Darwin-L Message Log 37: 56–91 — September 1996

Academic Discussion on the History and Theory of the Historical Sciences

Darwin-L was an international discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences, active from 1993–1997. Darwin-L was established to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present, and to encourage communication among scholars, scientists, and researchers in these fields. The group had more than 600 members from 35 countries, and produced a consistently high level of discussion over its several years of operation. Darwin-L was not restricted to evolutionary biology nor to the work of Charles Darwin, but instead addressed the entire range of historical sciences from an explicitly comparative perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology, systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, historical geography, historical anthropology, and related “palaetiological” fields.

This log contains public messages posted to the Darwin-L discussion group during September 1996. It has been lightly edited for format: message numbers have been added for ease of reference, message headers have been trimmed, some irregular lines have been reformatted, and error messages and personal messages accidentally posted to the group as a whole have been deleted. No genuine editorial changes have been made to the content of any of the posts. This log is provided for personal reference and research purposes only, and none of the material contained herein should be published or quoted without the permission of the original poster.

The master copy of this log is maintained in the Darwin-L Archives (rjohara.net/darwin) by Dr. Robert J. O’Hara. The Darwin-L Archives also contain additional information about the Darwin-L discussion group, the complete Today in the Historical Sciences calendar for every month of the year, a collection of recommended readings on the historical sciences, and an account of William Whewell’s concept of “palaetiology.”

------------------------------------------------
DARWIN-L MESSAGE LOG 37: 56-91 -- SEPTEMBER 1996
------------------------------------------------

DARWIN-L
A Network Discussion Group on the
History and Theory of the Historical Sciences

Darwin-L@raven.cc.ukans.edu is an international network discussion group on
the history and theory of the historical sciences.  Darwin-L was established
in September 1993 to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of
which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present,
and to encourage communication among academic professionals in these fields.
Darwin-L is not restricted to evolutionary biology nor to the work of Charles
Darwin but instead addresses the entire range of historical sciences from an
interdisciplinary perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical
linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology,
systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, historical
anthropology, historical geography, and related "palaetiological" fields.

This log contains public messages posted to Darwin-L during September 1996.
It has been lightly edited for format: message numbers have been added for ease
of reference, message headers have been trimmed, some irregular lines have been
reformatted, and some administrative messages and personal messages posted to
the group as a whole have been deleted.  No genuine editorial changes have been
made to the content of any of the posts.  This log is provided for personal
reference and research purposes only, and none of the material contained herein
should be published or quoted without the permission of the original poster.
The master copy of this log is maintained on the Darwin-L Web Server at
http://rjohara.uncg.edu.  For instructions on how to retrieve copies of this
and other log files, and for additional information about Darwin-L and the
historical sciences, connect to the Darwin-L Web Server or send the e-mail
message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu.

Darwin-L is administered by Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu), Center for
Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology, University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A., and it
is supported by the Center for Critical Inquiry, University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, and the Department of History and the Academic Computing Center,
University of Kansas.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:56>From ggale@CCTR.UMKC.EDU Wed Sep 11 14:56:17 1996

Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 14:56:22 CST
From: ggale@CCTR.UMKC.EDU
To: DARWIN-L@RAVEN.CC.UKANS.EDU
Subject: evolutionary thinking in archeology

In this week's _Science_ (30 August 96) is a review
of book, _Zapotec Civilization_, which might interestDarwin-Listers.
Here is a salient passage from the review:
"Building on the theoretical foundation laid by his anthropological
predecessors at the University of Michigan--Leslie White, Elman Service,
and Marshall Sahlins, among others--Flannery made the concepts of adaption
and selection from the theory of biological evolution central to explaining why,
under certain environmental and cultural conditions, some forms of
social, political, and economic institutions tended to
develop while others withered away." (p. 1178)

g

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<37:57>From ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu Thu Sep 12 11:24:03 1996

Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 12:24:36 -0400
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu (Darwin List)
From: ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu (Jeremy C. Ahouse)
Subject: Re: source of Borges taxonomy?

Dear DarwinL,

        As you recall I was trying to track down Borges' *invented*
taxonomy. I mentioned that I had tracked Franz Kuhn to a book written by
Daniel Balderston. Well I found Prof Balderston and he offered the
following.

>Dear Jeremy Ahouse:
>My take on the "invention" question is that Borges did not really invent
>very many people or titles out of thin air, but that he did sometimes
>attribute things that he had written himself to others (see the end of
>"Pierre Menard" on "erroneous attribution," as well as the texts at the end
>of "Universal History of Infamy"). Franz Kuhn certainly existed, but as far
>as I know the famous reference to the Chinese encyclopedia is invented. You
>should look at Kuhn's works, though--whenever I have done extended research
>on Borges's sources I have been amazed to find fairly accurate sources
>eventually, though it sometimes takes a lot of looking. See the discussion
>of the "Deutsche Chinesische Hochschule" and other issues in my "Out of
>Context" (Duke University Press, 1993). Hope this helps. Daniel Balderston
>
>Daniel Balderston, Chair
>Department of Spanish and Portuguese
>Tulane University
>New Orleans, LA. 70118
>USA

        So now we just need to find someone who has read Franz Kuhn...

        - Jeremy

        Jeremy C. Ahouse
        Biology Department
        Brandeis University
        Waltham, MA 02254-9110
ph:     (617) 736-4954
fax:    (617) 736-2405
email:  ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu
web:    http://www.rose.brandeis.edu/users/simister/pages/Ahouse

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:58>From kimler@social.chass.ncsu.edu Thu Sep 12 11:58:47 1996

From: "Dr. William C. Kimler, History" <kimler@social.chass.ncsu.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 12:58:15 EST
Subject: Population increase

A couple of recent postings asked about "Malthusian" ideas of
population increase before Malthus.  As Lila Harper pointed out,
talk about population and famine was "in the air."  Discussion of
famine was nothing new for Europeans; the new element  was some sense
of mathematical laws of inevitable increase [and suffering]. Or would
Progress eliminate such woes?  Malthus's goal was to interject a
note of pessimism into the optimistic vision of the materialist
Enlightenment.  He was opposed to  those who would see the growth of
prosperity of the eighteenth century as natural and continuing.  The
context was the usually accepted contention that national stature,
wealth, and welfare is tied to maximizing population.

There's an old but useful survey of population ideas and economic
theories by Charles Stangeland --  Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of
Population: A Study in the History of Economic Theory (1904,
reprinted in 1966).  His point is that Malthus was hardly original in
his calculation of the tendency to increase nor in his contention
that the result always outstrips food supply.   From 1750-1800, it
was almost universally accepted that increase would overwhelm food
supply.  It was a common theme among Enlightenment philosophes and
Physiocrats.  Even the idea that the population tendency is a
geometrical ratio whereas food supply increases more slowly is found
in several authors.  Generally, the math calculations derived from
studying birth rates and mortality tables, which cities and states
were collecting with more regularity after the late 1600s. Malthus
himself said that the facts of population's tendency to increase had
long been noted, but that its "natural and necessary effects" had
been overlooked.

Malthus developed a view of society as dependent on the operation of
natural cause and effect:  this "cause" is "immediately united with
the very nature of man."  Thus he is tracing a derivation from human
nature to certain inevitable laws of society -- and using history for
his data.

William

********************************
Dr. William Kimler
Department of History - Box 8108
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8108
(919) 515-2483   FAX 515-3886
kimler@ncsu.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:59>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sun Sep 15 15:23:47 1996

Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 16:23:43 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: History of economics (fwd from HOPOS-L via George Gale) (long)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

--begin forwarded message--------------

Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 10:09:25 MDT
Sender:       A Forum for Discussion of the History of the Philosophy of
              Science <HOPOS-L@LSV.UKY.EDU>
From: "Ross B. Emmett" <emmer@CORELLI.AUGUSTANA.AB.CA>
Organization: Augustana University College
Subject: What defines a legit contribution to 'The History
                of [a science]'

What follows is the first of a set of monthly editorials from the list HES,
sponsored by the History of Economics Society. The editorial is written
by E. Roy Weintraub from Duke University and discusses "What defines a
legitimate contribution to the subdiscipline 'The History of Economics'?."
Future editorials will include: Phil Mirowski on the nature of cyborg
science (October), and Wade Hands on the contribution of SSK to the history
of economics (January).

The topics Professor Weintraub addresses are ones that occasionally appear
on HOPOS-L, and I thought the subscribers might be interested in the
editorial and the ensuing discussion. The editors of HES have established
homepages for the editorials, which provide links to the editorial, to the
ensuing discussion on HES, and to related links (in this case, to a longer
version of the editorial available from Professor Weintraub's own homepage,
and related papers by Ross Emmett and Greg Ransom). The homepage is
accessible at:

http://cs.muohio.edu/~HisEcSoc/Resources/Editorials/Weintraub

If you wish to join the discussion on HES, please send the message
SUBSCRIBE HES <your name> to lists@cs.muohio.edu. You will be contacted
shortly about your subscription request.

============ HES GUEST EDITORIAL =======================

What defines a legitimate contribution to the subdiscipline `The History
of Economics'?

In late twentieth-century departments of economics, all individuals who
resort on occasion to modes of argument which employ historical devices or
who in their work quote or comment on Keynes, Marx, Veblen, et al., are
regarded by their economics departmental colleagues as de facto historians
of economics; sometimes even those individuals believe themselves to be
historians of economics if they quote or comment upon Keynes, Marx, Veblen,
et al.

I submit that such individuals should not be so regarded, and that their
work, however valuable as economics, does not constitute a legitimate
contribution to the history of economics.

In her 1992 HOPE essay "Breaking Away," Margaret Schabas wrote "there is
now, however, an entire generation of professional economists who have
probably never read Marshall or Keynes, and who probably only have a
superficial understanding of either the history of economics or economic
history. This suggests that economists, at least in the United States, are
now no more likely to develop historical intuitions than physicists or
physiologists. In short, the umbilical cord has been broken.  Economists, by
insisting on technical progress, have lost the means to think historically
and thus will no longer cultivate an affinity for the history of economics,
or at least a non-Whiggish history of economics. Historians of economics
must someday come to terms with this conceptual barrier.  As I see it, they
might as well break away and form an alliance with historians of science."
(page 197)

Yet whether or not the community of historians of economics breaks away from
the community of economists to seek a home, as the historians of physics
have, within departments of history or history of science programs, the
standards by which a piece of work in the history of economics must be
judged are the standards by which a piece of work in the history of physics
should be judged or by which a piece of work in the history of molecular
biology should be judged: specifically, the standards are those employed by
professional historians to evaluate and appraise historical writing.  In
order to graduate with a doctoral degree from a recognized history program,
one must demonstrate in the written work a command of the research skills of
an historian, and the craft to write, that is to interpret, the various
primary and secondary sources.

As Ted Porter noted, in his comment on Schabas's piece:  "[T]echnical
history, after all, has often served an apologetic function.  This, I must
emphasize, is by now greatly attenuated in historical studies of natural
science.  I regret to add that history as legitimation is still very strong
in the history of economics.  And this, I think, may be the decisive reason
why historical work on recent economics has made so little impression on a
generation of historians who insist on their autonomy from science.
Unfortunately, many historians of economics are so completely socialized as
economists, and so little as historians, that the genre of historical study
is not fully distinct from that of the review essay. The review essay
surveys a field and assigns credit, almost always on the assumption that
knowledge is steadily progressing.  Far too much history of economics,
still, aims to extend the review back twenty or fifty years by presenting
the ideas of the economist on some modern question.  The precursor, long
dismissed as a category mistake in history of science, is still alive and
well in economics, and this is almost inevitable so long as history of
economics is written to meet the standards and presuppositions of
ahistorical economists." (page 235)

It is not as if the perspective I urge is alien to economists, for it is
precisely the model that has been established in the subdiscipline of
economic history.  That is, many economic historians hold joint appointments
in departments of economics and departments of history. Sometimes economic
historians have their primary affiliation with history departments.
Nonetheless, the standards for writing and publishing and professional
acceptance in the discipline of economic history are different from the
standards of the subdisciplines of labor economics or international trade,
or economic demography, or Post Keynesian economics.

Informed by the historians' notions of evidence and modes of employing
evidence in argument, for economic historians the standards of scholarship
conform to historians' ideas of research, researchability, and rhetoric
which employ those research results in the construction of argument.  And I
observe that Robert Fogel, Gavin Wright, and Robert Gallman have a position
within the field of American history which appears not to not tarnish their
standing within the economics profession.

I retain the hope that over time writing and research in the history of
economic thought will approach the standards of historical writing in the
history of physics or the history of mathematics or the history of medicine,
for I believe that only then will the interests of economists be engaged by
the history of their discipline, and their discipline's ideas, in the same
respectful way that physicists and mathematicians purchase and read
histories of physics and mathematics.  Thus I look forward to a time when as
many economists have read Groenewegen's biography of Alfred Marshall, or
Ingrao and Israel's history of equilibrium theory as physicists have read
Westfall's biography of Newton, or statisticians have read Stigler's history
of statistics, or biologists have read Judson's history of molecular
biology.

E. Roy Weintraub, Professor of Economics
Director, Center for Social and Historical Studies of Science
Duke University, Box 90097
Durham, North Carolina 27708-0097

Phone and voicemail: (919) 660-1838
Fax: (919) 684-8974
E-mail: erw@econ.duke.edu
URL: http://www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html

======== Message posted to history-ideas by Ross B. Emmett ======

Ross B. Emmett                Editor, HES and CIRLA-L
Augustana University College
Camrose, Alberta CANADA   T4V 2R3
voice: (403) 679-1517   fax: (403) 679-1129
e-mail: emmer@corelli.augustana.ab.ca  or  emmett@augustana.ab.ca
URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmer

--end forwarded message----------------

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:60>From peter@usenix.ORG Mon Sep 16 07:06:09 1996

Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 05:08:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Peter H. Salus" <peter@usenix.ORG>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: source of Borges taxonomy?

Jeremy,
This thread (and Balderston's response) leads me to yet
another complication in Borges' attributions.  In several
cases they are ``correct,'' but designed to appear as
though B made them up.  In 1979, while working on animal
communication, I was reading ``The Book of Imaginary
Beings.''  There, to my surprize, I found [s.v. `Hochigan']
the comment on monkey speech, attributed [falsely] to
Descartes, but which does stem from Antoine Le Grand
(1694, Book III, Part 1, p. 237a): ``An Entire Book of
Philosophy According to the Principles of the Famous
Renate Des Cartes'' [London].

My brief note appeared in The Explicator 38.3 (Spring 1980) 13f.

Peter
________________________________________________________________

Peter H. Salus	#3303	4 Longfellow Place	Boston, MA 02114
	+1 617 723-3092

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:61>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Fri Sep 20 13:38:14 1996

Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 14:37:47 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: September 20 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

SEPTEMBER 20 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1811: PYOTR SIMON PALLAS dies at Berlin, Germany.  A natural historian and
geographer of great breadth, Pallas had spent most of his life in Russia, and
had investigated topics as diverse as the systematics of corals (_Elenchus
Zoophytorum_, 1766), the formation of mountain ranges (1777), animal variation
(1780), and phytogeography (_Flora Rossia_, 1784-1788).

1863: JACOB (LUDWIG CARL) GRIMM dies.  With his brother Wilhelm Carl, Jacob
Grimm will be remembered as one of the founding fathers of comparative Indo-
European philology.  Together they edited collections of fairy tales (1812-
1815), and Jacob produced one of the earliest comprehensive works on
comparative grammar (_Deutsche Grammatik_, 1819-1837).  In 1822 Jacob will
characterize what is today known as Grimm's law, the regular pattern of
consonantal replacement (the replacement of 'p' by 'f', for example) that
occurred during the history of the Indo-European languages.

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu or connect to
the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:62>From HANSS@sepa.tudelft.nl Wed Sep 18 10:21:42 1996

From: "Hans-Cees Speel" <HANSS@sepa.tudelft.nl>
Organization:  TU Delft
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 17:21:20 MET
Subject: language genes analogy

Dear Darwinners,
At http://cogsci.ucsd.edu:80/~sereno/scheme.html
is a nice picture from the best essay on analogy between biology and
other evolutionary sciences that I currently know.

check it out if it interests you.

greeitngs, Hans-Cees

Theories come and go, the frog stays [F. Jacob]
-------------------------------------------------------
|Hans-Cees Speel School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and management
|Technical University Delft, Jaffalaan 5 2600 GA Delft PO Box 5015 The Netherlands
|telephone +3115785776 telefax +3115783422 E-mail hanss@sepa.tudelft.nl
http://www.sepa.tudelft.nl/~afd_ba/hanss.html featuring evolution and memetics!

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:63>From WCalvin@U.Washington.edu Mon Sep 16 15:52:57 1996

Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 13:39:57 -0700
From: William Calvin <WCalvin@U.Washington.edu>
Organization: University of Washington
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: The Darwinian Process

Darwiners,
	I'm gearing up to do some radio interviews and talk shows on my two new
books, HOW BRAINS THINK (BasicBooks) and THE CEREBRAL CODE (MIT Press),
and both lead the interviewers to ask about evolution and how it comes
about.  For the gradualism of evolution per se, Dawkins' new book
CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE is very helpful with examples and metaphors,
though nothing is really brief enough to fit the 20-second sound bites
of radio (the maximum time between interruptions that change the
topic!).
	What I hope to do is to deflect the discussion into talking about the
darwinian process itself -- that the immune response shows the same
copying-with-variation etc as species evolution, just on the time scale
of days to weeks.  And both new books address the issue of how the brain
could engage in a similar copying competition with spatiotemporal
patterns, but on the time scale of thought and action, milliseconds to
minutes.  Instead of shaping up a better antibody, you shape up a better
thought, plan of action, sentence to speak, etc.
	The main distraction that arises, taking that talk show path, is that
so many of the things called "Darwinian" are merely carving processes,
ones which lack the algorithmic nature of Darwin's quality-bootstrapping
process.  Yet they're part of the story.  In THE CEREBRAL CODE, I list
six essential features of a full-fledged Darwinian process:  1) a
pattern which is 2) copied with 3) occasional variation, where the
variant patterns 4) compete with one another for a limited workspace,
their success biased by 5) a multifaceted environment, and where 6) the
variants of the next generation are preferentially done from the more
successful variants of the present one (Darwin's inheritance
principle).  Lack any one of the six, and the shaping-up process runs
out of gas.  I also discuss stability and a series of optional catalysts
that speed evolution (recombination, climate change, parcellation,
emptied niches).
	[THE CEREBRAL CODE is all about how this darwinian process (and its
catalysts) can be implemented in the superficial layers of our cerebral
cortex by the known circuitry (see
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/bk9toc.htm).]
	[HOW BRAINS THINK is really about intelligence on a far broader scale,
leading up to the great versatility conferred by being able to shape up
novel courses of action offline before acting in the real world.  See
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/bk8toc.htm]

	But my question is:  Anyone know some nice, quick (!) selectionist
examples that dead end because they lack all six essentials of the
darwinian algorithmic process?  Thanks.

  William H. Calvin                      WCalvin@U.Washington.edu
                          http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/
    Just to confuse everyone, I have *two* new books this autumn,
  HOW BRAINS THINK (BasicBooks) and THE CEREBRAL CODE (MIT Press)

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:64>From RUSHTON@SSCL.UWO.CA Tue Sep 17 19:38:36 1996

Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 20:36:22 -0500 (EST)
From: RUSHTON@SSCL.UWO.CA
Subject: Race, Evolution, and Behavior
To: DARWIN-L@RAVEN.CC.UKANS.EDU

   Phil Rushton here picking up less well trod aspects of the race question
than the one on IQ and brain size.

   The racial ordering of Africans, then Europeans, then Orientals shows up
on 60 different anatomical, physiological, and social variables.

   Pertinent to evolutionary theorizing in particular is reproductive
physiology.  Whereas the average woman ovulates and produces an egg once every
28 days some women double and triple ovulate thereby increasing chances of a
pregnancy.  For example, the rate of dizygotic twinning based on a double
ovulation is less than 4 per 1,000 births among East Asians, 8 among Europeans,
and 16 or greater among Africans.

   Blacks average more testosterone than Whites and Whites average more
testosterone than Orientals.

   The African-American marriage pattern (unstable monogamous relations) is
found throughout the Black Caribbean.  It is Not due to the legacy of slavery
because it is also common throughout sub-Saharan Africa and among Africans
who have moved to Western Europe.

   Sex ratios also differ by race at birth.  Males are least likely among
Africans (45%), next least among Europeans (53%), and most among Orientals
(55%).

   Sexually transmitted diseases are commonest among Blacks, next Europeans,
and least among Asians.  Ever since record keeping began, Africa as a
continent has been unusual in having STDs as the major source of infertility.
The latest figures on HIV and AIDS from WHO and CDC are truly stunning.
Two out of every 100 sexually active Black American men is living with HIV.
the same or even higher figures are found throughout the Black Caribbean and
Black Africa.

    Full details of all these data and more (international crime rates, brain
size) along with the evolutionary processes thought responsible are to be
found in my book Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995, Transaction Publishers,
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ.  $34.95 66 illustrations.
FAX 908-445-3138.  Telephone 908-445-2280.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:65>From awouk@nilenet.com Tue Sep 17 22:23:51 1996

Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 21:22:16 -0600
From: Arthur Wouk <awouk@nilenet.com>
To: DARWIN-L@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: from Vince Sarich

I notice that the brain size/intelligence thread developed quite nicely and
apparently reached a point of closure while I have been on the road. I offer
the bit of personal history on the subject as my contribution for today.

Jon Marks, in the following, laid out the apparent problem:

<<<It's been a while since I felt the urge to invoke Fisher's "fundamental
theorem of natural selection" for anything, but the Sarich/Davis quotation
makes it sound appropriate.  If the action of natural selection reduces
genetic variation, it strikes me that this argument has precisely the
opposite import as it was intended to.  If the argument is that we have
just been through a period of intense directional selection for intelligence
/ brain size, then I do believe it follows that there should be relatively
little genetic variance remaining and thereby worth arguing about.>>>

Jon's argument does of course make a good deal of sense. There is, after
all, no perpetual motion machine out there generating unlimited variation
for selection to work on and intense directional selection should reduce
the amount of genetic variation. I used this sort of argument in the same
context for many years in my teaching at Berkeley -- ignoring for far
longer than I should have the obvious fact of the huge amount of
intellectual variation in my students -- never mind the 90% of the
California population from which they did not derive.  In other words,
when I actually thought about it even a little, variation in human
intellectual ability certainly didn't reduced, constrained, or canalized.
This was the apparent conundrum that I raised with a seminar group of
mine at Berkeley back in 1988. Natural selection was supposed to reduce
genetic variation; presumably our brain increased in size so rapidly as a
result of natural selection; and yet brain size variability was still pretty
much in the usual realm for a volume character; not to mention the
variability of mind so evident to any teacher. One of the brighter students
in the seminar immediately saw the weak point in the argument, asking:
"WhereUs the evidence that genetic variation is reduced by selection?" I
told I didnUt really know of any, but as she was a genetics major, why
didnUt she look into the literature on the issue. Well, she did -- not that
there seemed to be all that much of it -- and found, as I remember, an
experiment on Drosophila specifically designed to test the question which
found no reduction in variability in a trait under quite intense (artificial)
selection. That same semester James Crow published in Science
(sometime in the fall of 1988) a review of the proceedings of a conference
and spent a fair bit of space documenting the retention of variation even
in the face of intense longterm selection. His best example was a study at
the Univ. Of Illinois on increasing oil content in corn which had been going
on for more than 100 years, with an almost perfectly linear with time
rise of oil content from 4% to 21% over that period. He also provided some
animal husbandry examples.

So "selection reduces variation" is another of those factoids that
"everyone" "knows"and which thus finds itself in textbook after textbook;
but for which there is precious little evidence, and where abundant
evidence against it has been present since time immemorial from human
efforts in agriculture and animal husbandry.

The lesson? I'm not sure, but two germane ones might be: ask "where's the
evidence?", and "don't let the way you think things ought to be lead you to
a conclusion as to how they are not." The latter is my sense as to how the
is/ought issue has been converted when the connection between the
evolutionary perspective and human variation is concerned.

The history of the factoid and its recent uses to buttress the arguments
against a substantial, highly heritable variation in intelligence among
modern humans might form a fascinating research enterprise.

Vincent Sarich

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:66>From daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk Fri Sep 13 23:50:55 1996

From: Danny Fagandini <daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Significance of density of neuron connectivity
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 20:47:32 BST

Sheldon Klein <sklein@cs.wisc.edu> wrote:

> I've read, in another context, that dolphins,    for example, have a
> higher average number of connections per neuron   than do humans
> (perhaps related to sonar abilities).

More probably to cope with continuous movement in three dimensions.

--
danny
daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:67>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Fri Sep 20 23:29:13 1996

Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 00:29:07 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: An interruption from the list owner: Back to the historical sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

I rarely exert a heavy editorial hand on Darwin-L, but I do try to keep
us on-topic whenever possible.  I am going to interrupt at this point and
end the thread on intelligence and race: most of the participants have
had several opportunities to express their views now and their respective
positions are clear.  I'll return any further posts to their original
senders.  Darwin-L is not a group devoted to psychology nor human biology
nor even to evolutionary biology per se, but rather to historical inference
in a comparative context.  Good discussion groups survive by staying
focused on the topics that they are chartered to cover; when they drift
away they begin to lose subscribers who joined on the assumption that
the group would cover the topics it announces it will cover.  There are
a great variety of discussion groups available on the net, and people
interested in finding groups devoted to human biology, psychology, or
any other field may wish to browse the interest group directory at:

  http://catalog.com/vivian/interest-group-search.html

Usenet newsgroups also cover a wide range of topics; ask your local
computer center how to access them if you don't know how.

Back to the historical sciences.

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)      |
Cornelia Strong College, 100 Foust Building  |  http://rjohara.uncg.edu
University of North Carolina at Greensboro   |  http://strong.uncg.edu
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.      |

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:68>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sat Sep 21 01:21:31 1996

Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 02:21:25 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Founder effect in cosmology
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

George Gale recently wrote:

>Date: Mon, 09 Sep 1996 13:28:11 -0600 (CST)
>From: ggale@CCTR.UMKC.EDU
>
>Re: Founder Effect
>
>Niall Shanks and I use the Founder Effect to explain the rather odd
>evolution of cosmology in the period 1935-1965 in a forthcoming article
>in _Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics_.

Would you care to enlighten us on some of the details, George?  (Maybe
if the paper has an abstract you could send it along.)  I take it you
are applying the founder effect idea to the history of cosmology during
this period, and not the history of the cosmos.

Bob O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:69>From jsl@rockvax.rockefeller.edu Sat Sep 21 09:14:48 1996

To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Founder effect in cosmology : optical activity
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 10:21:00 EDT
From: Joshua Lederberg <jsl@rockvax.rockefeller.edu>

Is the following to the point?

Not quite cosmic in impact, but nearly:
The orientation of organic matter to D-glucose and L-amino acids.
Cf:
Halpern B., Westley J.W., Levinthal E.C., Lederberg J.
The Pasteur Probe: an assay for molecular asymmetry
in
Life Sciences and Space Research (COSPAR).
COSPAR p. 239-249. (1967)
Florkin M.,Dollfus A. (Eds.)

===
There is likewise a constraint on the conservation of genetic codes:
it would be very hard to evolve a major leap from one mapping of
RNA triplets to another, with all the baggage of foundered proteins
that would have to be recoded.

Almost any example of engineered technical standards, e.g. MS-DOS
or FORTRAN or the Morse Code would fall in the same category.
===

Since anti-matter and matter cannot co-exist in near proximity,
something like that might also be contrived for our cosmic
neighborhood.

Think of any other chaotic complex, where infinitesimal alterations
of initial conditions can profoundly affect the final outcome.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:70>From joe@genetics.washington.edu Sat Sep 21 12:56:02 1996

From: Joe Felsenstein <joe@genetics.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Founder effect in cosmology
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 11:05:52 -0700 (PDT)

> George Gale recently wrote:
> >Date: Mon, 09 Sep 1996 13:28:11 -0600 (CST)
> >From: ggale@CCTR.UMKC.EDU
> >
> >Niall Shanks and I use the Founder Effect to explain the rather odd
> >evolution of cosmology in the period 1935-1965 in a forthcoming article
> >in _Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics_.

One ought to add that, in biology, the Founder Effect is not a different
phenomenon from random genetic drift.  It caused by the small population
size at the time of founding, which leads to a burst of genetic drift.
Genetic drift is, one should recall, genetic changes owing to the random
happenstances of who dies and who reproduces.

In evolution of parts of human culture (such as cosmology), if the number
of cosmologists remained small for a while, there might have been ongoing
effects of cultural drift.  Certain ideas might have happened to have no
champions and have died out, simply because of accidental predilections of
the existing cosmologists.

May I assume that in explaining the evolution of cosmology, Shanks is really
using "genetic" drift rather than purely a founder effect (i.e. that the
drift was ongoing)?

--
Joe Felsenstein         joe@genetics.washington.edu     (IP No. 128.95.12.41)
 Dept. of Genetics, Univ. of Washington, Box 357360, Seattle, WA 98195-7360 USA

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:71>From peter@usenix.ORG Sat Sep 21 08:18:47 1996

Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 06:21:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Peter H. Salus" <peter@usenix.ORG>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re:  The Darwinian Process

I have recently gotten Calvin's THE CEREBRAL CODE from MIT Press
for review.  While this is not that review, I want readers of the list
to know that CODE is an absolutely first-class piece of work and
an exemplary instance of what theoretical neurophysiology can do
where darwinian processes are concerned.

Peter H. Salus

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:72>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sun Sep 22 01:12:15 1996

Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 02:11:50 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: September 22 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

SEPTEMBER 22 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1711: THOMAS WRIGHT, author of _An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of
the Universe, Founded upon the Laws of Nature, and Solving by Mathematical
Principles the General Phaenomena of the Visible Creation; and Particularly
the Via Lactea_, is born at Byers Green, near Durham, England.  In his
contemplation of cosmological time he will write: "In this great Celestial
Creation, the Catastrophe of a World, such as ours, or even the total
Dissolution of a System of Worlds, may possibly be no more to the great
Author of Nature, than the most common Accident in Life with us, and in all
Probability such final and general Doom-Days may be as frequent there, as
even Birth-Days, or Mortality with us upon the Earth."

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu or connect to
the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:73>From ggale@CCTR.UMKC.EDU Sun Sep 22 12:46:38 1996

Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 12:47:08 CST
From: ggale@CCTR.UMKC.EDU
To: DARWIN-L@RAVEN.CC.UKANS.EDU
Subject: Founder's Effect in Cosmology, ABS.

Bob asked for an abstract to our paper. Here 'tis:

METHODOLOGY AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN COSMOLOGICAL INQUIRY

by
George Gale
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Niall Shanks
East Tennessee State University

To appear: 1996: _Stud. Hist. Phil. Mod. Physics_

	The central concern of this paper is with the ways in which issues,
questions and debates in the domain of the philosophy of science can
influence the birth, and subsequent development of a science.  The case
study to be discussed is that of modern cosmology.  We will argue that
the study of events in the early history of modern cosmology affords
ample evidence of the many ways in which philosophy of science and
science are inextricably intertwined.
	To the extent that we are able to make our case we will (a) provide
evidence against the adequacy of rationalist reconstructions of the
history of science that pretend that science develops in a philosophical
vacuum, without regard to the conceptual and methodological debates
that are standard fare among philosophers of science; and (b) provide
evidence against the intellectual adequacy of (currently popular) social
constructivist attempts to "sociologize" the analysis of events in the
history of science in ways that downplay or eliminate the role of
philosophy of science and its history as factors shaping the development
of science.
	It turns out that the following two questions are central to
understanding the nature of modern cosmology:
[1]  Why were events surrounding the birth of modern cosmology marked
by vigorous indeed, sometimes downright raucous philosophical debates?
[2]  Why was the subsequent development of modern cosmology so long
affected by the outcome of the debate?
The discussion which follows attempts to answer these questions, in
large part, by providing an historical narrative.  Since many of the
elements of the historical narrative are still not widely known, the
narrative should be of some intrinsic interest, independently of its
interest as part of the answer to the two questions.
	In our discussion of the second question, we will argue that there
is an interesting explanatory analogy to be drawn between certain
features of the initial community of cosmologists, and certain features of
initial biological-species communities. Our proposed analogy trades upon
principles developed by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, and called by
him the "founder effect."  We claim that events in the early history of
cosmology manifest analogs of biological "founder effect" phenomena.
	We conclude by suggesting that the situation in modern
cosmology's origin may be generalizable.  If this is correct, then to the
extent that modern cosmology manifests founder effect phenomena, so
also will the many scientific communities which originate as it did, in
initially small populations of investigator -- populations that need not
reflect the conceptual and methodological diversity found in larger, more
mature branches of science.  In order to discuss the first of our two
questions, we begin with a brief historical prologue.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:74>From ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu Tue Sep 17 08:02:32 1996

Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 09:02:02 -0400
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu (Darwin List)
From: ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu (Jeremy C. Ahouse)
Subject: Wallace as an independent test of Darwin

Dear DarwinL,

        In trying to understand Darwin's "Debt to Malthus", Mayr(1991, pg
86) suggests that Wallace is a good comparison since he shares many of the
internal and external factors that predisposed Darwin thought to be
catalyzed by Malthus.

       Nothing illustrates better how important the general
       attitude and conceptual framework of the marker of a
       theory is than the simultaneous, independent proposal of
       the theory of natural selection by A. R. Wallace. He was
       one of the few people, perhaps the only one, who had a
       similar set of past experiences: a life dedicated to
       natural history, years of collecting on tropical islands,
       and the experience of reading Malthus.

        Is this an uncotroversial claim? Who has defended it (Mayr offers
no citation)? Will you all take exception? It is an interesting mix of
internalist and externalist claims (maybe just the right mix).

        thanks,

        Jeremy

Mayr, Ernst (1991)  One long argument : Charles Darwin and the genesis of
modern evolutionary thought. Harvard University Press.  QH371 .M336 1991

        Jeremy C. Ahouse
        Biology Department
        Brandeis University
        Waltham, MA 02254-9110
ph:     (617) 736-4954
fax:    (617) 736-2405
email:  ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu
web:    http://www.rose.brandeis.edu/users/simister/pages/Ahouse

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:75>From abrown@lazy.demon.co.uk Sun Sep 22 05:25:37 1996

Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 11:11:35 +0000
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: Andrew Brown <abrown@lazy.demon.co.uk>
Subject: George Price

Volume 1 of the collected papers of W.D. Hamilton ("The narrow Roads of gene
land") has just been published, in this country. Each paper is preceded by a
foreword describing something of the circumstances of its composition, and
through two of the forewords appears the extraordinary story of George Price
and the equation for altruism.

Price was an American science journalist and passionate sceptic who came
across Hamilton's 1964 kin selection papers in the late Sixties and was
deeply shocked by their implication that we cannot hope to have evolved more
than a limited, local forom of altruism. He set himself to do the work
again. Instead of finding flaws in it, he managed to reformulate the
equations in a more general and powerful form, so that they would apply at
all levels of selection.

Shortly thereafter, he underswent a sudden and profound religious
conversion. He became an absolutist Christian. This did not alter his
scientific beliefs at all, though he came to believe that his discovery of
the equations for altruism was a miracle, and that Godmeant him to spread
this discovery. However, it impressed on him theneed for personal altruism.
he sold what he had, and gave the fruits to the poor. He lost his flat after
inviting derelicts home, and ended up sleeping on the floor in an office he
was allowed to use at London University. He was driven out of there by one
of the tramps he had tried to help, who would stand on the pavement below,
shouting obscenities and threats. he ended up in a squat in off the Euston
Road, where he killed himself shortly after Christmas 1974. The death
certificate suggests January. I suspect he lay dead for some time before
being found.

It is a completely extraordinary story, which has colonised my imagination
to the point where I got hold of a copy of the death certificate. Apart from
anything else, it seems to me throw into very high relief the differences
between the sociobiological use of "altruism" and the religious or
novelistic uses of the term. Neither, incidentally, is to be confused with
niceness. Price was obviously in many ways a completely impossible man who
could quarrel with anyone. Professor Hamilton, in conversation, decribed him
as "an intolerable saint"

Do any readers of this list know more about this man? Do reply privately if
it would othersie clutter the list.

Andrew Brown
Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Independent, London
Not in the office right now. abrown@lazy.demon.co.uk / andrewb@well.com

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:76>From sklein@cs.wisc.edu Sat Sep 21 22:06:18 1996

Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 22:06:05 -0500
From: Sheldon Klein <sklein@cs.wisc.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: "Significance of density of neuron connectivity"
Cc: daaf@cerium.demon.co.uk, sklein@shorty.cs.wisc.edu

Danny Fagandini, citing

SK>> I've read, in another context, that dolphins, for example, have a
SK>> higher average number of connections per neuron than do humans
SK>> (perhaps related to sonar abilities).
stated,
DF>More probably to cope with continuous movement in three dimensions.

If spatial relations abilities are linked to other cognitive factors,
including language, then my comment and question might be restated
as a research imperative:

       "Research trends in AI, and neurophysiology might suggest that
 	the density of neural connectivity in the brains of members of
        a species is potentially a significant factor in comparative
        intelligence--  ...

       "Anyone know of any research on species/neural density connectivity
	and comparative 'cognitive' ability?

Sheldon Klein
sklein@cs.wisc.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:77>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sun Sep 22 14:30:59 1996

Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 15:30:52 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: More on coin evolution
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

Polly Winsor posted a message a while ago with an intriguing quotation
from one John Evans about the evolution of coin types in ancient Britain.
Rather than doing it the old fashioned way (by going to the library), I
send a copy of the message to a numismatics list, and received the following
reply from one of the few authorities in the world on ancient Celtic coin
evolution.  Here is an extraordinary example of the Internet at its best.

I would still be interesting to learn more about Evans' background and
whether he made other specific applications of evolutionary ideas to
numismatic history.

Bob O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)

--begin forwarded message--------------

Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 13:04:08 -0600
From: John Hooker and Carin Perron <writer@CADVISION.COM>
Subject: Re: John Evans on coin evolution, ca.1875
To: Multiple recipients of list NUMISM-L <NUMISM-L@VM.SC.EDU>

>The following message appeared recently on another list.  I wonder if
>anyone on NUMISM-L can provide a citation for the paper by John Evans
>that is mentioned?
>
>Bob O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)
>
>>From: Mary P Winsor <mwinsor@chass.utoronto.ca>
>>Subject: evolution of coins
>>To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu (bulletin board)
>>
>>In 1875 John Evans gave a talk entitled "The coinage of the ancient Britons,
>>and natural selection" in which he said "...the succession of the types of
>>the coins followed certain laws, to a great extent analogous with those
>>by which the evolution of successive forms of organic life appear to be
>>governed..." ... "the reduction of a complicated and artistic design into
>>a symmetrical figure of easy execution, was the object of each successive
>>engraver of the dies for the coins, though probably they were themselves
>>unaware of any undue saving of trouble on their part, or of the results
>>which ensued from it."
>>
>>I take this from a xerox copy in my possession.  This seems like a
>>wonderful topic some member of the list may want to follow up. I
>>can give no more information (not even a citation!).

Well here's a surprise for the first thing on a Saturday morning. I had been
thinking of unsubscribing to this list! Let's get the citation out of the
way first:

  Evans, J
  'The coinage of the ancient Britons and natural selection'
  _Proc. Royal Soc._, 1875, p.476-487

The subject of design evolution in Celtic Coins has been my raison d'etre
for more than a decade. I am the only person working in this field. My book,
whenever I get around to getting it published, will be entitled: _Celtic
Improvisations - A Case Study in Iron Age Art._ It is the most detailed and
comprehensive typological analysis of a Celtic coinage that has ever been
attempted. Now, on to Evans and the topic at hand:

If we had half the intelligence, and a tenth the zeal of these Victorians,
then we might accomplish amazing things.

Actually, Evans was wrong, but his wrongness was not absolute, and his
powers of observation cannot be faulted. There is a design evolution at play
in many series of Celtic coins, but this evolution follows principles that
are very different from what we might imagine.

The design evolution within a series is irrelevant to the copying of types
by other people. For example, certain bronze coins of Massilia were copied,
and these are found up the Loire Valley, and even in Britain. The
simplification of the design is partly due to the copies being rather poor
casts. The quality of the 'dies', in any case, was not great. Evans might
have been thinking of similar coins when he made his observation.

In these cases, from a 'natural selection' point of view, we are seeing, not
the evolution of the coins themselves, but the evolution of the use of die
engravers. When Celtic coins were first produced, they used certain Greek
coins as their models. People today often make the mistake of thinking that
Celtic artists were no good, and their creations were 'crude'. This attitude
was also dominant in the time of Evans.

What was actually happening was that the Celtic artists were trying to deal
with a very different form of art than they were used to. I will give you an
example to make this very clear. If you were a poet, and I gave you a number
of Japanese words and told you to use them to write Haiku, the results would
be laughed at by all Japanese critics. You might be the best poet working in
the English language, but you would not be a Japanese poet.

As time went on, some Celtic artists who had been working in metal decided
to use their talents to produce coin dies. Remember, most Celtic artists
would not have appreciated Classical art. They would have thought it
simplistic and lacking spiritual content. The work of blindly copying such
designs was left to the less talented. Coins, after, all were functional
objects like chisels. They did not have the status of captured gold torcs,
even if they were made of the same substance.

This situation began slowly to change, and that change was driven by many
factors. It varied region to region. As the more talented Celtic artists
took over die engraving in one area, their neighbours became jealous, and
had their artists work on the coins, as well. Some areas were not so
influenced: if they thought little of their neighbours, they would not copy
their ideas. Part of the change was due to new attitudes. A torc captured
from a rival chieftain had status that the same weight in gold paid to you
for mercenary services did not have. Eventually, the insidious nature of
gold had its way, and people began to realize, as we do today, <shameless
sociological commentary> that if you could not be honorable, you could at
least be rich.

Now, gold coins were in the possession of the wealthy, and they were not
used for trade in the way that our currency is used. They certainly had use
for tributes both political and religious, and they were a form of wealth
and were paid as originally, for military favors. You would not buy bread
with them!

As the status of coins changed, they became worthy of the attention of the
artists. The best of these artists were Armorican, although certainly,
superb work was done elsewhere--look at Class I staters of the Parisii. We
cannot equate Armorican art with their other art for two reasons: first,
there are no examples of Armorican art other than the coins. There are no
Celtic torcs, no shields, no decorated scabbards, no nothing. The second
reason applies to other regions as well: the status of artists working on
coin dies varied region to region. We might find that in some places great
examples of metalwork were being created along with abysmal coin designs!
This is more likely to be the case than not.

As the status of coinage changed, the coin designs of some regions began to
follow the tenets of the finest Celtic art. There is a very small window of
time where this happens. In many areas this window is only a few decades,
and sometimes it is only a few years. Then a new trend happens.

After Caesar's tour of Gaul, the Roman way of life was foisted on the Celts.
This was great for Joe Peasant, who found that he actually did not owe his
soul to his masters anymore. Britain set out on its long path to become a
nation of shopkeepers, and the world changed. The best of the Celtic artists
vanished with the chieftains--you see, they were also part of the elite.
Their status was sometimes as high as that of a chieftain. According to an
Irish story, one blacksmith even had his own fort and retainers!

There was no room anymore for Celtic artists. Their work was not understood
by the masses that now had political and economic sway. Coin designs began
to follow Roman models, and gem and die engravers flocked to Gaul and
Britain from everywhere to take advantage of the new economy. The bulk of
the coinage shifted to using two or three metals in the more 'civilized'(in
the true sense of the word - e.g. civitas) areas.

Within this narrow window of Celtic numismatic art, coins can provide an
insight into the tenets of Celtic art that no other objects have been able
to do. The reason being that, although a number of Celtic art objects are
known, very few of them can be securely attributed to a specific artist.
These few items do not give us enough information to show us how the designs
were developed by their creators.

I have shown the design development for the Coriosolite series, and have
identified three individuals that were responsible for the bulk of that
coinage. I have arranged the dies in their correct chronological order (this
sometimes differs from the order in which they were struck) and have been
able to reconstruct tenets of both Celtic art and Celtic religion.

There is some very exciting stuff here! These artists' abilities in abstract
design are remarkable. They used variations on a theme in visual art in the
same way that musicians use this today. They treated a run of dies as a work
in itself and developed designs as an end in themselves. When a design was
'perfected', they abandoned it at once and set out on a new quest!

Less talented die engravers would 'forge' the methods of those that knew,
but although this could not be detected by looking at one or two coins, it
became apparent after a run of several dies. Those that produced the Unelli
issue that is commonly believed to be Class II Coriosolite are a case in
point. These are genuine coins but fake art!

I am working on an expert sytem for identifying Coriosolite coins by my new
classification system. This will appear on the Internet in the near future.
It will also contain articles on my techniques for reconstructing the tenets
of Celtic art and iconography, together with full length articles on the
boar and lyre symbols, problems with current numismatic classification
systems and much more. (I have over forty web pages finished so far.)  I
will be posting its arrival on britarch and arch-theory (both
@mailbase.ac.uk.), as well as HWG, and other web design lists. I will notify
anyone else who expresses an interest.

To Mary Winsor:

Thanks for such an interesting and unexpected posting, and greetings from
Calgary! Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

To Bob O'Hara:

Thank you for passing it along!
feel free to repost this reply to your members of darwin@iris.uncg.edu

I had requested help with illustrations for this system to this list, alas,
no one wanted to help in return for a link. On reflection, I will probably
approach the Smithsonian and other institutions, as this is perhaps more
politic.

Regards,

John Hooker <writer@cadvision.com>
member: HTML Writer's Guild
Societe Jersiaise

--end forwarded message----------------

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:78>From mycol1@unm.edu Wed Sep 11 11:10:12 1996

Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 10:10:10 -0600 (MDT)
From: Bryant <mycol1@unm.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Creationism in NM schools

Darwin-ers:

	Chris Frazier, here at UNM's biology dept., has set up a web page
for anybody interested in the recent stealth creationist move by the NM
board of education.  Evolution was excluded from state-wide science
curricula.

Bryant

http://redtail.unm.edu/BOE/

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:79>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Thu Sep 26 12:23:57 1996

Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 13:23:27 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: John Evans biography (coin evolution; fwd)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

John Hooker of NUMISM-L who very kindly supplied us with details about
the "evolutionary numismatics" of John Evans has just sent me the following
biographical information about Evans which I am pleased to share with the
group.  Interestingly, John Evans the evolutionary numismatist was the
father of Arthur Evans, the Minoan archeologist.

Bob O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)

--begin forwarded message--------------

Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 14:43:38 -0600
From: writer@cadvision.com (John Hooker and Carin Perron)
Subject: John Evans Bio.
To: Bob O'Hara <darwin@iris.uncg.edu>

Hi Bob,

Mary Winsor responded to my little article and suggested that I include a
brief biography of John Evans, as you like to include such on your list.
This proved more difficult than I expected, as most references are to his
son, Arthur John Evans -- The excavator of Knossos. I did find this
reference. It unfortunately omits birth and death dates. I am limited by
what I have at home today.

The following is an excerpt from _Iron Age Coinage in South-East England:
The Archaeological Context, Part i_ by Colin Haselgrove, BAR British Series
174(i), 1987, pp.2-3.
----------------------
"A firm and secure foundation": the work of Sir John Evans, [the period
discussed by Haselgrove:] 1860-c.1910 ...

Evans personified the values of the Victorian era; a polymath and an F.R.S.,
his interest extended byond coins to many other aspects of archaeology, from
Bronze Age artefacts to Roman villas. Much of his work was based on his own
coin collection, which passed on his death either to the British Museum as
the nucleus of the national collection or to the Ashmolean Museum in 1941 in
the bequest of his son, Sir Arthur Evans. Evans had the means and contacts,
practical as well as social, to obtain "first refusal" on many finds and
information about others from fellow collectors such as Latchmore or
Kennard. ...

Evans' interest and approach must be seen in the perspective of nineteenth
century developments. Numismatics itself came of age in 1836 with the
publication of _Numismatic Chronicle_ and Taylor Combe's British Museum
catalogue. ...

Evans' methods of spatial and temporal ordering are described in his book
and in a lesser known address to the Royal Society (Evans, 1875). With his
paleontological and scientific interests, Evans readily assimilated the
revolution brought about by Darwin's _Origin of the Species_ (1859) and
recognised in natural selection, 'the theory of descent with variation', a
theoretical analogy for principles which were also discernible in the
evolution of human material culture and of coinage in particular. In this,
he was significantly influenced by the views of Pitt-Rivers, a major
archaeological contemporary (Thompson, 1977). Evans' success in marrying
typological degradation and the genesis of new varieties to Darwinian ideas
is shown in the choice of Iron Age coin typology to illustrate the
distortion of images during copying (Blakemore, 1977). Evans also suggested
another major principle for the chronological arrangement of coinage: -

"Besides the succession of types, there is another ....law that appears to
be natural to all absolute governments which strike coins, if not indeed to
other ruling powers. This is the great law of effecting economy at the
expense of others.... by striking coins of the same denomination as those
already in circulation, but either of less weight, or of baser alloy, or of
both" (Evans, 1875, 485)

Evans' chronology for uninscribed coin types still provides the essentials
of the modern framework.
-------------------------

I hope this is helpful.
Regards,
John <writer@cadvision.com>

--end forwarded message----------------

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:80>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Thu Sep 26 12:45:21 1996

Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 13:45:10 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: September 26 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

SEPTEMBER 26 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1687: During the Venetian seige of Athens a bomb falls on the Parthenon,
which is being used by the Turks for munitions storage.  The roof, parts
of the frieze, and many of the columns, which had lasted for more than two
thousand years, are destroyed.

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu or connect to
the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:81>From fsteinl@gwdg.de Mon Sep 23 15:52:56 1996

Date: 23 Sep 96 15:29:00 +0200
From: fsteinl@gwdg.de (Friedrich Steinle)
Subject: Postdoc-Stipendien
To: oldenburg@rzaix52.rrz.uni-hamburg.de

Postdoktoranden-Stipendien in Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Das Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Goettingen schreibt zwei
einjaehrige Postdoktoranden-Stipendien der Volkswagen-Stiftung im Fach
Wissenschaftsgeschichte aus. Die Stipendien sollten am 1. Januar 1997
angetreten werden; eine Verlaengerung ueber den 31. Dezember hinaus ist
nicht moeglich. Hoehe der Stipendien: 2600,- DM monatlich zuzueglich
Reise- und Forschungsmitteln. Forschungsprojekte in Goettinger Archiven
und Bibliotheken werden bevorzugt.

Bewerbungen mit Lebenslauf, Projektbeschreibung und zwei
Empfehlungsschreiben sind zu senden an:

Prof. Dr. N.A. Rupke
Institut fuer Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Georg-August-Universitaet Goettingen
Humboldtallee 11
37073 Goettingen

Bewerbungsschluss ist der 15. November 1996.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:82>From wilkins@wehi.EDU.AU Mon Sep 23 19:47:46 1996

Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 10:47:44 +1000
From: John Wilkins <wilkins@wehi.EDU.AU>
Subject: Founder's Effect in Cosmology
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu

Regarding George Gale's paper, it should be noted (and he may have
noted) that David Hull's _Science as a Process_ (University of Chicago
Press, 1988) explicitly makes a "founder effect" argument for the early
development of scientific theories. Hull's argument is that science is
increasingly organised from the early history of modern science into
"demes", which promote intrademic cooperation and extrademic
competition, in what he calls "conceptual inclusive fitness" maximising
behaviour. Demes need not be organised on the basis of theoretical
identity (indeed, Hull argues that theory interpretation is as
individual as organic phenotypic variation), but they must have some
common interests. These demes are intended as a replacement for
Lakatosian research programmes and Kuhnian paradigms, and are neither
entirely defined in terms of theory content nor social structure.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:83>From elanier@crl.nmsu.edu Tue Sep 24 11:57:53 1996

Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 10:57:20 -0700
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: elanier@crl.nmsu.edu (Ellery Lanier)
Subject: ancient coins

Thank you Bob O'Hara, Mary Winsor, and John Hooker for the delightful material
on Celtic coins. I also would like to share some coin information. This is
about early American cents. I have just completed my dissertation on William
H. Sheldon and Somatotypes. Sheldon was faced with the problem of creating a
taxony for the human species. He chose early American copper pennies as an
example of seeming random organization in the colonies that could be given
form. I have been unsuccessful in obtaining his book on Early American Cents,
but the professional numismatic societies have been most helpful. I learned
that for a time the Sheldon standard was a worldwide tool for coin evaluation.
It may have been replaced by now. Sheldon used the same methodology in
classifying humans. (He also used Mendeleef's card sorting system that gave
us the Periodic System). In my opinion Sheldon's greatest insight was
associating morphology with the Temporal Horizon. I tested the concept
experimentally. My results were very positive and I am waiting for someone to
replicate my research. Indeed, ". . .this is an extraordinary example of the
Internet at its best".

Best wishes
Ellery                                      elanier@crl.nmsu.edu
http://crl.nmsu.edu/users/WWW/somatotyping.html

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:84>From wmontgom@nasc.mass.edu Wed Sep 25 09:28:18 1996

Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 10:32:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: William Montgomery <wmontgom@nasc.mass.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Wallace as an independent test of Darwin

Frank Sulloway has discussed the similarities between Darwin and Wallace
in his forthcoming "Born to Rebel."  In addition to the points made by
Mayr, he notes that both men were younger sons.  This bears on Mayr's
list of similarities in complex ways, and Darwin-L readers will certainly
want to consider his views.
				Bill Montgomery
				WMontgom@nasc.mass.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:85>From WirtAtmar@aol.com Mon Sep 23 13:00:56 1996

Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 14:00:17 -0400
From: WirtAtmar@aol.com
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu, wcalvin@u.washington.edu, awouk@nilenet.com
Subject: Re: The Darwinian Process

Please allow me to apologize in advance for the length of this reply, but two
different questions were recently raised that I feel are close enough in
subject to warrant a slightly longer answer.

1. DEAD-END DARWINIAN-LIKE PROCESSES

William Calvin asks:

>Anyone know some nice, quick (!) selectionist examples that dead
>end because they lack all six essentials of the darwinian algorithmic
>process?

The answer is yes, and it is a very simple and common phenomenon: human
technological manufacturing. But an aside, before I begin the example, allow
me to say that when I write of the Darwinian algorithm, I list only five
components of the process. The difference in count isn't the important
attribute. More important I believe are the differences in emphasis that Dr.
Calvin and I place on the process. Dr. Calvin's list more or less describes
the process from the point of view of the code. The list that follows below
instead emphasizes evolved phenotypic behavior -- to the point that the
nature of the underlying code becomes essentially irrelevant, so long as it
exists.

The following is a very brief extract of the philosophical setting that I
generally draw when I attempt to explain the mechanism of Darwinian
evolution. The following (although slightly modified in this presentation)
appeared in  "Notes on the simulation of evolution," (Atmar, 1994. IEEE
Trans. Neural Networks. 5:130-148), an article written with an engineering
audience in mind:

===================================

     o  Darwinian evolution is an optimization algorithm. It is not a
predictive theory, nor is it a tautology ([5] p. 519, [6] p. 112), as has
often been claimed (e.g., [7],[8]). As in most optimization processes, the
point(s) of solution wait to be discovered by simple trial-and-error search.

     o  Reproduction in natural biota is generally very nearly replication,
but it is not, nor can it be, perfect replication. In a thermodynamically
"cold" universe, replication occurs without error. But in such circumstance
evolution would be impossible. Error in replication is fundamental to the
evolutionary process. However, at all temperatures greater than absolute
zero, error in replication is guaranteed and evolutionary optimization thus
becomes inevitable in any self-replicating population constrained by a
bounded arena.

     o  Darwinian evolutionary theory is composed of only five components:
(i) a bounded arena, (ii) a replicating population which must eventually
expand beyond the bounds of the arena, (iii) thermodynamically inescapable
replicative error, (iv) competition for space in that arena among the
inevitable variants, and (v) consequential competitive exclusion of the
lesser fit.

     o  Given self-reproduction, the properties and processes of Darwinian
evolution are the inescapable consequences of thermodynamically governed
self-reproduction in a finite, positively entropic universe.

     o  The Darwinian evolutionary algorithm exists without any sense of
predetermined goal-directedness. The ultimate "goal of evolution" is
determined solely by the shape and nature of the adaptive topography (the
fitness function drawn as a "landscape") and is wholly external to the basic
evolutionary processes of variation and selection.

     o  Selection acts only to statistically cull the least appropriately
behaving variants of the current trial set from the inevitable excess
population.

     o  Evolution optimizes behavior, not the encoding genetics per se, other
than by consequence [11]. The specific nature and mechanisms of the genetical
code are basically irrelevant to the process of Darwinian evolution so long
as they provide the necessary minimal complexity for a functional code set.

     o  Several naturally-evolved mechanisms operate to greatly increase the
speed of optimization and general behavioral appropriateness of a population
to its current environment. They are: (i) the evolution of recombinant code
(sex), (ii) the evolution of the processes of error repair and error
expungement from the germline (including sexual selection), (iii) the
evolution of hierarchical levels of modularity (cellular tissue
differentiation, metamerism and colonialism), and (iv) the evolution of
individually adaptive behaviors (ontogenetic intelligence).

     o  Evolution is not a force but a process [1]. The most overt attribute
of the process is the accumulation of increasingly appropriate behaviors
within an evolving lineage of trials.

     o  Learning is a matter of selectively retained behaviors, accumulated
through stochastic trial-and-error, and is inherent to -- and
indistinguishable from -- the evolutionary process itself [2]-[4]. Three
distinct modes of learning are evident in natural evolution: (i)
"phylogenetic learning" (where adaptive behaviors are accrued within the
lifetime of a phyletic lineage. The reservoir that accumulates
phylogenetically learned behavior is the species' aggregate germline; the
least unit of change in this reservoir is a base pair), (ii) "sociogenetic
learning" (where adaptive behaviors are accumulated within the lifetime of
the group. The reservoir of learned behavior is social culture; the least
unit of change is a shared experience), and (iii) "ontogenetic learning"
(where appropriate behaviors are learned through trial-and-error during the
lifetime of an individual. The reservoir of learned behavior is aggregate
neuronal and hormonal memory; the least unit of change is neurotransmitter
titer and/or receptor site sensitivity).

     o  The cell is the only engine of life. It is also the minimum atom of
life; no smaller unit exists capable of self-sustained metabolism and
reproduction.

     o  All organisms large enough to be seen with the unaided eye are
composed of complexly interacting colonies of (nearly-) genetically identical
cells. The concept of the individual is somewhat deceptive. All higher levels
of cellular organization acquire the attributes of a colony where
differentiated units are recruited into synchronized behaviors, operate to a
common purpose, and are evaluated as a whole.

     o  Only three forms of knowledge reservoirs have been evolved under
natural circumstance within a phyletic lineage. They are: (i) the reservoir
of phylogenetic knowledge inherent to germline DNA, (ii) socially
communicated and remembered experience (culture), and (iii) the hormonal and
neuronal memory of individuals.

====================================

To answer Dr. Calvin's question directly, there is a simple example, and that
is any manufacturing process. Five of his six processes are intact in the
human manufacture of any complex artefact, but the "boot-strapping" attribute
characteristic of Darwinian evolution fails because the critical sixth is
missing. That missing sixth is "self-reproduction." Without this final item,
the process cannot, on its own, adapt or learn. Rather the reproductive mode
employed must be one of merely constant clonal reproduction from an original
copy.

Two forms of error are inherent to every manufacturing process: design error
and manufacturing error. Design error is essentically genotypic error, where
the resultant product will be simply inappropriate for its intended function
or environment due to fundamental misdesign.

Manufacturing error is a form of epigenetic error. The basic blue-print
against which the product is being manufactured is intact and appropriate,
but the end-result is flawed due to a thousand different sources of
manufacturing error, most of which are environmentally induced.

The first error is corrected by constant re-design until the product matches
the demands of the environmental marketplace in which it must compete. The
second error is suppressed by an altogether different process: the imposition
of strict quality controls at every stage of the manufacturing process and
the intense culling selection of malformed components before they get to far
along in the manufacturing stream.

A resistor that can be declared defective before it is put into a subassembly
only costs a penny or so to dispose of. But once the defective resistor has
been integrated into a subassembly, it costs hundreds of times as much to
isolate and dispose of the subassembly -- partly due to the difficulty of
determining the subassembly is defective, and partly due to the investment
that has been made to this point in its assembly.

But these costs are minor as compared to shipping a defective product to a
customer and having to retrieve it through the warranty process -- especially
if the end-product costs only a few tens of dollars to originally
manufacture.

As the behavioral complexity of the manufactured device increases, the
necessities of implementing extremely strict quality assurance standards
concomitantly increases. The best examples of the implementation of such
strict quality controls are, of course, in the manufacture of integrated
circuits.

The first integrated circuits were independently invented in 1954 by Texas
Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor; both original circuits contained
only seven components. In comparison, today's microprocessors contain four to
ten million transistors on a single chip. If a single transistor is
defective, the entire chip may be rendered valueless. The rub lies in trying
to find those single-point defects in such a complex device before it is
shipped to the customer -- and that difficultly is part of the reason that
every chip is subjected to rigorous testing during a burn-in period. If
defective variants exist in the currently manufactured cohort, they must be
weeded out. But the circuits have grown so complex that every VLSI (very
large scale integration) chip maker now acknowledges the fact that he is
ocassionally shipping undetected defective product -- it's just that quite
often he doesn't know how much.

"Yield" is the percentage of chips that pass these rigorous selective tests.
When integrated circuits were first manufactured, yields were miserably low,
even though the complexity of the chips was minute by today's standards. The
poor yields were due to the presence of a great variety of imperfections and
contaminants in the manufacturing process.

To the manufacturer, who plays the role of the evolving phyletic lineage in
this analogy, the value of correcting and suppressing these forms of
variational error is as an important a part of the design process as is
optimizing the functional behavior of the chip itself. Profitablity, to the
manufacturer, is not only determined by the product's goodness-of-fit to
market demands but just as much by his capacity to deliver a product at the
lowest possible cost (resource utilization efficiency). The minimization of
phenotypic wasteage is as important to a circuit manufacturer as it is to a
biological species.

The behavioral complexity of the most complicated circuits now rivals at
least that of the most primitive Metazoa. But what keeps this process from
being completely Darwinian, by Dr. Calvin's six criteria, is not the lack of
reproduction, but the lack of self-reproduction. Without this critical sixth
step, nothing can be learned, no sources of error can be autonomously
suppressed, nor is there an accumulating reservoir of knowledge within the
mechanical process itself.

The manufactured circuits only become "honorary living things" (to use
Dawkin's term) when human marketers, engineers, and accountants are included
in the product's iterated evolution. Only when the entirety of the
manufacturing and design process is included in the consideration does the
process, as a whole, contain the necessary feedback loop and becomes an
accurate recapitulation of evolution. But even then, the process is "fueled"
parasitically off of the evolved biological metabolism of the human engineers
who drive the process, no different in essence than those extrinsic processes
that allow the existence and evolution of viruses.

2.  THE "SELECTION REDUCES VARIATION" FACTOID

Vincent Sarich writes, "...'selection reduces variation' is another of those
factoids that 'everyone knows' and which thus finds itself in textbook after
textbook; but for which there is precious little evidence, and where abundant
evidence against it it has been present since time immemorial from human
efforts in agriculture and animal husbandry."

Let me vigorously disagree with Dr. Sarich.  If there were no profound or
fundamental value in the reduction of variation through intense selection,
then there would be no reason for us to either expect or observe (i) the
persistence evolutionary re-invention of error repair and suppression
mechanisms, nor (ii) the evolution of prolonged demonstrations of competitive
vigor prior to mating (sexual selection).

The evolution of DNA or tissue error repair mechanisms requires the prior
auxiliary evolution of error detection and recognition mechanisms. Without
first evolving such mechanisms, error repair cannot be evolved. The evolution
of recognition mechanisms represents the first great step in a process of
selective culling that wholly serves to reduce variation in the genotype.

Similarly, the evolution of prolonged contests among  males of evolutionarily
enhanced pugnacity and aggressiveness, prior to mating, represents a second
primary method of culling selection offered to the species in order to
identify and expurgate weak or congentially defective individuals from the
breeding population. Both mechanisms operate to profoundly reduce phenotypic
variation, and by direct consequence, genotypic variation.

What makes Dr. Sarich's comment apparently correct -- at least on the surface
-- is the nature of point defects. A single-point defect may render the
phenotype completely inviable or significantly competitively debilitated --
or it may have no effect at all.  Unexpressed mutational variation (or
variation below a selective threshold) that it is imposed on a genome has the
freedom to vary as it will. On a percentage basis, in a complex organism,
such variation will numerically swamp the very small amount of variation that
can be tolerated in the expressed code, particularly so in critically
expressed code, where variation becomes essentially intolerable and the
conservation of such code over a billion year span is not unimaginable.

At core of the problem lies the persistent problem of the proper
interpretation of the allelic variation that is observed in electrophoretic
gels. The active sub-unit(s) of an enzyme generally consume only a very small
portion of the bulk protein. A certain amount of variation must reasonably be
tolerable in the non-active framework of the protein. But the interpretive
problem remains that all that electrophoresis is measuring is the Reynold's
number of various allelic variants as they are electrically dragged through a
viscous gel. The variation that is being measured is one of the distribution
of surface charge and mechanical conformation. There is no overwhelming a
priori reason to presume that such variation actually translates into direct
differences in biological activity, no more than the color of a race car can
be presumed to indicate its performance. Variations in the colors of the race
cars and in such molecular dispersions are clearly useful identifying tags,
allowing one to separate and distinquish the various players, but that is as
much of a conclusion that can be drawn with that information alone.

Wirt Atmar

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:86>From pinax@cyberia.com Thu Sep 26 14:13:48 1996

Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 14:13:42 -0500
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: pinax@cyberia.com (Frog Hollow)
Subject: John Evans

         For a succinct biography of Sir John Evans (1823-1908) see the 11th
edition - in many ways, the best of them - of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
If only ed. 11 of the EB were available on-line or on CD-ROM....

Cheers,    Betsy Shaw

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:87>From mayerg@cs.uwp.edu Fri Sep 27 17:17:35 1996

Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 17:17:25 -0500 (CDT)
From: Gregory Mayer <mayerg@cs.uwp.edu>
Subject: Peters projection
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu

In response to an inquiry a while back concerning how cartographers
viewed the so-called Peters projection, I had posted some information
from John Campbell's text to the effect that it was not well thought of
by cartographers.  Quite accidentally I have just come across a book on
cartographic controversies by Mark Monmonier (a geographer) entitled
_Drawing the Line_ which has a whole chapter on Peters and his campaign
to publicize his projection (which was devised 100 years earlier by
someone named Gall).  As I had gathered from Campbell, Peters is not
well-regarded by cartographers, and his efforts are seen as essentially
political.  In fact, cartographers seem to think that Peters is doing
what he accuses everyone else of doing: producing distorted maps so as to
make political points.

Gregory C. Mayer
mayerg@cs.uwp.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:88>From jrcameri@facstaff.wisc.edu Fri Sep 27 05:05:11 1996

Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 21:29:38 -0500
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: Jane Camerini <jrcameri@facstaff.wisc.edu>
Subject: darwin and wallace

I find Mayr's statement on the similarities somewhat facile.  There were
resources such as Malthus' s Essay common to both men, but their backgrounds
were vastly different, as were their constraints.  For a fascinating
analysis of Wallace's 'Malthusian Moment' see a new essay by Jim Moore in a
forthcoming volume from Chicago : Contexts of Victorian Science, B.
Lightman, ed.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:89>From GRANSOM@ucrac1.ucr.edu Sun Sep 29 08:19:14 1996

Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 6:18:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: GREG RANSOM <GRANSOM@ucrac1.ucr.edu>
To: DARWIN-L@RAVEN.CC.UKANS.EDU
Subject: Bowler's _Life's Splendid Drama_.

In his new book _Life's Splendid Drama:  Evolutionary Biology and
the Reconstruction of Life's Ancestry, 1860-1940_ (Chicago:  U. of
Chicago Press, 1996) Peter Bowler advances an important thesis about
the acceptance of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, and the
interanimation between the tranformation caused by Darwin's work on that
of biologists working on phylogenetic research, paleontology, and bio-
geography -- and the eventual acceptance not only of Darwin's hypothesis
of modification by descent, but also of Darwin's explanation of
adaptive features and behaviors by the hypothesis of natural selection.

How close does Bowler come to the mark when he makes these claims:

"[In my book] I ask how significant the new [Darwinian approach] was:
Did it constitute a revolution, or merely a transformation of existing
disciplines?  My argument is that the attempts to reconstruct life's
ancestry fall into the latter category .."  (p. 4)

"In the end, I hope to show that the emergence of twentieth-century
Darwinisim was encouraged by profound modifications that had taken place
in evolutionists' views on the history of life in the period from the
1870s to the 1930s."  (p. 5)

"If Simpson was able to make important contributions to the modern
synthesis, he did so because he could draw upon important innovations,
both techinical and conceptual, made by the previous generation of
paleontologists.  They had, in effect, become more 'Darwinian' in their
overall view of the history of live, even though many still accepted
a role for mechanisms other than natural selection."  (p. 5)

"As morphology turned away from phylogenetic reconstruction, paleontology
and biogeography become more active.  We shall see that this transition
promoted a greater awareness of the extent to which the history of life on
earth could be explained in terms of changing environments through
geological time."  (p. 5)

"A neumber of non-Darwinian mechanisms of evolution were abandoned [after
the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s] with important
consequences for ideas on the pattern of evolutionary change.  But the
rejection of these non-Darwinian ideas should not be seen as a sudden
revolution precipitated by events outside the realm of paleontology.  As
suggested above, this study will show that the path toward modern
Darwinism had already been broken by an earlier generation of evolutionists
asking new questions about the forces that shape the history of life on
earth."  (p. 5)

Bowler seems to suggest a major revision of our understanding of the
factors involved in the acceptence of the Darwinian picture, and seems
also to provide further support to Ghiselin's argument against the
Kuhnian picture of scientific 'revolutions'.  For my own part, for some
time I have been especially convinced by Bowler's argument, re-emphasized
in his new book, that we must re-think the relationship between Darwin
and 19th ideas of evolution and evolutionary processes both inside, and
especially _outside_ biology.  As Bowler puts it, "If Darwin converted the
scientific world to evolutionism despite being unable to convince his
contemporaries that he had solved the problem of how evolution worked, we
need to reassess our understanding of his impact on both science and
society."  (p. 2)

Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
UC-Riverside
gransom@ucrac1.ucr.edu
http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:90>From rozan@uog9.uog.edu Sun Sep 29 21:24:31 1996

Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 12:28:10 +0000 (WET)
From: "Yigal Zan, R.L. H-Anderson" <rozan@uog9.uog.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Wallce and Darwin

Reading David Quammen's Song of the Dodo made me want to read early
Wallace; in SotD much interesting detail is given re these two men's
differing personal experiences with the natural world due for one thing to
differences in their economic circumstances; Quammen also touches on the
delicate matter of how much Darwin knew and when he knew it vis a vis now
missing letters from Wallace, etc. R. Hunter-Anderson

_______________________________________________________________________________

<37:91>From mayerg@cs.uwp.edu Mon Sep 30 08:03:01 1996

Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 08:02:54 -0500 (CDT)
From: Gregory Mayer <mayerg@cs.uwp.edu>
Subject: Re: Bowler's _Life's Splendid Drama_.
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu

	It is difficult to grasp the thesis of an unseen book from a few
paragraphs, but, to quote Bowler, the cited claims seem to be

> merely a transformation of existing

views, rather than a major revolution.  What I found interesting is the
notion that paleontology had become, in part, Darwinian prior to
Simpson.  Gould has argued that the synthesis was grafted on to
paleontology by Simpson.  But the interpretation that seems to be urged
by Bowler would be revisionary, perhaps even more traditional, rather
than revolutionary.

Gregory C. Mayer
mayerg@cs.uwp.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________
Darwin-L Message Log 37: 56-91 -- September 1996                            End