Comments on: Charles Darwin, Geologist

By: Steven Schafersman

Steven Schafersman — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:05:23 +0000

Yes, my mistake. You included the biology books, too. You are correct.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:56:58 +0000

Steven, thanks for the comments. You are right that Glen Roy is an interesting case. I did not include any of the read papers, articles, collected recollections or notes. This would add a number of items but not much to the word count. I’ll do a version with that and a few other changes at some time in the future. There may be about 20 that would have to be counted.

That is not a list of geology publications, it is a list of monographs and books including biological ones up to the Origin.

By: Steven Schafersman

Steven Schafersman — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:06:44 +0000

Greg, you are certainly correct that Darwin was primarily a geologist during the first half of his career, a fact noted by many other historians of science. His most important geological work was his first monograph on the structure and distribution of coral reefs in which he correctly deduced the origin of the three different types of Pacific coral reefs–fringing, barrier, and atoll–by the elevation of volcanic islands and the subsidence of the sea floor. He was spectacularly proven correct over a century later by deep drilling of atolls and sea mounts (submerged volcanic islands). Even later, sea floor subsidence was shown to result from sea floor spreading. You also list his second and third geological monographs on Volcanic Island and South America.

Now for some quibbles:

Your list omits one of Darwin’s most famous geological papers, that on the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy, read at the Royal Society (London) in 1839 and published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1839. Darwin made a “gigantic blunder” (his description) by claiming the three Roads were of marine origin. The very next year, Louis Agassiz (ironically, a life-long creationist despite being the greatest fish paleontologist of his century!) correctly explained the Roads as caused by a series of glacial lakes undergoing freezing and thawing along their shorelines. Agassiz was also the originator of the Glacial theory. The Roads are lake terraces formed along the shorelines of ancient lakes impounded by ice dams. Darwin didn’t concede his mistake until just before his death.

Also, two of Darwin’s famous barnacle books were totally zoological, based on living species, and shouldn’t be on the list. The other two deal with fossil barnacles but have little to do with geology (biostratigraphy) and everything to do with paleozoology (Darwin was the greatest barnacle paleontologist of his century!).

By: Simea mirans

Simea mirans — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:08:05 +0000

Has anyone put together a collection of quotations from stoned scientists?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:39:48 +0000

From the M Notebook (the part where he is probably ill and writing about metaphysics and stuff).

I dare say Darwin himself would admit that my graph, based on collected data, lends more weight to the argument than his own meanderings written while almost certainly stoned. But it is a great quote.

By: Andrew C. Holmes

Andrew C. Holmes — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:20:03 +0000

My paleontology professor says that geologists get to claim Darwin one of their own citing this 1938 quote from Notebook M:

“I a geologist have illdefined notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surface & truly poetical.”