Perhaps this is not the best example. I used to play competitive
chess back in the good old days when I had time for it and my
chess buddies would often criticize me for defending lost
positions. Chess aficionados will know what I mean when I
say that my favorite opening was the Latvian Gambit which yields
a position considered by most orthodox authorities to be lost
after only two moves ;-).
Seriously though, I'm somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed
with you. Your position has already been refuted, yet you
struggle on valiantly. Should I just ignore you as others
have done or should I continue to twist the proverbial knife?
At 10:45 PM 4/3/96 EST, Steve wrote:
>Brian
>
>On Thu, 28 Mar 1996 22:31:50 -0500 you wrote:
>
>>BH>I think any scholar that did not consider the possibility that
>>private correspondence may contain "tentative ideas and even
>>nonsense" would not be much of a scholar. Surely Darwin's
>>parenthetical remark "and oh! what a big if" suggests that
>>Darwin thought the idea tentative at best.
>
>>SJ>Of course Darwin's corrrspondence had "tentative ideas". But
>>my point was that they would have been well-thought out, and
>>certainly not "nonsense".
>
>BH>But you wrote:
>>
>> 'Those who have done this must assume that Darwin did
>> not just dash off "tentative ideas and even nonsense",
>> but thought deeply and seriously about what he wrote.'
>> -- SJ
>>
>>Please make up your mind. What is it now, that Darwin *did*
>>"dash off" some tentative ideas but they were well-thought out
>>tentative ideas?
>
SJ>There is no need for me to "make up" my "mind". It is perfectly clear
>if you read what I wrote! :-) I disagree with the "dash off" and
>nonsense", bit of Yockey's post. My point was that Darwin was such a
>cautious and deep thinker that even his "tentative ideas" would have
>been well-thought out.
>
I did read what you wrote and it wasn't clear. How am I supposed
to know that when you write "tentative ideas and even nonsense"
you just mean "nonsense"?
Also, you seem to be making some kind of idol out of Darwin. He
was flesh and blood like you and I. Also, like most people,
his tentative ideas were most likely tentative.
>>BH>Also note that
>>the quote begins "It is often said ..." indicating that the
>>subject was commonly discussed at the time. I also read somewhere
>>(but can't seem to find the reference) that Darwin's father
>>Erasmus also discussed the warm little pond. In any event,
>>there seems good reason to doubt that the idea was original
>>to Darwin.
>
>>SJ>Erasmus Darwin was Charles Darwin's *grandfather*. I have already
>>quoted Orgel and Shapiro who state that "the warm little pond" origin
>>of life idea originated with Charles Darwin. If you claim it was
>>originated by Erasmus Darwin, then you would need to demonstrate
>>that.
Steve, I demonstrated exactly what you asked, yet you swagger on.
What's your problem?
[...]
SJ=========>
>Sorry, these are secondary sources so I can't accept them! :-)
>
Sorry, but they are not. Now, if I had quoted King-Hele's
views on pre-biotic chemistry you would have a point.
Does this give you a clue?
SJ:==
>Seriously, thanks for the quotes from Erasmus Darwin. But they are
>not in the same league as Darwin's "warm little pond" quote.
>
Yes, I agree, Erasmus' little poem was brilliant. :)
>BH>(b) he doesn't deserve credit for it. IMHO, proper credit is
>>due the first person who *was* willing to take responsibility
>>for the idea by publishing it and defending it publicly.
>
>SJ>This is your criteria. But the fact is that Charles Darwin *has*
>>been given the "credit" for it, because he first thought of it and
>>wrote it down (albeit in private correspondence).
>
>BH>It is irrelevant that he *has* been given credit. Orgel et al could
>>be wrong, no?
>
SJ:==
>Of course, but I the burden of proof is on you to produce a quote
>prior to Charles Darwin that outlines the pre-biotic evolution
>research program as clearly as his "warm little pond" letter.
>
No, no, no, no, no ......... ;-)
The onus is on you buddy. You want to give someone credit for
something written in a private letter even though that person
never defended the idea publicly and even though their published
opinion on the subject is quite different from what was said in
private. This is contrary to the way things are usually done, you
need to justify it. It doesn't matter that it was Darwin. Darwin
isn't God, he gets no special favors. This is the main point and
it stands regardless of whether the idea was original with
Darwin. It turns out that it almost certainly was not, but this
is only a minor point.
Dare I give an illustration? Let's try. Suppose you were to
publish the first article on some controversial hypothesis
in some technical field, we'll call it dweebology for fun. :)
You spend ten years valiantly defending your idea against
all comers. Finally, after about 30 years, your idea has
become universally accepted and you are a famous dweebologist.
After retiring, some historian digs up a letter written by
Mr. Dweebology himself [Professor Dufus L. Dweeb] to his
grandmother 10 years before your paper was published. In
this letter, Dr. Dweeb mentions your idea in passing. In
conferences where you were valiantly defending your idea,
Dweeb says very little, tentatively aligning himself with
the opposition. Never does he defend the idea in any of his
papers. Do you think it fair that the Jones hypothesis be
renamed as the Dufus theory of Dweebology?
OK, all this just to make it clear what I believe to be the
main point. In an earlier post you wrote:
'There is no doubt that Darwin wrote it and can justly
claim to be the father of "the prebiotic soup paradigm"'
--SJ
To justify this you gave a few quotes. First of all, Yockey's
main point was a protest against the attempt by some to give
Darwin credit for "soup theory", so of course you are going to
find some quotes of the type you dug up, otherwise Yockey's
point was pointless ;-).
Out of curiosity, I dug through several of my references
on abiogenesis in an attempt to see (a) who is generally
given credit for "the prebiotic soup paradigm" in the
literature and (b) how often the Darwin quote is mentioned.
The answer to (a) is overwhelmingly either Oparin or the
tag team Oparin-Haldane. The Darwin quote is mentioned
in (roughly) somewhat less than half of the papers and
books I looked at [here I am counting only those sources
which discuss the history of the subject, most journal
papers do not discuss such trivia at all ;-)]. Anyway,
in most cases where the Darwin quote comes up it is
mentioned merely to indicate that Darwin had thought
about the subject with no attempt at giving him credit
for the idea.
Now I'll just mention a few specific cases for illustration.
One of the more interesting cases is the classic book
<The Origins of Life on the Earth> by Miller and Orgel.
[please note the second author]. In this book I could
not find any mention of Darwin's warm little pond quote.
Obviously I didn't read the entire book looking for it,
but Darwin's name does not appear in the index. I also
read over the historical sections and the first person
mentioned is Oparin, there was no mention of Darwin.
Also, on page 175 Miller and Orgel write:
The very first organisms must presumably have grown and
reproduced at the expense of preformed organic materials
in the prebiotic soup. This seems very obvious now, but
until Oparin's book appeared, many writers believed that
the first organism arose by a very improbable event and
was from the very beginning capable of synthesizing all
its components from CO2 and water by photosynthesis ...
--S. L. Miller and L. E. Orgel (1974). <The Origins of
Life on the Earth>, Prentice-Hall, 1974, p.175.
It is very clear in this book that it is Oparin who is
"Mr. Soup Theory" and not Darwin. So, what happened between
1974 and 1994 (Orgel's SciAm paper)? Were Miller and Orgel
unaware of the Darwin quote in 1974? This seems unlikely
since the quote is given in another Origin of Life classic,
JD Bernal's <The Origin of Life>, published a few years
earlier (1967) and cited by M&O.
Bernal introduces the Darwin quote with:
... Darwin [40], with for him unusual caution, in his
published work refused seriously to face this problem,
but the following two quotations, both from letters,
indicate that he had thought of it: ...
-- JD Bernal, <The Origin of Life>, The World Publishing
Company, 1967, p. 20.
Bernal refers to primordial soup theory as the Oparin-Haldane
hypothesis and talks of "Oparin's 'primative soup'" instead
of Darwin's warm little pond.
Also note that Bernal's assessment of Darwin: "with for him
unusual caution" contradicts your statement above "...that
Darwin was such a cautious and deep thinker".
Another interesting example is John Casti's (excellent)
book <Paradigms Lost>. Chapter 2 covers the origin of
life with the suggestive title "A Warm Little Pond".
Although it seems rather obvious that Casti must have
gotten his chapter title from Darwin's letter, I could
find no mention of Darwin in this chapter. Also, Casti
clearly gives credit for the primordial soup paradigm
to Oparin and Haldane:
... it was Miller's experiment that set the stage for
what has become the dominant scientific paradigm for
how life as we know it today got its start here on Earth.
To trace that thread, we must begin in 1923 in Moscow
with the unheralded publication of a booklet asserting
that there is no fundamental difference between living
and nonliving matter.
Having just escaped the yoke of the czars and not yet
stuck their necks into the noose of Stalinism, Russians
found the Roaring Twenties to be an excellent decade
for challenging established orthodoxies. So it seems
appropriate that during this time a thirty-year-old
biologist, Alexander L Oparin, should present the first
real scientific case against biblical creationism, arguing
that life could have arisen by natural physical means
here on Earth. [...] A few years later, the British
biologist J.B.S. Haldane independently proposed the
same general idea, colorfully expressing the character
of such a primordial sea as a kind of "hot dilute soup,"
leading to the modern labeling of this 0parin-Haldane
Hypothesis as the Primordial Soup Theory.
-- J. Casti, <Paradigms Lost>, Avon Books, 1989, p. 69.
And finally, the reference I originally alluded to but was
unable to find until this afternoon:
One of the first to speculate on the conditions necessary
for the origin of life on earth was Erasmus Darwin, the
grand-father of Charles Darwin. In his <Temple of Nature> (1)
he had written, "All vegetables and animals now existing
were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones
formed by spontaneous vitality." Perhaps this idea had
influenced Charles Darwin in his own thinking. Several
years later, he wrote to his friend Hooker (2) about
some "warm little pond" with all sorts of ammonia and
phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present,
in which he postulated that a protein compound was
chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex
changes.
[...]
To the Russian biochemist, A.I. Oparin (5), more than to
anyone else today, we owe our present ideas on the scientific
approach to the question of the origin of life. ...
-- C. Ponnamperuma (1983). "Cosmochemistry and the Origin
of Life," in <Cosmochemistry and the Origin of Life>,
C. Ponnamperuma (Ed), D. Reidel, pp. 1-34.
Although Ponnamperuma mentions both Erasmus and Charles, credit
is given to Oparin. Also, Ponnamperuma makes what I thought to
be a rather obvious connection, suggesting that Darwin may have
gotten the idea from his grand-father. This would certainly
account for why Darwin started his statement with "It is often
said ...".
Again, this is a relatively minor point, however I hope you
will agree that it satisfactorily addresses your previous
statement:
'But the fact is that Charles Darwin *has* been given the
"credit" for it, because he first thought of it and wrote
it down (albeit in private correspondence).' -- SJ
Now, let me repeat something that Bernal said to make sure that
my main point is still with us:
"Darwin, with for him unusual caution, in his published
work refused seriously to face this problem" -- Bernal
Thus he doesn't deserve the credit.
>BH>Further, this is not just *my* criteria.
>
>Agreed. It was Yockey's quote.
>
>BH>The key in the Darwin quote was his gravity illustration:
>>
>> "Who can explain the essence of the attraction of gravity?
>> No one now objects to following out the results consequent on
>> this unknown element of attraction ..."
>>
>IOW, the "unknown element of attraction" is accepted as an axiom.
>
>>SJ>Darwin says nothing about an "axiom", but he does say: "the
>>attraction of gravity...his unknown element of attraction".
>
>BH>He doesn't have to actually say "axiom". What do you think
>>"...following out the results consequent on this unknown element
>>of attraction ..." means?
>
>What it says "unknown"! :-)
>
Good grief Steve, you're hopeless, you really are. Must I spell
this out for you? "...following out the results consequent
on this unknown element of attraction ..." means the same thing
as "accepting the unknown element of attraction as an axiom
and following out the consequences". The unknown element of
attraction *is* unknown. That's why its accepted as an axiom
and is not derived from more fundamental considerations. One
doesn't hold off developing a theory of gravity until such
a time as the element of attraction is known. By way
of analogy Darwin is saying that there is nothing wrong with
accepting life as an axiom and then following out the consequences
thereof.
========================
Brian Harper |
Associate Professor | "It is not certain that all is uncertain,
Applied Mechanics | to the glory of skepticism" -- Pascal
Ohio State University |
========================