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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

OTD in 1838, Charles Darwin read Malthus’s Principles of Population “for amusement.” The idea of a “war of nature” was venerable, but D realized that such a war would tend to remove deleterious variations from populations. Natural selection would necessarily follow. 🌱🐋🧪#HistSTM #philsci 📈📉#evolbio

Cartoon of Darwin holding a copy of the Origin, looking into a mirror and seeing as his reflection Malthus holding a copy off his Essay on the Principle of Population. By Tom Dunne for American Scientist.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

L: Color print magazine advertisement for Pennsalt DDT products. This ad appeared in Time Magazine, June 30, 1947. Science History Institute. R: Photo of children being spayed with DDT in a public swimming pool. Date and photographer unknown. 🌱🐋 # HistSTM 🧪🌎 #philsci #philsky #WomeninSTEM

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published OTD in 1962. “[W]e have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” 🌱🐋 # HistSTM 🧪🌎 #philsci #philsky #WomeninSTEM

Caricature of Rachel Carson by David Levine for the New York Review of Books.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Thomas Hunt Morgan was born OTD in 1866. If you're ever feeling that your work is uending and unedifying, remember that he once said this: "Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it." 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

Photograph of Morgan's Fly Room at Columbia University, around 1920. American Philosophical Society.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The pioneering aquarist Jeanne Villepreux-Power was born OTD in 1794. She was the first to record that some species of octopuses could use tools to pry open their prey's shells. She observed them waiting for the clam to open its shell and then jamming In a rock. 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM

Lino block print of Jeanne Villepreux-Power by @minouette.bsky.social

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Samuel Johnson was born OTD in 1709. Selecting one quote from my notes was a challenge, but here goes: “Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.” #PhilSky

Caricature by David Levine for the New York Review of Books

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

OTD in 1854, Charles Darwin began sorting his notes in preparation for writing a treatise with the working title “Natural Selection.” He would never publish the book, instead publishing a short “abstract”—titled “On the Origin of Species”—in 1859. 🐋🌱 #HistSTM #evolbio 🧪

Manuscript title page of On the Origin of Species, in Charles Darwin’s hand.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Eunice Foote conducted an experiment showing that atmospheric CO2 traps heat. OTD in 1856, she listened to a man (John Henry of the Smithsonian) present her results to the American Acad. for the Advancement of Science. Henry downplayed the significance of Foote’s finding. #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM 🧪🌎

Eunice Foote, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays”, in American Journal of Art and Science, 2nd Series, v. XXII/no. LXVI, November 1856, p. 382-383.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Thomas Lovejoy was born OTD in 1941 “Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping cranes in higher esteem than people.... [But] the choice is not between wild places or people, it is between a rich or an impoverished existence for Man.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Photo portrait of L with a hawk. Unknown photographer.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM

Fig. 11 from Griffin, Echoes of Bats and Men (1959). “The frequency and wave length of a bat's sound vary during each chirp. This diagram, which is approximately to scale, illustrates the small amount of sound reflected by one insect.”I

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

J-B Lamarck was born OTD in 1744 A “prime cause … endows animal life with the power to make organization gradually more complex…. Occasionally a foreign, accidental, and therefore variable cause has interfered with the execution of the plan, without, however, destroying it.” 🐋🌱🧪🗃️🧠 #EvoBio #HistSTM

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Ruin a book by adding a word: My first thought was The Old Man and the Sea Horse. But then I realized I’d totally want to read that. Maybe it’s a sequel to Remarkably Bright Creatures?

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Ruin a book by adding a word: The Longest Yard Sale

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Rosalind Franklin was born OTD in 1920. Her X-ray crystallography was key to discovering DNA’s structure (her student Raymond Gosling took photo 51). She also studied viruses. After her untimely death, a colleague Aaron Klug continued her work and won a Nobel. 🌱🐋🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM

Cartoon of Franklin with a microscope, while Crick and Watson drink beer and expostulate, at a bar stylized as a double helix. By Quentin Blake.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Edward Hopper was born on this day in 1882. “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” Room in New York (1932) 🐡 #PhilSci (and, yes, I think that’s an appropriate feed for this)

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

OTD in 1925 John Scopes was found guilty of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee statute that forbade the teaching of "any theory … that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The trial was as much an effort to bring tourist money into Dayton TN as anything else. 🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Cartoon with the city of Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes trail was held, represented as an organ grinder. The organ is labeled “Scopes trial,” and the grinder’s monkey is collecting dollars labeled “publicity.”

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

The letters by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had been read before the Linnean Society. OTD in 1858, D abandoned the “Big Species Book” he had been working on and began a short “abstract” of his theory. It would go on to be published as On the Origin of Species. 🌱🐋🧪🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #EvoBio

Darwin’s manuscript of the title page to the Origin. Credit: Darwin Online.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Thomas Kuhn was born OTD in 1922. Historicity—over revolutions and paradigms—was core to his thought. “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” 🦋🦫🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #PhilSci

Caricature of Kuhn by David Levine for The New York Review of Books.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Vilfredo Pareto was born OTD in 1848. His most famous quote is: "Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." But he never said it: quoteinvestigator.com/2024/08/02/f... 🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #HistSTM 📉📈

Photo portrait of Pareto. Via Wikipedia.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Walter Benjamin was born OTD in 1892. “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” #PhilSky 🧠🗃️

Caricature of Benjamin by David Levine for The New York Review of Books.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Cormac McCarthy was born OTD in 1933. 🌱🐋🐡 #BookSky

“Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.”

Text in iPad notes app. Take a photo and use it.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Just came across this, on the lemon: “Lemons are symbols, ciphers, ingredients; conduits for meaning and metaphors; little cathedrals, fruit for dreaming.” It comes from Jennifer Higgie’s meditation on the lemon as culinary, literary, and art historical object, via Yotam Ottolenghi.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Ernst Mayr was born OTD in 1904. “Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.” 🧠🗃️🌱🐋🦋🦫🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Caricature of Mayr by David Levine for the New York Review of Books.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Franz Kafka was born OTD in 1883. "[T]he right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other." The Trial #PhilSky #PhilSci #BookSky

Caricature of Kafka by David Levine for the New York Review of Books.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

OTD in 1858, papers by Darwin and Wallace proposing transmutation of species by natural selection were read to the Linnean Society. Its president later noted that 1858 had not seen any “discoveries which at once revolutionize … the department of science on which they bear.” 🐋🌱🗃️🧠🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Cartoon of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, by Chris Madden, based on a caricature from Hornet magazine.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Joseph D. Hooker was born OTD in 1817. Darwin’s best friend, and the period’s greatest botanist. Like D, H feuded with Richard Owen. O sought to bring H’s Kew Botanic Gardens under the authority of O’s British Museum, accusing H of “attaching barbarous binomials to foreign weeds.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

Engraving of Hooker by Charles Henry Jeens. Wikipedia.

Photo portrait of Sir Richard Owen by Ernest Edwards, 1867. Wikipedia.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

Anne Carson was born OTD in 1950. “Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” “Swimming has a stoniness, water being as different from air as stones.” #BookSky #Poetry

Caricature of Carson by David Levine for the New York Review of Books.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Carlo Ginzburg, a founding figure in microhistory, has died. May his memory be a blessing. 🧠🗃️ www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/b...

nytimes.com

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Babbage would later use a model of the Difference Engine to show that what we perceive as miracles are better understood as consequences of laws of nature we don’t fully understand. He proposed the origin of new species of plants and animals as an example of this. #HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪 #PhilSci

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

OTD in 1822, a letter from Charles Babbage proposing the construction of a “Difference Engine” for the automated calculation of mathematical functions was read before the Royal Astronomical Society of London. #HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪🦫🦋

Model of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 1, Replica. Smithsonian.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

English landscape painter John Constable was born OTD in 1776. "Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments." 🧪🐋🌱🐡#philsci #HistSTM

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

On the role that diagramming played in Crick and Watson’s contributions to the structure of DNA--and on diagrams as epistemic tools in science and math more generally--see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (paywall). 🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM

sciencedirect.com

Tools of Reason: The Practice of Scientific Diagramming from Antiquity to the Present

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Francis Crick was born OTD in 1916. We've all seen the DNA diagram that appeared in Crick and Watson’s Nature paper (left), but have you seen his sketch (right), from which his wife Odile made the published version? 🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Darwin later reconceived S’s sympathy” through an evolutionary lens, making morality more contingent and more widely distributed through the animal kingdom, than S had imagined. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Stewart pointed to Smith’s account of the development of human languages as an instance, but the epithet might equally be applied to Smith’s account of the evolution of moral principles out of our innate human faculty of “sympathy” with our fellows. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Adam Smith was baptized OTD in 1723. A frequent explanatory practice was what Dugald Stewart called “conjectural history”—a narrative, fictive in its particulars, that is somehow truer in capturing the general processes by which certain phenomena tend to unfold. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

OTD in 1837, Charles Darwin first presented his theory of how coral reefs are formed to the Geological Society of London. The event marked his public debut as a theorist. L: hand-colored section of Cocos Island atoll. R: diagram of the same from his 1842 book (Darwin Online). 🌱🐋🧪⚒️🗃️🧠 #HistSTM

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Walt Whitman was born OTD in 1819. Song of Myself is a singularly Darwinian poem. The re-placing of natural theological tropes in a thoroughly naturalistic setting is characteristic of both. 🧪🦫🦋🐋🌱#HistSTM #BookSky

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Whitman wrote: “I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.” #BookSky

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Melville wrote: “I had heard of [Emerson] as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish. To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible…. I love all men who *dive*. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs 5 miles or more.” #BookSky

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born OTD in 1803. Complexity scientists think they came up with the idea that some phenomena cannot be predicted, but only generated algorithmically. But Emerson wrote that “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” 🦋🦫🧪 #BookSky

Illustration of Emerson likening himself to a “transparent eyeball" in his “Nature” essay. By Christopher Pearse Cranch (ca. 1837-1839). From Houghton Library, Harvard University, via Wikipedia.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

William Whewell was born OTD in 1794. One of the great early philosophers and historians of science, he was also a neo-Kantian and an Anglican priest. He also believed that our redemption on earth via Christ’s crucifixion proved the impossibility of extraterrestrial life. 🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Title page of Whewell’s book Of the Plurality of Worlds. Via Archive.org.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

But Lorenz was not the first with the intuition. In The Phantom Tollbooth, the Princess of Pure Reason says: "...whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world." 🧪🦋🦫🧠🗃 #PhilSci #HistSTM #Booksky

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Edward Lorenz, of “butterfly effect” fame, was born OTD in 1917. "Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.” 🧪🦋🦫🧠🗃 #PhilSci #HistSTM

A plot of Lorenz' strange attractor for values ρ=28, σ = 10, β = 8/3. Via Wikipedia.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

New study challenges common view that some Ediacaran fossils are traces of complex worm-like animals, saying they are assemblages of bacteria and algae. If true, this would suggest that the Cambrian Explosion may have marked a more major transition than had recently been thought. 🧪🌱🐋 #EvoBio

sciencedaily.com

Stunning fossil discovery challenges the origins of animal life

Scientists revisiting mysterious 540-million-year-old microfossils from Brazil have overturned a major idea about early animal life. What were once thought to be trails left behind by tiny worm-like c...

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