Greg Priest
PhD in history and philosophy of science (also JD and MLA), Stanford.
Biology, complexity, diagramming. Philosophy of history.
Curates these BlueSky feeds:
History and Philosophy of Biology
Complexity Science
Philosophy of History and Historiography
- New study finds that some dogs are able to learn new words from overhearing conversations not directed at them, with a facility comparable to that of 18-month old human infants. 🧪🐋🌱
- “Reality, in its quantitative aspect, must be considered as a system of populations.… The general study of the equilibria and dynamics of populations … has probably reached its highest development in the biological study known as 'ecology,' [and] this name may well be given to it.” 🌱🐋 #philsci 🧪🌎🦋🦫
- Kenneth Boulding—philosopher, #complexity theorist, and mystic—was born OTD in 1910. “The earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything … and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.” 🌱🐋 #philsky #philsci 🧪🌎 #STS
- Kenneth Boulding—philosopher, #complexity theorist, and mystic—was born OTD in 1910. “The earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything … and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.” 🌱🐋 #philsky #philsci 🧪🌎 #STS
- “Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.” #philsky #booksky
- AA Milne was born on this day in 1882. “Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.” 🌱🐋🧪#PhilSci #booksky
- AA Milne was born on this day in 1882. “Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.” 🌱🐋🧪#PhilSci #booksky
- OTD 1908 Willhelm Weinberg gave a talk to the Society for the Natural History of the Fatherland in Württemberg giving the population genetics equations GH Hardy would independently publish 5 months later. It was 35 years before his work was recognized in the Anglophone world. 🐋🌱🥢🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM
- Paul Feyerabend was born OTD in 1924. Knowledge is not a body of consistent theories converging on truth. It is “an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible … alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth … forcing the others into greater articulation.” 🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #STS
- William James was born OTD in 1842. As important as “pragmatism” to understanding James is “meliorism,” the idea that improving the world is possible, but not assured. We have to fight for it. “We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.” #philsky
- An ecologist “lives alone in a world of wounds…. [He] must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” 🌱🐋🌎🧪
- Aldo Leopold was born OTD in 1887. “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” #HpBio #HistSTM 🌎 #philsci #STS 🧪
- Alfred Russel Wallace born OTD in 1823. He said he shared with Darwin “an intense interest in … the variety [of living things] that catches the eye of the observer even among those which are very much alike, but which are soon found to differ in several distinct characters.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio
- OTD in 1912, Alfred Wegener delivered a lecture propounding the theory that our modern continents were formed by the splitting and drifting apart of an ancient supercontinent, which he named Pangea. Due to his failure to offer a plausible mechanism, he was widely ridiculed. 🧠🗃️⚒️ 🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci
- Arthur Danto was born Jan 2, 1924 To call a car “dented” is to implicitly refer to an earlier undented state. Stories “have a beginning, a middle, and an end. An [historical] explanation then consists in filling in the middle between the temporal end-points of a change.” 🧠🗃️ 🦋🦫 #PhilSsci #PhilSky
- OTD in 1944, in Korematsu v. US, SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of FDR’s order that US citizens of Japanese descent be involuntarily interned. The decision has come to be seen as one of the lowest moments in the Supreme Court’s history.
- Maurice Wilkins was born OTD in 1916. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the structure of DNA using X-ray crystallography. He did not start out in biochemistry. He changed fields after being disillusioned by his work on the Manhattan Project. 🐋🌱 #HistSTM #STS 🧪 🐡
- Maxwell's Demon was born OTD in 1867 in a letter to Peter Guthrie Tait. M called it only a “finite being.” Lord Kelvin named it a “demon,” presumably referring to its apparent unearthly power to (locally and temporarily) violate the second law of thermodynamics. 🦫🦋 #HistSTM #philsci 🧪
- An article I saw today details a debate (in Heisenberg’s old stomping grounds of Helogland) in which Carlo Rovelli and Chris Fuchs argue about how best to interpret Heisenberg’s intuition. 🦫🦋🧪 #philsci science.org/content/article/100…
- Joan Didion was born OTD in 1934. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live.... We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” #BookSky #Lit 🦋🦫 🗃️🧠
- Werner Heisenberg was born OTD in 1901. “What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” We are “asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer … by the means that are at our disposal.” 🦋🦫🧪 #PhilSci #HistSTM
- Claude the albino alligator, the unofficial but very real mascot of the California Academy of Sciences, has died at 30, apparently of liver cancer. I’m kind of broken up about it. In all seriousness, may his memory be a blessing. 🧪🐋🌱
- St. George Jackson Mivart, one of Darwin’s fiercest critics, was born OTD in 1827. If long necks favor giraffes on the African savannah, M asked, where are the *other* long-necked ungulates? Why are there not vast herds of giraffopottamuses sweeping across the veldt? #QED 🧪 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio
- The surprising crab-trap–pulling behavior is described in this article: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... We recently published a paper on how animal tool use is conceptualized, offering a framework to make sense of its different forms 👇📃 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #evosky #philsci
- Expression was also important in the history of the book, being an early instance of a book that included photographs, notwithstanding publisher John Murray’s worry that including photos would “poke a hole in the profits.” 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky
- Darwin was a pioneer in experimental psychology, showing photos of human faces that had been galvanically stimulated to represent different emotions to visitors to Down House in an effort to determine which emotions could be reliably identified. 3/4 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky
- Darwin had earlier made detailed observations of the emotional displays of his “little animalcule of a son,” William Erasmus, which he used in Expression. D’s wife Emma worried that if she were “out of temper,” he would just be “forming theories about me.” 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky
- Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions launched OTD in 1872. Just as our bodily form has evolved from our animal ancestors, so too have our minds, including "the habit of expressing our feelings [or, in his title, "emotions"] by certain movements." 1/4 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky
- John Beatty has a lovely chapter analyzing this topic in Kohn’s classic volume The Darwinian Heritage: degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.151…
- It’s not really that surprising that Darwin used the diagrammatic form in the Origin. In his private notes, he often scribbled diagrams to help him think through the general patterns that might be expected to emerge from evolutionary processes. 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡
- I also also have a standalone article, here: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs… Full disclosure: analysis to a certain extent changed by the time of the dissertation. 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡
- I also also have a standalone article, here: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs… Full disclosure: analysis to a certain extent changed by the time of the dissertation. 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡
- Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, was usually quite generous about paying for maps, plates, and in-text images for D’s books, and D attended closely to his illustrations, so it’s surprising that the Origin featured only 1, a diagrammatic model of change through time. 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio 🐡
- OTD in 1859, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. He’d been working on a long treatise titled “Natural Selection,” but learning that Alfred Russel Wallace had developed a similar theory, he shifted toward a shorter “abstract.” 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio
- Asa Gray was born OTD in 1810. A devout believer in a personal God, G was also one of Darwin’s greatest champions. In a correspondence spanning 12 years, G and D minutely explored what evolution says about God and free will. D could not accept G’s God, but was deeply torn. 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci 🧪
- Arthur Miller was born OTD in 1915. He had a complicated relationship with The Crucible, never settling even on who was the central villain. But late in life, he offered this: “I’m not really a moralist. I just make the assumption that certain things we do lead to catastrophe.” #philsky #booksky
- “To make a life of order out of the buzzing confusion in a wondrous but difficult world demands our best efforts.… Negotiating the physical world into a conceptual entity of some interest and dimension is a challenge of the championship level.”
- Wayne Thiebaud was born OTD in 1920. “You can do art history backwards or forwards; you can take your choice. Progress is not part of it. Variation, yes, and extension and all that, but progress? Phew. I don’t know how you’d beat any of that stuff, even from the cave period.”
- As a consequence L believed that, like classical physics, geological dynamics are ergodic. In exploring a Newtonian state space, the earth system will return to a state in which iguanadons, ichthyosaurs, and pterodactyls roam the earth Henry De la Beche mocked him here 🗃️🧠🧪 ⚒️ 🦋🦫 #histSTM #philsci 🐡
- Charles Lyell was born OTD in 1797. L believed that geology could and should be made a Newtonian science: Just as “the fall of an apple ... assist[s] in explaining the motions of the moon,” so too “the laws of earthquakes ... throw light on the origin of mountains....” 🗃️🧠🧪 ⚒️ 🦋🦫 #histSTM #philsci 🐡
- Charles Lyell was born OTD in 1797. L believed that geology could and should be made a Newtonian science: Just as “the fall of an apple ... assist[s] in explaining the motions of the moon,” so too “the laws of earthquakes ... throw light on the origin of mountains....” 🗃️🧠🧪 ⚒️ 🦋🦫 #histSTM #philsci 🐡
