, i.e. speciation, or what you want to call "macro-evolution".

Scientifically show me that there is indeed a distinction between your so-called "micro-" and "macro-evolution", and I will be willing to accept the evidence. Otherwise, SCIENCE has shown, repeatedly, that there is no real distinction.

Separating evolution into "micro-" and "macro-" is just another red herring from those unwilling to question their own beliefs about their own importance to the universe, as I mentioned above.

Organisms change over time, due to a number of genetic and environmental factors. This is a FACT. The mechanisms of it are a theory (which is as close to truth as science can get). Why is it difficult for you to believe that, over enough time, things will change so much as to be incompatible (reproductively speaking)?

You may proceed with your laughter AFTER you refute what I have said with EVIDENCE.

Re:Micro vs. Macro is fiction

[Copid]

Though it is often argued that macro evolution follows the same processes as micro evolution, famous evolutionists such as Gould have nonetheless proposed theories such as the "Punctuated Equilibrium" theory which states that evolution actually took place in big steps and it wasn't always through millions of accumulated micro-level evolution.

Not so much. Punctuated equilibrium has to do with the distribution of changes over long periods of time, not how gradual changes over short periods of time. The end result of "macroevolution" is still the result of small changes adding up. They just don't happen uniformly over time.

Another reason for this theory is to account for the Cambrian Explosion problem which Dawkins also refers to in his books including the Blind Watchmaker.

Cambrian explosion "problem"?

Some of the other theories proposed for large changes between generations is the Horizontal Gene Transfer theory. However, the problem with this theory is that horizontal gene transfer is seen in simpler organisms like bacteria and is not seen on any other organisms such as vertebrates.

Are you claiming that experts in biology are positing a gene transfer mechanism not found in vertebrates as an explanation for rapid changes in vertebrates?

So is it not accurate to say that micro evolution and macro evolution follow the same processes. Even many prominent evolutionists will disagree with that.

Not at all. I think that you're missing the point of punctuated equilibrium.

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?

Theory of Evolution vs ID

[mlwmohawk]

I'm pretty disgusted with Ben Stein. I used to see him as an example of an intelligent conservative, and yet now, he blows all his credibility.

The problem with evolution is that it requires an amount of critical thinking to understand, and while subtle, the nuances are easily exploited by the cynical against the theory itself.

The "Ben Steins" of the world mystify me. I can't believe someone is so evil to purposefully make an argument they know to be false against science. I can't also believe that he is so stupid as to believe ID.

And yes, ID supporters, ID is stupid. It isn't science. It is religion, and "god did it" is not a valid scientific theory. ID is to biological science what "circle squaring" is to mathematics.

Evolution is a proven fact. Organisms change with their environment. This is irrefutable. The "Theory" of evolution is the hows, whys, and over all path that organism A has taken to become what it is.

In science, we seek to understand the hows, whys, and path better.

Re:"survival of the fittest" is a vacuous tautolog

[nuttycom]

Your thought experiment is interesting, but it treads close to something like solipsism; how can we know that the outcome of *any* given scientific experiment hasn't been meddled with by Descartes' demon?

You'd be just as well off stating that scientists are laboring under some misapprehension of causality.

Besides, you think that the scientists haven't been watching through the windows for that thousand years?