Darwin, Let's Go on a Journey

So I was watching


stumbling over this quote from Darwin:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that

naturally I went looking it up (am I using the internet wrong? Where's the porn? lol jk) and ended up on the edge

First of all, it adds context:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

But then Dawkins is just twaddling on I don't want to even discuss what he's ranting on about. So let's focus on Darwin.
It's poetic everybody can see that, right? Romantic almost. Is that surprising? No.
The difference between Darwin, who besides his many talents was a child of his time, and a modern 'scientist' who is just as much product of his environment, seems to struggle with awe and beauty, admiration and more 'emotional approach' to the object of their study.
In a world that still was much more mysterious, in our view backwards much less explained must lead to uncertainty and even anxiety, but I think the opposite is true.
Because it was just a handful of people in relation to society that had doubts and questions of the sort Darwin's family and a few Gentlemen in the Clubs he was a member of had.
That's one poleshift in perspective I think that stares you in the eyes, if you think about it.
Back then: busy, working, enjoying a minute of sunshine, a little happiness before you go breaking your back, leisure 10 seconds per day.
Today: we got time for all sorts of entertainment. Plus wellness.

We doubt everything. Back then nobody had time to bother with it. The normal average child had one or two jobs to pay their weight. Darwin wasn't completely isolated from that, but very privileged. The gap between the classes was much wider.
Survival struggle was normal. We don't have that anymore in our everyday life. Life was miserable. For a big majority.
Now we are wealthy enough to participate in the more abstract discussions of how stuff works and what reality is.
So what do humans instinctively always first turn to when they're looking for help, support, intervention... if not the super-natural.
What people might call 'superstitions', a lucky charm, or a prayer is a reflex. A mental reflex. I don't decide 'oh I am going to get my rabbit foot' and add: Dear Jesus for good measure.
If faced with survival pressure the mind reaches out 'beyond'.

But I assume: you doubt that?
And rightfully so. We could make a survey, but I'd say it's true for more than just a few people. We get impressed if we look back how hard school was back then. But it was a privilige not a requirement. Meaning very few people had access to education at all.
That's also very different today.
Yet what life is, if there is a God, what is consciousness, what is the universe good for or why does it exist, how does it all work... are still mostly unexplained questions.
On the individual level I think most people are pretty convinced their interpretation of reality is the most true.
There are maybe a few exceptions, but I think the rule everybody does is closer to the truth.
Yet it's really all false. Nobody, not one in the whole wide world knows a full picture of how everything works, or what it even is.

And still I can admire the beauty of life. Despite cruelty and everything.
Allowing myself to enjoy those few seconds today, despite the survival pressure...
Even though I'm still not sure where the pressure is coming from? If it's not supernatural

it's you!

Right? Here are we back at the quote:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

You know what the problem is: their microscopes sucked.
Turns out the best miscroscope still can't really show how that happened, that first breath.
Life, isn't she a beauty? Who wants to be a rock? How boring is that?
Zero entertainment value.
We have to assume life only exists to make things more interesting.

a reply to: Peeple

Hi Peep, yeah, there's a lot to unpack in your opening post.

So when I first saw a macro photo of an ant's face my programming/belief system of beauty was fixed and my first impression was that ant's face was not beautiful - questioning comfort zones and self-controlling limits is a difficult but necessary path if one wants to become objective. Anyway, that's my pursuit right now.

We can look deeper and deeper into Earth's biodiversity using our electron microscopes and you are right, we still won't learn the true extent of reality no matter how advanced we become.

Darwin's survival theory is relevant today and he was brave enough to step outside his comfort zone and take the flack.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats.

Giving oneself a moment of pleasure amongst life's hardships is a must. We are advised for every one negativity experienced we need five to counteract it. So praise yourself well, and others too because everyone needs many doses of positivity.

Dawkin's belief in atheism seems 'all in' and I wonder what belief system or experience in life made him go there.

As for school being hard back then, I have decided that it was hard because we were not taught how to think for ourselves nor were we taught how to study properly - that has changed now, thankfully.

a reply to: quintessentone

No I mean they had to do what we do today, without calculators. Classical education really meant you speak Greek and Latin and practice your rethoric.
At the time of Darwin children got a lot less indulged. I meant that as contrast, ...though it's probably a gradual process.

a reply to: Peeple

The children of the Darwin time were not expected to learn the complexity of subjects from what the children of today are but there were calculating aids, such as the abacus. I recall in elementary school being taught how to use one.

www.thecalculatorsite.com...

Interestingly, a little before Darwin's age was a prototype computer, but only the wealthy got to dabble with that technology.

kids.nationalgeographic.com...

So we have to take into consideration all the contrasts of that time and most families were farmers and laborers, so little was expected of them in the way of being educated.

a reply to: Peeple

I love this thread! Very thought-provoking!

Back then nobody had time to bother with it. The normal average child had one or two jobs to pay their weight. Darwin wasn't completely isolated from that, but very privileged. The gap between the classes was much wider.
Survival struggle was normal. We don't have that anymore in our everyday life

This part reminded me of when my Grandfather gave me his third grade primer that had 'reading, writing, arithmetic' in it, back in 1960 something. I was in junior high, and reading through the book I was absolutely stunned; the subject matter was far advanced in many areas than I had ever been exposed to.

I'm not sure I would have ever been able to graduate third grade! I'm not sure when education regressed in the school system, or why that was brought about. Americans don't seem to value learning and academics as much as other cultures do.

originally posted by: quintessentone

Darwin's survival theory is relevant today and he was brave enough to step outside his comfort zone and take the flack.

The problem with Darwin is he got a lot wrong while still being on the cutting edge of understanding for his time. What I find strange is that people still use him as the one example of evolution and the reality is it would be like saying addition and subtraction are the only math.

originally posted by: Peeple

No I mean they had to do what we do today, without calculators. Classical education really meant you speak Greek and Latin and practice your rethoric.
At the time of Darwin children got a lot less indulged. I meant that as contrast, ...though it's probably a gradual process.

Think of how much we advanced from 1880 to 1980. Horse and buggy to airlines and landing on the moon... That was one crazy 100 years, and all done with a slide ruler... School today is daycare. When you look at homeschooling, they actually only do school like 3 hours per day.

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: quintessentone

Darwin's survival theory is relevant today and he was brave enough to step outside his comfort zone and take the flack.

The problem with Darwin is he got a lot wrong while still being on the cutting edge of understanding for his time. What I find strange is that people still use him as the one example of evolution and the reality is it would be like saying addition and subtraction are the only math.

Well, you could make that conclusion with what Darwin put out there, but he seemed to have been a visionary as well and probably didn't make these theories known, because he wasn't well received by the religious community as you may recall. I'm sure he kept a lot of his theories to himself or shared with close family and friends, as in this case.

His most famous is the theory of evolution by natural selection, which explains much of what we know about life on Earth. But he also pondered many other questions. In a hasty letter to a friend, he put forward an idea about how the first life might have formed. Some 150 years later, that letter looks remarkably prescient – maybe even prophetic.

www.bbc.com...

Really remarkable theorizing when you realize how lacking the science was then.

The key document is a letter he wrote, dated 1 February 1871, to his close friend the naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker. This letter is now almost 150 years old. It is short – just four paragraphs – and hard to read because of Darwin’s spidery handwriting. In it, after a brief discussion of some recent experiments on mould, Darwin outlined the beginnings of a hypothesis:

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter [would] be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

Darwin was proposing that life began, not in the open ocean, but in a smaller body of water on land
This takes a bit of unpacking, partly because several ideas are jammed together: it reads as if Darwin was thinking his hypothesis through even as he wrote it down. But the core idea is simple enough.

Darwin was proposing that life began, not in the open ocean, but in a smaller body of water on land, which was rich in chemicals. This is in essence the primordial soup idea, but with one advantage: in a pool, any dissolved chemicals would become concentrated when water evaporated in the heat of the day. The initial synthesis of the chemicals of life would be powered by some combination of light, heat and chemical energy.

In many ways Darwin’s idea is hopelessly incomplete, but he cannot be faulted for that. He was writing before the discovery of nucleic acids like DNA, before biologists understood anything about how genes work, and when the internal workings of living cells were largely a mystery. Darwin imagined that life began with a protein, but nobody really knew what proteins were: not until 1902 was it understood that proteins are chains of amino acids.

a reply to: Xtrozero

Galton feels far more pertinent to our world than darwin. as does UCL (now Imperial)

Darwin gave a theory the likes of Galton, Fabians Fisher Beveridge wanted to make their theories reality along with plenty of nasties like hitler but they all have the same thing in common wanting to fix humanity by eradication the wrong types (alwys the poor) thus proving their own theories of evolution correct..

we still see the same types today..

a reply to: quintessentone

I don't know but I made pre-university maths in Germany 'Leistungskurs' they're calling it and I could barely do it with a programmable calculator, I can't imagine doing curves and functions without one.
It would take forever.
That's another thing one can notice: decrease of the time we can focus on one task.

a reply to: Xtrozero

That's true, it mostly serves the purpose to have them occupied while the parents work.

On education today:

I love this song and thought maybe you can appreciate it.

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: Peeple

No I mean they had to do what we do today, without calculators. Classical education really meant you speak Greek and Latin and practice your rethoric.
At the time of Darwin children got a lot less indulged. I meant that as contrast, ...though it's probably a gradual process.

Think of how much we advanced from 1880 to 1980. Horse and buggy to airlines and landing on the moon... That was one crazy 100 years, and all done with a slide ruler... School today is daycare. When you look at homeschooling, they actually only do school like 3 hours per day.

100% dead head on. They spend less time in curriculum and learn more.

Many of the advancements we made were done very recklessly. Like children playing with a gun.

The let's throw something against the wall and see if it sticks approach.

Seldom was anything done where care and thought went into long term outcomes. A lot of those eureka moments brought joy in the moment, but many tears, pain and death down the road.

originally posted by: NightSkyeB4Dawn

Many of the advancements we made were done very recklessly. Like children playing with a gun.

The let's throw something against the wall and see if it sticks approach.

It was a time when one person not in some role of power could change the world for good or bad... My grandfather was born in 1888 and in 1970s the world was much different than his first 20 years of life to the point it was unrecognizable to him. I disagree with the "throw something against the wall" approach as you suggest. A lot of thought went into everything without computers helping.

originally posted by: Peeple
a reply to: quintessentone

I don't know but I made pre-university maths in Germany 'Leistungskurs' they're calling it and I could barely do it with a programmable calculator, I can't imagine doing curves and functions without one.
It would take forever.
That's another thing one can notice: decrease of the time we can focus on one task.

Maybe it's more about using our time to think about math in different ways rather than using our time grueling over calculations in the way in which we were expected to perform them.

I recall my children asking for reading and math help. The reading curriculum was only words by memory, which appalled me, so I helped them with the word memory cards, but additionally taught them how to read phonetically, because how in the hell are they to figure out new words they come across? Actually my youngest child's teacher phoned me and told me she was the only student in Jr. Kindergarten that could read.

As for math, I attempted to teach both of the 'math made simple' using math tricks but they protested saying their teacher would fail them for not following the school's way of doing it. Again I was appalled and my children struggled with math.

This is a lead in to my point about comparisons between different times in education and how it was administered, also about how others are inventing new ways to solve math problems and thus spending more time figuring out new ways to solve math problems - ultimately ending up saving us less time solving math problems.

There's one in the source below about the ever-winning lottery ticket. Although other mathematicians debunked that one.

www.popularmechanics.com...

A retired couple won $26 million by using simple arithmetic to beat the game’s odds. Jerry and Marge Selbee owned a convenience store in Evart, Michigan before they retired and got rich by winning multiple state lottery games over the next six years.

metro.co.uk...#:~:text=A%20retired%20couple%20won%2 0%2426%20million%20by%20using,state%20lottery%20games%20over%20the%20next%20six%20years.

Math made simple, that's the ticket.

I actually use that simple math system when I buy lottery tickets and my payout is usually over 50% to 70% payout.

originally posted by: nickyw

Galton feels far more pertinent to our world than darwin. as does UCL (now Imperial)

Galton was a relative of Darwin, so I bet they had a good number of conversations. He also started out as a doctor at like the age of 15, so most likely a brilliant man too. His ideas of eugenics were straight up Nazi so I don't see him going down in history as a great one....lol

What really changed everything was genome mapping. The human genome project took 13 years and billions of dollars, today it takes one or two days and cost like 5k.

When we look at Darwin today, he is now like only one slice of knowledge of a very large pizza with 100s of other slices too and not the whole pie as he once was.

originally posted by: quintessentone

I recall my children asking for reading and math help. The reading curriculum was only words by memory, which appalled me, so I helped them with the word memory cards, but additionally taught them how to read phonetically, because how in the hell are they to figure out new words they come across? Actually my youngest child's teacher phoned me and told me she was the only student in Jr. Kindergarten that could read.

As for math, I attempted to teach both of the 'math made simple' using math tricks but they protested saying their teacher would fail them for not following the school's way of doing it. Again I was appalled and my children struggled with math.

So, my wife is Asian, and as soon as my kids could talk, she had them reading homemade flash cards of words. 100s and 100s, then she made them spell each word. She did the same with math on flash cards with the problem on front and answer on the back. I remember going to k grade on watch your kid read day and my son was reading Harry Potter and the kid next to him was having a hard time with Doctor Seuss. During their school years my wife had them do workbooks in the summer for the next year grade. Today my one son just finished college as an EE with a math minor and my other is going to be a doctor, so I can't say flash cards are bad.

a reply to: Xtrozero

I never said flash cards were bad, they helped me learn medical terminology more quickly, it's only because I was, at that time, an avid reader of books so I wanted to make sure my children could pick up any book, read anything, and figure out perhaps from the root words, what the word meant. The education system's curriculum and processes all seemed lacking to me. Why not incorporate varying ways of learning and different methods of teaching?, was where my head was at.

originally posted by: quintessentone

I never said flash cards were bad, they helped me learn medical terminology more quickly, it's only because I was, at that time, an avid reader of books so I wanted to make sure my children could pick up any book, read anything, and figure out perhaps from the root words, what the word meant. The education system's curriculum and processes all seemed lacking to me. Why not incorporate varying ways of learning and different methods of teaching?, was where my head was at.

I understand, but I sometimes think we make things too complicated than what they need to be, and I think we dumb down our kids as to what their true potential is really like. People today talk about how kids are not even adults now until their mid 20s, spend 6+ years in college after 13+ years of preschool, grade school, high school. A few posts ago we talked about Galton who was going though medical school at the age of 15. At 15, Ben Franklin founded a weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant. Many at 15 were masters in theirs trades too, so what modern teaching methods did they have back then? Kids today can't even drink wine until they are 21...geez

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: quintessentone

I never said flash cards were bad, they helped me learn medical terminology more quickly, it's only because I was, at that time, an avid reader of books so I wanted to make sure my children could pick up any book, read anything, and figure out perhaps from the root words, what the word meant. The education system's curriculum and processes all seemed lacking to me. Why not incorporate varying ways of learning and different methods of teaching?, was where my head was at.

I understand, but I sometimes think we make things too complicated than what they need to be, and I think we dumb down our kids as to what their true potential is really like. People today talk about how kids are not even adults now until their mid 20s, spend 6+ years in college after 13+ years of preschool, grade school, high school. A few posts ago we talked about Galton who was going though medical school at the age of 15. At 15, Ben Franklin founded a weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant. Many at 15 were masters in theirs trades too, so what modern teaching methods did they have back then? Kids today can't even drink wine until they are 21...geez

This is what Peeple wrote:

No I mean they had to do what we do today, without calculators. Classical education really meant you speak Greek and Latin and practice your rethoric.
At the time of Darwin children got a lot less indulged. I meant that as contrast, ...though it's probably a gradual process.

Are today's kids indulged or given what they need to be successful in this complex stress-filled world?

originally posted by: quintessentone

Are today's kids indulged or given what they need to be successful in this complex stress-filled world?

Self-created stress, or stress never seen before because their childhood has little to none. What is the stress level of when you are 8 and need to get a job to survive? We have pussified our young plain and simple. Participation trophies for breathing as example and then when they don't walk into a 100k job to do nothing after getting a degree in college that does nothing for them in the business world, they end up being stressed out as an over educated barista.