Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM

J-B Lamarck was born OTD in 1744 A “prime cause … endows animal life with the power to make organization gradually more complex…. Occasionally a foreign, accidental, and therefore variable cause has interfered with the execution of the plan, without, however, destroying it.” 🐋🌱🧪🗃️🧠 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Ruin a book by adding a word: My first thought was The Old Man and the Sea Horse. But then I realized I’d totally want to read that. Maybe it’s a sequel to Remarkably Bright Creatures?

Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · last wk.

Ruin a book by adding a word: The Longest Yard Sale

Ruin a book by adding a word: The Longest Yard Sale

Dan Kaszeta FRHistS@dankaszeta.bsky.social · 2w ago

Ruin a book by adding a word: Source Code of the Woosters

Rosalind Franklin was born OTD in 1920. Her X-ray crystallography was key to discovering DNA’s structure (her student Raymond Gosling took photo 51). She also studied viruses. After her untimely death, a colleague Aaron Klug continued her work and won a Nobel. 🌱🐋🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM

Edward Hopper was born on this day in 1882. “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” Room in New York (1932) 🐡 #PhilSci (and, yes, I think that’s an appropriate feed for this)

OTD in 1925 John Scopes was found guilty of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee statute that forbade the teaching of "any theory … that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The trial was as much an effort to bring tourist money into Dayton TN as anything else. 🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

The letters by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had been read before the Linnean Society. OTD in 1858, D abandoned the “Big Species Book” he had been working on and began a short “abstract” of his theory. It would go on to be published as On the Origin of Species. 🌱🐋🧪🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #EvoBio

Multi-talent Robert Hooke, who launched microscopy, was born 18 July 1635 #histsci #histtech thonyc.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/m...

Making the indiscernible visible: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

The seventeenth century polymath Robert Hooke, who was born 17th  18th July 1635, is a complex and problematic figure in the history of science. Undoubtedly immensely talented and endlessly ingenio…

thonyc.wordpress.com

Thomas Kuhn was born OTD in 1922. Historicity—over revolutions and paradigms—was core to his thought. “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” 🦋🦫🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #PhilSci

Vilfredo Pareto was born OTD in 1848. His most famous quote is: "Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." But he never said it: quoteinvestigator.com/2024/08/02/f... 🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #HistSTM 📉📈

Walter Benjamin was born OTD in 1892. “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” #PhilSky 🧠🗃️

Cormac McCarthy was born OTD in 1933. 🌱🐋🐡 #BookSky

Just came across this, on the lemon: “Lemons are symbols, ciphers, ingredients; conduits for meaning and metaphors; little cathedrals, fruit for dreaming.” It comes from Jennifer Higgie’s meditation on the lemon as culinary, literary, and art historical object, via Yotam Ottolenghi.

Ernst Mayr was born OTD in 1904. “Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.” 🧠🗃️🌱🐋🦋🦫🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Franz Kafka was born OTD in 1883. "[T]he right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other." The Trial #PhilSky #PhilSci #BookSky

OTD in 1858, papers by Darwin and Wallace proposing transmutation of species by natural selection were read to the Linnean Society. Its president later noted that 1858 had not seen any “discoveries which at once revolutionize … the department of science on which they bear.” 🐋🌱🗃️🧠🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Joseph D. Hooker was born OTD in 1817. Darwin’s best friend, and the period’s greatest botanist. Like D, H feuded with Richard Owen. O sought to bring H’s Kew Botanic Gardens under the authority of O’s British Museum, accusing H of “attaching barbarous binomials to foreign weeds.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

Anne Carson was born OTD in 1950. “Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” “Swimming has a stoniness, water being as different from air as stones.” #BookSky #Poetry

Carlo Ginzburg, a founding figure in microhistory, has died. May his memory be a blessing. 🧠🗃️ www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/b...

Yes! And we have one of those models (and more) at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA: www.computerhistory.org/collections/...

Babbage Difference Engine No. 1, demonstration piece (three-quarter-scale replica) - 102711127 - CHM

There is a plaque attached to the base that reads "To T. Vincent Learson with appreciation and admiration from his associates in IBM, December 1972". Often referred to as "the beautiful fragment."

computerhistory.org

Babbage would later use a model of the Difference Engine to show that what we perceive as miracles are better understood as consequences of laws of nature we don’t fully understand. He proposed the origin of new species of plants and animals as an example of this. #HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪 #PhilSci

Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · 2mo ago

OTD in 1822, a letter from Charles Babbage proposing the construction of a “Difference Engine” for the automated calculation of mathematical functions was read before the Royal Astronomical Society of London. #HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪🦫🦋

OTD in 1822, a letter from Charles Babbage proposing the construction of a “Difference Engine” for the automated calculation of mathematical functions was read before the Royal Astronomical Society of London. #HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪🦫🦋

English landscape painter John Constable was born OTD in 1776. "Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.  Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments." 🧪🐋🌱🐡#philsci #HistSTM

On the role that diagramming played in Crick and Watson’s contributions to the structure of DNA--and on diagrams as epistemic tools in science and math more generally--see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (paywall). 🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Tools of Reason: The Practice of Scientific Diagramming from Antiquity to the Present

sciencedirect.com

Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Francis Crick was born OTD in 1916. We've all seen the DNA diagram that appeared in Crick and Watson’s Nature paper (left), but have you seen his sketch (right), from which his wife Odile made the published version? 🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Francis Crick was born OTD in 1916. We've all seen the DNA diagram that appeared in Crick and Watson’s Nature paper (left), but have you seen his sketch (right), from which his wife Odile made the published version? 🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM

My blog post on Darwin’s reimagining of sympathy is here: https://www.jhiblog.org/2017/11/13/what-if-humans-were-raised-like-bees-charles-darwin-and-the-evolution-of-morality/ My article on the same (paywall) here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/676147/pdf 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

What if Humans Were Raised Like Bees? Charles Darwin and the Evolution of Morality

By Greg Priest Read the full companion article in this quarter’s Journal of the History of Ideas. A new biography of Charles Darwin is coming out. Styled as a “radical reappraisal,” the book, by...

jhiblog.org

Darwin later reconceived S’s sympathy” through an evolutionary lens, making morality more contingent and more widely distributed through the animal kingdom, than S had imagined. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Stewart pointed to Smith’s account of the development of human languages as an instance, but the epithet might equally be applied to Smith’s account of the evolution of moral principles out of our innate human faculty of “sympathy” with our fellows. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

Stewart pointed to Smith’s account of the development of human languages as an instance, but the epithet might equally be applied to Smith’s account of the evolution of moral principles out of our innate human faculty of “sympathy” with our fellows. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Adam Smith was baptized OTD in 1723. A frequent explanatory practice was what Dugald Stewart called “conjectural history”—a narrative, fictive in its particulars, that is somehow truer in capturing the general processes by which certain phenomena tend to unfold. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

Adam Smith was baptized OTD in 1723. A frequent explanatory practice was what Dugald Stewart called “conjectural history”—a narrative, fictive in its particulars, that is somehow truer in capturing the general processes by which certain phenomena tend to unfold. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio