Narratives of Charles Darwin Down Under

Despite the fact that Charles Darwin spent several months in Australia in the final year of his Beagle voyage that circumnavigated the globe, most studies that deal with Darwin's life or his discovery of evolution spend little time discussing his Australian period, if it is mentioned at all. His time there is largely deemed to have produced little of significance in comparison to his visits to other places such as the Galápagos Islands, which has long been mythologized as providing the key sources of observable data that ultimately led Darwin to develop his evolutionary speculations. In recent years, however, Darwin's period in Australia has received more attention, most notably a series of studies detailing the observations and connections Darwin made while in New South Wales, Tasmania, and King George Sound. While much of this literature has provided an important corrective to previous Darwin scholarship that had largely ignored Darwin's period in Australia, it has also worked to perpetuate a romantic and heroic view of scientific discovery by suggesting that Darwin's key “evolutionary revelation” was made not in the Galápagos Islands but in the Blue Mountains, a claim that has been recently made in print and online. This paper therefore examines the historical literature on Darwin Down Under, focussing in particular on this recent romantic turn that seeks to situate Australia as the key site of inspiration for Darwin's theory of evolution.     

Scientific patronage in the age of Darwin: The curious case of William Boyd Dawkins

This essay examines the curious relationship between Charles Darwin and the palaeontologist William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929). Dawkins was a beneficiary of Darwin's patronage and styled himself as a Darwinian to Darwin and the public, yet viciously attacked Darwin and his theory in anonymous reviews. This has confused historians who have misunderstood the exact nature of Dawkins's attitude towards evolution and his relationship to Darwin. The present study explains both the reasons for Dawkins's contradictory statements and his relationship with Darwin. I introduce Batesian mimicry as a conceptual framework to make sense of Dawkins's actions, suggesting that Dawkins mimicked a Darwinian persona in order to secure advancement in the world of Victorian science. Dawkins's pro-Darwinian stance, therefore, was a façade, an act of mimicry. I argue that Dawkins exploited Darwin for his patronage – which took the form of advice, support from Darwin's well-placed friends, and monetary assistance – while safely expressing his dissent from Darwinian orthodoxy in the form of anonymous reviews. This is, therefore, a case study in how scientific authority and power could be gained and maintained in Victorian science by professing allegiance to Darwin and Darwinism.     

Three unpublished letters to Charles Darwin: the solution to a ‘geometrico-geological’ problem

While Charles Darwin wrote his Observations on South America, he often sought the advice and help of other scientists in solving specific problems. Three letters that the Cambridge geologist and mathematician William Hopkins wrote to Darwin exemplify such aid. In these letters Hopkins was able to show Darwin how he could calculate the position of the sedimentary beds on the Chonos Archipelago, which Darwin had visited. In his first letter Hopkins sent a solution, part of which eluded Darwin. Darwin's letters to Hopkins have not yet been found, but two additional letters gave Darwin the solution he was looking for.     

Charles Darwin and the repugnant curators

Recently discovered documents have revealed the background to a letter published in The Darwin Correspondence, dated 21 February 1838 and sent to Charles Darwin and six others from John George Children of the British Museum. It concerned a complaint made by Edward Blyth about George Robert Gray, assistant in charge of birds at the museum. A response by Darwin, and 14 other referees, supported Gray's defence of his character, and the complaint was dismissed. It is concluded that Children investigated this complaint so vigorously because of recent criticism of the natural history collections by witnesses to the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the British Museum (1836–37), who sought to increase the involvement and influence of career scientists in the overseeing of the collections. Children may have also been sensitive to criticism because he was a controversial appointee.     

Accentuate the negative: Locating possibility in Darwin’s ‘long argument’

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has an unusual format. After presenting his theory of Natural Selection in its first four chapters, there follows a series of five chapters presenting a large number of problems and objections to the theory which, he admits, appear overwhelming. Not until chapter 10 does he begin to present what he takes to be the positive evidence for his theory. In this paper I trace the evolution of this structure from its first hints in his Species Notebooks , through the 1842 Sketch and 1844 Essay to the Origin, showing that it reflects a growing awareness on Darwin’s part of what I call ’In Principle Impossible’ arguments against his theory, and of a systematic strategy for disarming them.     

Conditional distribution analyses of probabilistic forecasts

Probabilistic forecasts have good ‘external correspondence’ if events that are assigned probabilities close to 1 tend to occur frequently, whereas those assigned probabilities near 0 tend to occur rarely. This paper describes simple procedures for analysing external correspondence into meaningful components that might guide efforts to understand and improve forecasting performance. The procedures focus on differences between the judgements made by the forecaster when the target event occurs, as compared to when it does not. The illustrations involve a professional oddsmaker's predictions of baseball game outcomes, meteorologists' precipitation forecasts and physicians' diagnoses of pneumonia. The illustrations demonstrate the ability of the procedures to highlight important forecasting tendencies that are sometimes more difficult to discern by other means.     

The Advantages of Obscurity: Charles Darwin's Negative Inference from the Histories of Domestic Breeds

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin famously accounted for the lack of fossil evidence in support of species evolution on the grounds that the fossil record is naturally incomplete. This essay examines a similar argument that Darwin applied to his analogy between natural and artificial selection: the scarcity of data about the historical backgrounds of domestic breeds was the natural by-product of an extremely gradual change process. The point was to enhance the ability of the artificial selection analogy to suggest that nature's species had undergone a similar transformation. Darwin did not depend on this negative inference alone, however, for in his writings he included whatever information he could find about the actual histories of particular breeds. A comparison with Darwin's treatment of the fossil record suggests the reasonableness of this combined use of opposite kinds of evidence to establish a single point. The comparison also suggests the unique qualities of negative inference as applied to the breeding analogy.     

Charles Darwin and group selection

The question of the levels at which natural selection can be said to operate is much discussed by biologists today and is a key factor in the recent controversy about sociobiology. It is shown that this problem is one to which Charles Darwin addressed himself at some length. It is argued that apart from some slight equivocation over man, Darwin opted firmly for hypotheses supposing selection always to work at the level of the individual rather than the group. However, natural selection's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, endorsed group selection hypotheses.     

Primordial chemistry and enzyme evolution in a hot environment

Ever since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, questions have been raised about whether enough time has elapsed for living organisms to have reached their present level of complexity by mutation and natural selection. More recently, it has become apparent that life originated very early in Earth’s history, and there has been controversy as to whether life originated in a hot or cold environment. This review describes evidence that rising temperature accelerates slow reactions disproportionately, and to a much greater extent than has been generally recognized. Thus, the time that would have been required for primordial chemistry to become established would have been abbreviated profoundly at high temperatures. Moreover, if the catalytic effect of a primitive enzyme (like that of modern enzymes) were to reduce a reaction’s heat of activation, then the rate enhancement that it produced would have increased as the surroundings cooled, quite aside from changes arising from mutation (which is itself highly sensitive to temperature). Some nonenzymatic catalysts of slow reactions, including PLP as a catalyst of amino acid decarboxylation, and the Ce^IV ion as a catalyst of phosphate ester hydrolysis, have been shown to meet that criterion. The work reviewed here suggests that elevated temperatures collapsed the time required for early evolution on Earth, furnishing an appropriate setting for exploring the vast range of chemical possibilities and for the rapid evolution of enzymes from primitive catalysts.     

Complementarity,wave-particle duality,and domains of applicability

Complementarity has frequently, but mistakenly, been conflated with wave-particle duality, and this conflation has led to pervasive misunderstandings of Bohr's views and several misguided claims of an experimental “disproof” of complementarity. In this paper, I explain what Bohr meant by complementarity, and how this is related to, but distinct from, wave-particle duality. I list a variety of possible meanings of wave-particle duality, and canvass the ways in which they are (or are not) supported by quantum physics and Bohr's interpretation. I also examine the extent to which wave-particle duality should be viewed as an example of the sort of dualities one finds in, e.g., string theory. I argue that the most fruitful way of reading of Bohr's account complementarity is by comparing it to current accounts of effective theories with limited domains of applicability.     

Value management and model pluralism in climate science

Non-epistemic values pervade climate modelling, as is now well documented and widely discussed in the philosophy of climate science. Recently, Parker and Winsberg have drawn attention to what can be termed “epistemic inequality”: this is the risk that climate models might more accurately represent the future climates of the geographical regions prioritised by the values of the modellers. In this paper, we promote value management as a way of overcoming epistemic inequality. We argue that value management can be seriously considered as soon as the value-free ideal and inductive risk arguments commonly used to frame the discussions of value influence in climate science are replaced by alternative social accounts of objectivity. We consider objectivity in Longino's sense as well as strong objectivity in Harding's sense to be relevant options here, because they offer concrete proposals that can guide scientific practice in evaluating and designing so-called multi-model ensembles and, in fine, improve their capacity to quantify and express uncertainty in climate projections.     

Zweideutigkeit about “Zweideutigkeit”: Sommerfeld,Pauli, and the methodological origins of quantum mechanics

In early 1925, Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) published the paper for which he is now most famous and for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1945. The paper detailed what we now know as his “exclusion principle.” This essay situates the work leading up to Pauli's principle within the traditions of the “Sommerfeld School,” led by Munich University's renowned theorist and teacher, Arnold Sommerfeld (1868–1951). Offering a substantial corrective to previous accounts of the birth of quantum mechanics, which have tended to sideline Sommerfeld's work, it is suggested here that both the method and the content of Pauli's paper drew substantially on the work of the Sommerfeld School in the early 1920s. Part One describes Sommerfeld's turn away from a faith in the power of model-based (modellmässig) methods in his early career towards the use of a more phenomenological emphasis on empirical regularities (Gesetzmässigkeiten) during precisely the period that both Pauli and Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), among others, were his students. Part two delineates the importance of Sommerfeld's phenomenology to Pauli's methods in the exclusion principle paper, a paper that also eschewed modellmässig approaches in favour of a stress on Gesetzmässigkeiten. In terms of content, a focus on Sommerfeld's work reveals the roots of Pauli's understanding of the fundamental Zweideutigkeit (ambiguity) involving the quantum number of electrons within the atom. The conclusion points to the significance of these results to an improved historical understanding of the origin of aspects of Heisenberg's 1925 paper on the “Quantum-theoretical Reformulation (Umdeutung) of Kinematical and Mechanical Relations.”     

The rhetorical strategy of William Paley’s Natural theology (1802): Part 1, William Paley’s Natural theology in context

This article reconstructs the historical and philosophical contexts of William Paley’s Natural theology (1802). In the wake of the French Revolution, widely believed to be the embodiment of an atheistic political credo, the refutation of the transmutational biological theories of Buffon and Erasmus Darwin was naturally high on Paley’s agenda. But he was also responding to challenges arising from his own moral philosophy, principally the psychological quandary of how men were to be kept in mind of the Creator. It is argued here that Natural theology was the culmination of a complex rhetorical scheme for instilling religious impressions that would increase both the virtue and happiness of mankind. Philosophy formed an integral part of this strategy, but it did not comprise the whole of it. Equally vital were those purely rhetorical aspects of the discourse which, according to Paley, were more concerned with creating ‘impression’. This facet of his writing is explored in part one of this two-part article. Turning to the argumentative side of the scheme, part two examines Paley’s responses to David Hume and Erasmus Darwin in the light of the wider strategy of inculcation at work throughout all his writings.     

Henry More and the development of absolute time

This paper explores the nature, development and influence of the first English account of absolute time, put forward in the mid-seventeenth century by the ‘Cambridge Platonist’ Henry More. Against claims in the literature that More does not have an account of time, this paper sets out More's evolving account and shows that it reveals the lasting influence of Plotinus. Further, this paper argues that More developed his views on time in response to his adoption of Descartes' vortex cosmology and cosmogony, providing new evidence of More's wider project to absorb Cartesian natural philosophy into his Platonic metaphysics. Finally, this paper argues that More should be added to the list of sources that later English thinkers – including Newton and Samuel Clarke – drew on in constructing their absolute accounts of time.     

Huxley's defence of Darwin

This article ventures a reappraisal of Huxley's role in the Darwinian debates. First, the views on life-history held by Huxley before 1859 are identified. Next, the disharmony between these views and the view put forward by Darwin in the Origin of species (1859) is discussed. Huxley's defence of the Origin is then reviewed in an effort to show that, despite his fervour on Darwin's behalf, his advocacy of the case for natural selection was not particularly compelling, and that his own scientific work took no revolutionary new direction after 1859.     

Was Feyerabend a Popperian? Methodological issues in the History of the Philosophy of Science

For more than three decades, there has been significant debate about the relation between Feyerabend and Popper. The discussion has been nurtured and complicated by the rift that opened up between the two and by the later Feyerabend's controversial portrayal of his earlier self. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the accounts of the relation that have been proposed over the years, disentangles the problems they deal with, and analyses the evidence supporting their conclusions as well as the methodological approaches used to process that evidence. Rather than advancing a further speculative account of the relation based on Feyerabend's philosophical work or autobiographical recollections, the second part of the paper strives to clarify the problems at issue by making use of a wider range of evidence. It outlines a historical reconstruction of the social context within which Feyerabend's intellectual trajectory developed, putting a special emphasis on the interplay between the perceived intellectual identity of Feyerabend, Feyerabend's own intellectual self-concept, and the peculiar features of the evolving Popperian research group.     

Saving the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance

Constitutive mechanistic explanations are said to refer to mechanisms that constitute the phenomenon-to-be-explained. The most prominent approach of how to understand this relation is Carl Craver's mutual manipulability approach (MM) to constitutive relevance. Recently, MM has come under attack (Baumgartner and Casini 2017; Baumgartner and Gebharter 2015; Harinen 2014; Kästner 2017; Leuridan 2012; Romero 2015). It is argued that MM is inconsistent because, roughly, it is spelled out in terms of interventionism (which is an approach to causation), whereas constitutive relevance is said to be a non-causal relation. In this paper, I will discuss a strategy of how to resolve this inconsistency—so-called fat-handedness approaches (Baumgartner and Casini 2017; Baumgartner and Gebharter 2015; Romero 2015). I will argue that these approaches are problematic. I will present a novel suggestion for how to consistently define constitutive relevance in terms of interventionism. My approach is based on a causal interpretation of manipulability in terms of causal relations between the mechanism's components and what I will call temporal EIO-parts of the phenomenon. Still, this interpretation accounts for the fundamental difference between constitutive relevance and causal relevance.     

Trust in expert testimony: Eddington's 1919 eclipse expedition and the British response to general relativity

The 1919 British astronomical expedition led by Arthur Stanley Eddington to observe the deflection of starlight by the sun, as predicted by Einstein's relativistic theory of gravitation, is a fascinating example of the importance of expert testimony in the social transmission of scientific knowledge. While Popper lauded the expedition as science at its best, accounts by Earman and Glymour, Collins and Pinch, and Waller are more critical of Eddington's work. Here I revisit the eclipse expedition to dispute the characterization of the British response to general relativity as the blind acceptance of a partisan's pro-relativity claims by colleagues incapable of criticism. Many factors served to make Eddington the trusted British expert on relativity in 1919, and his experimental results rested on debatable choices of data analysis, choices criticized widely since but apparently not widely by his British contemporaries. By attending to how and to whom Eddington presented his testimony and how and by whom this testimony was received, I suggest, we may recognize as evidentially significant corroborating testimony from those who were expert not in relativity but in observational astronomy. We are reminded that even extraordinary expert testimony is neither offered nor accepted entirely in an epistemic vacuum.