Arts & Letters Daily search results for “darwin” (61)
2010-01-01 | 'Charles Darwin''s natural selection is one of the grandest ideas of any age. Herbert Spencer''s use of Darwin is quite another story' more »
2011-01-01 | The city that Darwin built. Can evolutionary theory bring aimless, shabby Binghamton, N.Y. back to life? more »
2013-12-05 | Was Shakespeare more significant than Darwin, or Mill more than Malthus? Can greatness be quantified? Cass Sunstein has his doubts more »
2010-01-01 | Libertarians need Charles Darwin because a Darwinian science of human evolution supports classical liberalism more »
2013-06-27 | Is evolution a means or an end? The question of biological teleology agonized Darwin. Just consider the stegosaurus more »
2015-04-06 | Half of Americans reject evolution, the second-lowest acceptance rate of 34 developed countries. Just try defending Darwin in Kentucky more »
2011-01-01 | Darwin has displaced Hegel as a political thinker, suggests Francis Fukuyama. Is this the end of the end of history? more »
2017-09-19 | Books by Charles Darwin number 25. Books about Darwin number 7,500, with 160 more titles each year. Is there anything new to say on the subject? Yes more »
2012-08-16 | Richard Dawkins talks with Playboy. They discuss the usual things: Jesus, Darwin, creationism, bipedalism, and buggering a bald transsexual more »
2013-04-08 | Science without Darwin. Had the naturalist perished on the HMS Beagle, might evolutionary ideas have been accepted more quickly? more »
2017-07-18 | Darwin and women. Publicly dismissive of the female intellect, in private he was completely dependent on it more »
2013-01-26 | Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Heisenberg: Scientific progress has always required heroic minds, not necessarily heroic morals. Adam Gopnik elaborates more »
2015-07-27 | Copernicus, Darwin, and ... Ernest Lawrence? He ushered in the era of Big Science, transforming the way knowledge advances more »
2010-01-01 | Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Jerry Fodor may not be creationists, but that only makes more flagrant the stupidity of their case against Darwin more »
2017-02-13 | "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." Darwin dealt with human evolution in only 12 words. But that was enough more »
2018-05-16 | Useful in crime-scene investigations since China’s Qin dynasty, fingerprinting confounded Darwin and absolved Picasso. Where, exactly, does the technique come from? more »
2022-10-15 | How did young Charles Darwin transform from diffident specimen collector to scientific theorist? Luck had a lot to do with it more »
2014-08-25 | Long before Cuvier, Darwin, and Mendel, Aristotle was deciphering the mysteries of the cuttlefish's abdominal tract, the ambiguities of hyena genitals more »
2011-01-01 | No doubting Charles Darwin was the greatest biologist of the 19th century. A shame, however, that his star has obscured another bright mind of the time: Richard Owen more »
2016-08-02 | A philosophy of education. Influenced by Hegel and Darwin, John Dewey launched a revolution that overthrew the methods of the day. Hannah Arendt was not pleased more »
2010-01-01 | 'It''s the holiday season again, and time for cheerful women and their men to go out shopping together. Usually a big mistake, and Darwin tells us why' more »
2013-06-12 | Darwin referred to humor as ?a tickling of the mind.' But seriously: What actually happens in our brain when we laugh? more »
2010-01-01 | If you want to pick holes in evolution, you need to grasp what Darwinian science tries to achieve. A new book on Darwin fails to do this more »
2015-12-16 | Origins of the beard. Darwin sported whiskers but struggled to explain facial hair. Is it a triumph of nurture over nature, culture over primitive instinct? more »
2016-04-01 | Darwin did not take metaphors lightly. He honed them and defended them. That was the case with "natural selection," which wasn't his first choice for evolution more »
2021-01-21 | Darwin in space. If there is life on other planets, it will have evolved along the same lines as life on earth more »
2012-08-16 | Can evolution explain the instinct to make and appreciate art? No, thought Darwin. Yes, argued Denis Dutton. Adam Kirsch sorts it out more »
2014-04-09 | Can an octopus think? How about an earthworm, or a sea snail? Darwin, Freud, Kandel, and the strange world of lower-organism cognition more »
2015-03-28 | Alfred Russel Wallace and his notebook traveled some 14,000 miles, accumulating evidence of natural selection. Does Darwin get too much credit? more »
2014-03-08 | Darwin in Arabia. On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, but appeared in Arabic in 1918. One problem: no word in Arabic for 'species? more »
2010-01-01 | 'Historians, please note. If ever there existed a scientific theory that is fundamentally historical, that explains change over time, it is Darwin''s evolution by natural selection' more »
2020-06-18 | Darwin and the earthworms. To prove their intelligence, he glued leaves together, shouted at them, and serenaded them with a bassoon more »
2013-07-18 | Darwin called it ?an odd state of mind,' a puzzle of evolutionary theory. Shyness alienates, yes, but it also binds us together more »
2013-01-14 | Maybe Darwin was wrong, says Thomas Nagel, and biology is teleology: The universe is aimed at certain goals as it unfolds through time more »
2015-02-23 | Darwin didn't argue with politicians. But politicians tangle with him. Indeed, evolution is a litmus test: Do you stand with reason even if it costs votes? more »
2010-01-01 | 'You can''t explain natural selection by appeals to domestication. There is no mind in Darwin''s nature to conduct a breeding program. Oh, yeah?' more »
2010-01-01 | Charles Darwin, "the man who made the modern world," was conventional in his fibre, reticent and generous, one who insisted that his own mental abilities were only middling more »
2010-01-01 | Compassion and benevolence, as Charles Darwin knew, are rooted in our evolved psychology, ready to be cultivated for the greater good more »
2017-01-03 | If Kepler, Darwin, and Einstein had not come along, would their theories have been discovered by others? Were they indispensable? An alternative history of great ideas more »
2017-01-18 | From Emerson and Carlyle to Lamarck and Darwin, thinkers have debated agency. But where does debating the free will of squirrels, rocks, and robots get us? more »
2011-01-01 | 'Diagnosing Darwin. The naturalist''s chronic vomiting has been attributed to any of 40 diseases. Now there''s a new diagnosis' more »
2018-03-15 | Darwin had eczema, so he grew a beard; Dickens hid his receding chin. Then there was the matter of George Eliot’s hands more »
2021-02-09 | When Charles Darwin met Harriet Martineau, she enjoyed a level of influence he could not imagine. And she challenged his dim view of women more »
2017-03-10 | Tennyson despaired at the existence of fossils; Darwin mocked such thinking as “catastrophist.” Our notion of extinction rests on the relationship between the arts and sciences more »
2010-01-01 | Just as Chomsky blew B.F. Skinner out of the water with his innatism in the 1950s, so Jerry Fodor wants to do the same to Charles Darwin. The signs so far more »
2018-01-02 | Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist, has read hundreds of books about Darwin and his work. Many are not good, but A.N. Wilson's is by far the worst more »
2019-05-17 | In the last decades of the 19th century, séances abounded, and austere sects speculated about geology. Darwin’s world was awash with spiritualized science more »
2017-09-06 | There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to diminish Darwin by insisting that his ideas are not original. A.N. Wilson is no more successful than his predecessors more »
2017-04-06 | Darwin’s work set off an intellectual earthquake in America. It transformed Thoreau from a poet into a geologist, altered abolitionism, and spurred a generation of literary naturalists more »
2018-08-16 | In 1837, Darwin sketched a tree of life: a common ancestor at the trunk, ever-dividing branches leading to new species. Turns out those branches aren't as separate as we thought more »
2017-09-05 | Jane Carlyle was the greatest letter writer of her time. A correspondent of Mill, Darwin, Forster, she is remembered as a genius. But a genius of what? more »
2022-03-04 | Darwin was 22 when he set sail on the Beagle. He was 50 when he published On the Origin of Species. The theory of evolution … evolved, slowly more »
2020-12-23 | Merpeople: For Linnaeus, they were next to seals and manatees, for Darwin, they explained a missing link. Now they’re being connected to queer identity more »
2017-01-31 | What Victorians looked like. Darwin had a beard and eczema, Tennyson a strange set of false teeth, George Eliot a right hand much larger than her left more »
2017-04-05 | In some cultures, shyness is a virtue, a sign of refinement. But it befuddled Darwin, who didn't see any benefit to our species more »
2018-11-01 | Tales from a publishing family. Jane Austen was upset with a printing delay. And Charles Darwin was not amenable to making On the Origin of Species solely about pigeons more »
2017-12-15 | “Darwin was wrong,” says A.N. Wilson, whose book is quite often wrong, too. Indeed, it's an object lesson in how not to write the history of anything more »
2018-01-29 | Cuttlefish were “hyacinth red and chestnut brown,” sea slugs “primrose yellow,” soft coral “light auricular purple”: Darwin, one admirer noted, was “a first-rate landscape painter with the pen” more »
2016-09-02 | Tom Wolfe has long been deft at skewering the pompous, the status-seeking, the class-conscious. His new target: Darwin. Wolfe comes armed not with evidence, but with sarcasm more »
2020-04-03 | Darwin wrote more than a dozen books. Some of them are easily ignored. Some are fun and charming. Some grind through important stuff. One of them flows briskly and changed the world more »
2017-04-01 | Darwin worked a few hours a day. Trollope wrote only between 5 to 8 a.m. — and published 47 novels. They weren't accomplished despite their leisurely schedules; they were accomplished because of them more »