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

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)

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

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

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

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 📉📈

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 🧠🗃️

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 🐋🌱🧪🦫🦋

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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