iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 9h

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

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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

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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

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

I get you. But the war metaphor is perfectly apt for certain kinds of organismal interactions. And Darwin himself recognized the point you raise, more often using “struggle“ – which he interpreted in a “large and metaphorical sense“ to refer more to striving than to seeking to dominate or defeat.

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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 · 23/06/2026

Not really. But I understand that I am lucky to be able to say that. Regardless, that’s not the goal.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I mean, what’s the point of just “passing a class”? I understand that there are a lot of people who think a college education is a waste of time. But the way to be *absolutely certain* that it’s a waste of time is to be focused on nothing more than “passing a class.”

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

You’re 100% right. I can only guess that @carlbergstrom.com misspoke, or got autocorrected. The job of an educator is not to teach “knowledge.” It is to teach people how how to learn and think and investigate

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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

Or someone before Vaucanson had unsuccessfully tried to manufacture a defecating duck automaton.

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

I don’t know, but I do wonder if it was the first. Maybe Jacquard had a predecessor who was never able to ship his loom.

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

But not the last, as I can testify as a former software/internet guy.

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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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