My latest amusing find is from the autobiography of Charles Darwin. Often delightful in its candor, the book recounts how the young Darwin had plenty of bad habits related to his predilection for collection and cataloguing. He wasted massive stretches of time shooting birds and tracking his kills, so much so that his father sent…
An insightful essay by Joe D. Burchfield entitled “The Age of the Earth and the Invention of Geological Time” discusses the concepts of “geological time” and “deep time”, tracing their usage back to the influential work of Charles Lyell at the start of the nineteenth century. “Geological time” occurs frequently in works having to do…
I’ve recently been reading Thomas Malthus’s 1798 first edition of The Principle of Population because of its significance for Charles Darwin, which I mention in my draft book on evolutionary theology, Evolution and Grace. Darwin was reluctant at first to apply natural selection to humans, but in fact it was Malthus’s teaching in regard to…