iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 10h

OTD in 1881, Charles Darwin published his last book, on earthworms. It reflected a long interest in animal minds: “One alternative alone is left, namely, that worms, although standing low in the scale of organization, possess some degree of intelligence.” 🧪 🌱🐋🦋🦫 #HistSTM #philsci #pschsky #cogsci

Caricature by Edward Linley Sambourne from Punch in 1882 titled “Man is but a Worm,” depicting human evolution, commencing with Chaos, through worm, monkey, culminating in Darwin himself.

13712

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

OTD in 1905, Henry Fairfield Osborn named Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king of the tyrant lizards. The specimen was collected by Barnum Brown in the Hell Creek formation in Montana. Below are the first published image of T. rex and a photo of the fossil being removed from the quarry. 🐋🌱⚒️🧪 #HistSTM

050

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

OTD in 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. #polisky

Marshall with his family at his swearing in. Photographer unknown

060

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

OTD in 1836, HMS Beagle docked at Falmouth, after a 5 year voyage. Charles Darwin wrote in his diary, “To my surprise and shame, I confess the first sight of the shores of England inspired me with no warmer feelings, than if it had been a miserable Portuguese settlement.” 🌱🐋🧪#HistSTM #STS

Watercolor of HMS Beagle at anchor by Owen Stanley

1205

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.

1259

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

43411

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.

07437

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.

34924

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

1289

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

261

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.

0224

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

062

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.

38942

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.

03710

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

35015

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

0203

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.

09335

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)

0375

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.”

12510

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.

28110

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.

0268

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.

1150

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.

0142

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.

071

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.

34311

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.

2246

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.

0178

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.

0124

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.

181

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.

1325

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

1206

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

1165

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

020

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

05615

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,

0338

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

071

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.

3257

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.

4141

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.

13110

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Gregory Bateson was born OTD in 1904. “Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.” “Epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?” 🦫🦋🧪🐋🌱 #PhilSci #HistSTM

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

0214

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Thomas H Huxley was born OTD in 1825. The idea of “warfare” between science and religion is suspect, but it works for H. Protestantism lacks “a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters” from the Pope to the Bible. 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio

1227

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was born OTD in 1860. He conceived of organismal form as primarily a matter of physical forces, rather than natural selection. He used diagrams to represent how networks of physical forces could deform one body plan into another. 🧪🌱🐋🦋🦫🐡 #HistSTM

56311

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

1162

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Henri Poincaré was born OTD in 1854. Identical antecedents must lead to identical consequents. But our world is so complex that it is inconceivable that two situations should *ever* be in all respects identical. And so the principle of determinism has no application to us. 🧪🦋🦫 #HistSTM #PhilSci

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

1223

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Kurt Gödel was born OTD in 1906. “If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.” John Barrow, The Artful Universe 🧪🦫🦋 #HistSTM #PhilSci

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

1306

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

For #PhilSky aficionados, here’s a cartoon from a recent @newyorker.com:

12110

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

OTD in 1953, J Watson and F Crick published a paper describing the double helical structure of DNA in the journal Nature. M Wilkins and co-authors, and R Franklin and R Gosling, published separate papers in the same issue with X-ray crystallography analysis. 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio

The dna double helix diagram from the original Nature paper.

2237

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Vladimir Nabokov was born OTD in 1899. “I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.” “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” —Lolita #Philsky #Booksky

Caricature of Nabokov by David Levine via the Brooklyn Museum.

083

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

My post was not intended to suggest that the fact that Darwin did not recant his theory is evidence in its favor or is that his failure to embrace Christianity is evidence of its falsity. Just relevant to an understanding of his thought and legacy.

010

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Charles Darwin died OTD in 1882. Stories of a deathbed renunciation of his doubts about Christianity and recantation of his theory circulated widely (mostly in the US, predictably). They were, however, lies. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to John Herschel. 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #PhilSci

15717