Happy 272nd birthday, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Lamarck!

Recently I just learned there is a Patrick Matthew that makes a strong claim for priority in important ideas in evolution that Darwin recognized.
Your saying he counts because of a conclusion that biology evolved and not because of the mechanism. Hmm.
On that score many would count including creationists .
All creationists would see mankind as having changed in looks from a original pair.
The mechanism for how biology changes must be the important point if someone is a first evolutionary biologist.
The guess is not good enough.

I recently read some Brit ,in a book on physics in the 1800's, figured out a major conclusion of einsteins space/time curving. Something like that.I forget his name but it was on wiki.
The science historians however denied he derseved much credit for just a educated guess.
I'm not sure but guessing on conclusions, even based on reasoning from data, can't be good enough to get the award.
How does one score it???

I normally do not answer Robert Byers because he never is willing to discuss whether there is evidence for his assertions. It becomes a one-way channel with him drawing conclusion after conclusion and not listening to feedback from anyone.

I give him credit for never being impolite, and he does really try to read up on some things, but the one-way nature of a conversation with him is trying.

However let me make a few statements about what he has said:

1. Patrick Matthew was an interesting guy, who really did invent natural selection before Darwin, though there is little reason to believe that Darwin saw Matthew's 1831 book which was quite obscure. (The criminologist Mike Sutton, who calls Darwin a "serial liar" argues otherwise).

2. I have no idea about that space-time issue.

3. All that has little or nothing to do with Lamarck, who had published his book (Philosophie Zoologique in 1809, and whose theory of adaptation did not involve natural selection.

4. Young-Earth Creationists have only recently started allowing huge amounts of evolution within groups they call "baramins". However before the 1980s they did not allow this, as they held to the old-fashioned view of "fixity of species". That was a respectable scientific view until about 1850. After Darwin it was scientifically dead but creationists still held to it.

Joe Felsenstein said: 4. Young-Earth Creationists have only recently started allowing huge amounts of evolution within groups they call "baramins". However before the 1980s they did not allow this, as they held to the old-fashioned view of "fixity of species". That was a respectable scientific view until about 1850. After Darwin it was scientifically dead but creationists still held to it.

Robert Byers said: Recently I just learned there is a Patrick Matthew that makes a strong claim for priority in important ideas in evolution that Darwin recognized. Your saying he counts because of a conclusion that biology evolved and not because of the mechanism. Hmm. On that score many would count including creationists . All creationists would see mankind as having changed in looks from a original pair. The mechanism for how biology changes must be the important point if someone is a first evolutionary biologist. The guess is not good enough. I recently read some Brit ,in a book on physics in the 1800's, figured out a major conclusion of einsteins space/time curving. Something like that.I forget his name but it was on wiki. The science historians however denied he derseved much credit for just a educated guess. I'm not sure but guessing on conclusions, even based on reasoning from data, can't be good enough to get the award. How does one score it???

Joe Felsenstein said: 2. I have no idea about that space-time issue.

4. Young-Earth Creationists have only recently started allowing huge amounts of evolution within groups they call "baramins". However before the 1980s they did not allow this, as they held to the old-fashioned view of "fixity of species".

George FitzGerald, in an attempt to explain the Michelson-Morely experiment, came up with length contraction based on the idea that atoms "plowing" through the "luminiferous ether" were shortened in the direction that they traveled. One can derive what needs to happen to get a null result directly from the time differences in the two legs of the Michelson interferometer. Knowing this, one can then postulate a mechanism for length contraction of the arms that will account for the null result.

Heinrich Lorentz came closer to Einstein's results by delving into the electrodynamics and postulating a "local time" for events. Lorentz also postulated length contraction after FitzGerald did.

Einstein used many of Lorentz's ideas but made at least one highly significant change in perspective that made his work more significant; this is Einstein's relativity postulate that made all inertial frames equivalent. This means that all laws of physics will be seen to be the same in all inertial reference frames; there will be no experiment, including measuring the speed of light, that will tell you that you are in a "special" inertial reference frame.

Einstein's work was far more comprehensive and predicted more phenomena beyond length contraction; including time dilation, the increase in mass of a moving particle, and E = mc².

Oliver Heaviside (strange guy) was another figure of note in the development of the field of electromagnetism.

If Darwin stole his ideas from others, then I guess that even though Darwin recanted on his deathbed, that doesn't mean anything.

Or do we have to find out whether Matthew also recanted?

A few comments on the comments:

1. I stand corrected -- apparently post-Flood rapid evolution was envisaged by some creationists earlier than the 1980s. It should roughly correspond to when creationists started calling themselves "scientific" creationists.

2. Mike knows a lot more about the history of work leading to Einstein's. I will just note that although people like Lorentz laid the groundwork, Einstein readily acknowledged the importance of their work. Here he is posing with Lorentz. Einstein was a nice guy and very good to other people (as long as you weren't a member of his immediate family) and I have that on the authority of my grandmother's cousin who was the recipient of some of that kindness.

TomS said: If Darwin stole his ideas from others, then I guess that even though Darwin recanted on his deathbed, that doesn't mean anything

I love the history of science, and I have read many books about it. One of the salient conclusions that I have reached, in my opinion, is this:

Not a single individual can ever hope to postulate a theory all by himself. The necessary data, the necessary experiments, the previous ideas, even the previous failed ideas, can never be accomplished by a single person. So the greatest triumph in Science is The Insight. The ability to see the big picture, to finally make sense of the disparate collection of facts and observations and failed ideas. We celebrate Einstein, but he wasn't the one who determined that the speed of light is constant. He did not perform the experiments, as he was a theorist. Of course, his gravitational insight is one of the most astounding in history. Another example is Georges Lemaitre. He did not discover that almost all galaxies are receding from us, as that was Vesto Slipher. Hubble was the one who discovered the relationship between the distance of a galaxy and its acceleration, but it was Lemaitre who came up with the Expanding Universe. In the same vein, Darwin, while he did perform lots of experiments, is more well known for his big Natural Selection insight. But most of the facts that he used as evidence for Evolution were already well known even before his voyage, the exception being the Finches.

One of the few exceptions to this rule that I can think of is Gregor Mendel. He pretty much single handedly performed all the experiments required and then came up with the crucial insight that heredity is transmitted in discreet packets.

The Insight is really the Holy Grail of science, the one thing that really marks a threshold between distinct epochs of learning.

Daniel said: I love the history of science, and I have read many books about it. One of the salient conclusions that I have reached, in my opinion, is this: Not a single individual can ever hope to postulate a theory all by himself. The necessary data, the necessary experiments, the previous ideas, even the previous failed ideas, can never be accomplished by a single person. So the greatest triumph in Science is The Insight. The ability to see the big picture, to finally make sense of the disparate collection of facts and observations and failed ideas. We celebrate Einstein, but he wasn't the one who determined that the speed of light is constant. He did not perform the experiments, as he was a theorist. Of course, his gravitational insight is one of the most astounding in history. Another example is Georges Lemaitre. He did not discover that almost all galaxies are receding from us, as that was Vesto Slipher. Hubble was the one who discovered the relationship between the distance of a galaxy and its acceleration, but it was Lemaitre who came up with the Expanding Universe. In the same vein, Darwin, while he did perform lots of experiments, is more well known for his big Natural Selection insight. But most of the facts that he used as evidence for Evolution were already well known even before his voyage, the exception being the Finches. One of the few exceptions to this rule that I can think of is Gregor Mendel. He pretty much single handedly performed all the experiments required and then came up with the crucial insight that heredity is transmitted in discreet packets. The Insight is really the Holy Grail of science, the one thing that really marks a threshold between distinct epochs of learning.

TomS said: If Darwin stole his ideas from others, then I guess that even though Darwin recanted on his deathbed, that doesn't mean anything. Or do we have to find out whether Matthew also recanted?

Joe Felsenstein said:

TomS said: If Darwin stole his ideas from others, then I guess that even though Darwin recanted on his deathbed, that doesn't mean anything. Or do we have to find out whether Matthew also recanted?

Excuse me, I was being facetious. Did Darwin recant anything on his deathbed? His family said no, when an evangelist named Lady Hope claimed to have been there and heard him recant. His family said that she simply wasn't there.

Joe Felsenstein said:

TomS said: If Darwin stole his ideas from others, then I guess that even though Darwin recanted on his deathbed, that doesn't mean anything. Or do we have to find out whether Matthew also recanted?

Did Darwin recant anything on his deathbed? His family said no, when an evangelist named Lady Hope claimed to have been there and heard him recant. His family said that she simply wasn't there.

eric said:

Joe Felsenstein said: 2. I have no idea about that space-time issue.

Me neither. The best I could come up with is maybe Robert is referring to Maxwell (Scottish, did his work in the 1860s, discoveries critically important to understanding the propagation of electromagnetic waves) or Lorentz (Dutch, did his work in the 1890s, his math used in relativistic equations). But those are just guesses. And neither of them support Robert's point about previous discoverers getting screwed over by Einstein (or Darwin), because both are recognized as important in their own right, regardless of how their contributions might have paved the way for Einstein and his Theory of Relativity.

4. Young-Earth Creationists have only recently started allowing huge amounts of evolution within groups they call "baramins". However before the 1980s they did not allow this, as they held to the old-fashioned view of "fixity of species".

Lurkers may be asking: why the change in the 1980s? Likely answer: because of the revolution in genetics. Prior to that, creationists could argue that within-group variation in DNA would turn out to be much smaller than between-group variation in DNA (for some definition of 'group' corresponding to their notion of 'kind'). They could also argue that humans were very genetically different from apes (so different that the phrase 'other apes' would not apply). Nobody could empirically test either claim very well, because we couldn't do massively parallel DNA analysis. After the 1980s, however, we figured out how to test these sorts of claims, and found both of them were false. The result is that creationists had to get vaguer about 'kinds', because there was no longer any way to define a kind that would (a) divide living creatures into an ark-manageable number of them, yet at the same time (b) not imply a huge amount of evolutionary change happened within a kind. They can claim one or the other, but post-1980s biology shows they can't claim both.

Mike Elzinga said: Heinrich Lorentz came closer to Einstein's results by delving into the electrodynamics and postulating a "local time" for events. Lorentz also postulated length contraction after FitzGerald did.

I found the name. It was William Kingdon Clifford. It was on some minor points about Einstein's ideas. I think it was minor. it was about about space/time curving etc.

Henry Skinner said:

Mike Elzinga said: Heinrich Lorentz came closer to Einstein's results by delving into the electrodynamics and postulating a "local time" for events. Lorentz also postulated length contraction after FitzGerald did.

Right man, right Wikipeda article, wrong first name: Hendrik, rather than Heinrich. He was Dutch, not German.