Monthly Archives: September 2014

September 30, 1861 (a Monday)











September 28, 1698


On this date, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was born at Saint-Malo, France. Maupertuis published on many topics, including mathematics, geography, moral philosophy, biology, astronomy and cosmology. In 1741, he published a book called Essai de Cosmologie, in which he introduced the concept of stronger animals in a population having more offspring, an idea that prefigured Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection a century later. Another important publication on natural history was Vénus Physique, published anonymously in 1745, in which Maupertuis wrote:


In his book Systeme de la Nature (1751), he theorized on the nature of heredity and how new species come into being. He thought that speciation took place by chance events in nature, rather than by spontaneous generation as was believed at the time.

Some historians of science see this series of conjectures as an early version of the theory of evolution. Indeed, if Maupertuis had taken his conjectures forward and developed them into a more fully formed theory, he might now be recognised as putting forward the foundations of the theory of evolution. Darwin’s fame rests on being the first to develop and publish the concept as a well-supported scientific theory, rather than being the first to suggest the concept.

Despite his many accomplishments, Maupertuis was considered arrogant by many of his fellow countrymen. He became a target of German mathematician Samuel Koenig, who accused him of plagiarism, and of French author Voltaire, whose satirical writings about Maupertuis were so savage that Maupertuis eventually left France. In 1759, Maupertuis died in virtual exile in Basel, Switzerland, in the home of Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli.

September 28, 1838 (a Friday)

Charles Darwin by G Richmond.

On this date, Charles Darwin first had an insight into the mechanism of evolution in nature. He wrote in his autobiography in 1876:


Below is the famous passage from Darwin’s notebook where these ideas were first recorded:

[Sept] 28th.[1838] Even the energetic language of «Decandoelle» does not convey the warring of the species as inference from Malthus.— «increase of brutes, must be prevented soley by positive checks, excepting that famine may stop desire.—» in Nature production does not increase, whilst no checks prevail, but the positive check of famine & consequently death..
…—The final cause of all this wedging, must be to sort out proper structure, and adapt it to change.—to do that for form, which Malthus shows is the final effect by means however of volition of this populousness on the energy of man. One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.


  • Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882 (London: Collins, 1958).
  • Charles Darwin, Notebook D [Transmutation of species (1838.07.15-1838.10.02)] 134e-135e.

September 25, 1866 (a Tuesday)

Thomas Hunt Morgan


September 24, 1835 (a Thursday)

Charles Darwin by G Richmond.


Galapagos tortoise





September 22, 1862 (a Monday)









Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation

September 22, 1862

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.
















[Signed:] Abraham Lincoln
By the President

[Signed:] William H. Seward
Secretary of State

Remembering Tiananmen Square » The Endless Further

It’s a bit late, but I came across this post about the recent, 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. It’s worth reading.

Remembering Tiananmen Square » The Endless Further.


Criminal Lockup Quotas are Criminal

With crime rates dropping, for-profit prison operators CCA and GEO Group have found a new way to keep beds full and profits high. They call them “bed guarantees.”


September 20, 1952 (a Saturday)

The Hershey-Chase Experiments.

On this date, geneticists Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase published the findings of their so-called blender experiments, which concluded that DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid) is where life’s hereditary data is found.

Prior to these experiments, so named because they were conducted using a regular kitchen blender, it was generally thought that proteins — not DNA — were the genetic stuff of life.

Their experiments used the T2 bacteriophage, which, like other viruses, is just a crystal of DNA and protein. It can reproduce when inside a bacterium such as Escherichia coli, or E. coli for short. When the new T2 viruses are ready to leave the host E. coli cell (and go infect others), they burst the E. coli cell open, killing it (hence the name “bacteriophage”).

Hershey and Chase were seeking an answer to the question, “Is it the viral DNA or viral protein coat (capsid) that is the viral genetic code material which gets injected into the E. coli?” Using the kitchen blender, Hershey and Chase separated the protein coating from the DNA of T2 bacteriophage. Injecting the DNA into the bacterial cell, they found that it was the nucleic acid itself, and not the protein, that caused the transmission of hereditary information.

The Hershey–Chase experiment, its predecessors, such as the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment, and successors served to unequivocally establish that hereditary information was carried by DNA.

Alfred Hershey was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969. He shared the prize with two American scientists, Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria, for “discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses” but Chase, who served as Hershey’s lab assistant during his experiments and whose name appears on the paper, was snubbed.


  • Hershey, A and Chase, M (1952). “Independent functions of viral protein and nucleic acid in growth of bacteriophage,” J Gen Physiol 36 (1): 39–56.

September 19, 1796 (a Monday)

On this date, President George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address to the People of the United States:

…[A]void the necessity of those overgrown Military establishments, which, under any form of Government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.

Although it is by all accounts the most famous and best-known of Washington’s speeches, it was never actually delivered orally by Washington. It was first published in David C. Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia) on 19 September 1796 under the title “The Address of General Washington To The People of The United States on his declining of the Presidency of the United States.”  It was almost immediately reprinted in newspapers across the country and later in a pamphlet form.

Page 1 of Washington's handwritten so-called Farewell Address (1796).

Notwithstanding his role as the nation’s foremost military man, Washington consistently showed little enthusiasm for the idea of a standing army.  He often reflected the perspective taken by Madison, Franklin, and others, who saw ample historical precedent for the deterioration of a republic into an authoritarian regime when a leader used threats from abroad as a means of augmenting his authority as a military leader and undermining the authority of the other departments.

And as the above quote indicates, long before President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about the dangers of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” in the Farewell Address he delivered over 50 years ago, Americans were familiar with the threat of “overgrown military establishments” to liberty.

In the early days of the United States, Americans, having just thrown off the yoke of the British empire, were understandably suspicious of standing armies in peacetime. The national army was kept intentionally small in peacetime, expanded in times of war, and reduced to prewar levels at the end of hostilities.

That was the pattern followed through the end of World War I, a time when many were beginning to question why America had entered the war in the first place, thereby entangling the country in the political, economic, and ethnic rivalries of Europe.  However, although America began to demobilize after World War II, there was no “return to normalcy” as President Harding had called for at the end of the previous war. The beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the fall of China to the communists, and the Korean War put America on a wartime footing that has become more or less permanent, whether we are in undeclared “shooting wars,” as in Korea, Vietnam, or our current wars in the Middle East, or in times of relative peace, most notably during the decade between the breakup of the Soviet Union and the terrorist attacks of September 11.



There is no time in the nation’s history in which Washington’s and Eisenhower’s warning has sounded more clearly and powerfully than the present.

Suggested reading:

September 19, 1864 (a Monday)

Carl Erich Correns







September 18, 1894 (a Tuesday)




A plaque at Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin




September 17, 1835 (a Thursday)

Charles Darwin by G Richmond.

In the morning on this date, HMS Beagle anchored at Chatham Island in the Galapagos Archipelago. Of this island, Charles Darwin wrote:


Galapagos Archipelago


September 15, 1935 (a Sunday)










September 15, 1835 (a Tuesday)

Charles Darwin by G Richmond.

In the afternoon of September 15, HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin on-board sighted Mount Pitt, a large hill on the north-east end of Chatham Island, about 600 miles off the coast of South America. This was the first sighting of the Galapagos Archipelago by the Beagle. Captain Robert FitzRoy wrote in the ship’s journal:


On September 16, the Beagle reached Hood Island. Early in the morning Edward Chaffers (Master) and Arthur Mellersh (Midshipman) set out on a boat to survey the island’s shoreline. By noon another boat was launched to survey the central islands of the archipelago. Later in the afternoon of September 16, HMS Beagle reached Chatham Island.

September 14, 1804 (a Friday)







September 13, 1970 (a Sunday)

Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that “there is no such thing as society” and mainstream economics works from exactly the same assumption – for mainstream economists society is simply the aggregation, the adding together, of millions of individual economic actors and actions. All of these actors are assumed to be “rational” – a word which economists also use in a way that reflects their own prejudices – a purely calculating and narrowly self interested mentality focused on short and long run material gratification, whose relationship to other economic actors is intrinsically competitive. Thus “rational economic man” has no emotion, is part of no social psychological processes involving mutual influence, common hopes, beliefs and fears, no mutual support, no group or common class interests. Instead “rational economic man” is a calculating machine, focused on maximizing his satisfactions or “utility”.

— Brian Davey, “Economics is not a social science”


— E. F. Schumacher, “Buddhist Economics” (1966)

Zen stones

On this date, The New York Times Magazine published an article by Milton Friedman entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.”  It has been held up by neoliberals as the foundation of their economic beliefs ever since.

Neoliberals are fierce advocates of so-called free markets, as though they are some magical solution to all of the world’s problems. What Friedman called the “free market” is actually laissez-faire, the elimination of any government influence in the market. The only role for the government in the system would be for the protection of property rights.

The problem, of course, is that laissez-faire fails every time it is tried. The grand laissez-faire experiments during America’s Gilded Age resulted in the most devastating economic collapses, the last of which we now call the Great Depression. Friedman’s “free market” offers no safety and no rules. The unscrupulous exploit any advantage to develop a monopoly, with the result being that the market itself becomes unstable and will eventually self-destruct.

The other problem with the free market is that it makes no accommodation for the commons. The commons is a very old concept, pre-dating even colonial America, existing in English common law as far back as 800 CE. A “commons” is any resource used as though it belongs to all. In other words, when anyone can use a shared resource simply because one wants or needs to use it, then one is using a commons. For example, the radio frequencies that pass in and around and through us all are part of the commons. Nowadays, a government agency, the FCC, prevents any two businesses from broadcasting on the same frequency because otherwise nobody could listen to either of them. However, in laissez-faire, there would be no commons, and things such as the radio spectrum would be unusable in its entirety, due to encroachment by other ventures.

Sometimes it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in — sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and/or dangerous gases (for example, carbon dioxide) into the air; and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. If a corporation’s share of the cost of the wastes discharged into the commons is less than the cost of purifying those wastes before releasing them, then we are locked into a system of “fouling our own nest,” so long as the government, even though it represents the people, cannot effectively regulate polluting corporations.

Milton Friedman offered no solution to these problems; in fact, his writings exacerbated them. The article he published on this date was ferocious. He said that any business executives who pursued a goal other than making money were “unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.” They were guilty of “analytical looseness and lack of rigor” and had even turned themselves into “unelected government officials” who were illegally taxing employers and customers. Ironically, Friedman himself was guilty of “analytical looseness and lack of rigor” by assuming the conclusion of his argument at the beginning of his article.

On 26 June 2013, Forbes published “The Origin of ‘The World’s Dumbest Idea’: Milton Friedman” written by Steve Denning. He points out several flaws and inconsistencies in Friedman’s paper:



A corporate exec­utive who devotes any money for any general social interest would, the article argues, “be spending someone else’s money… Insofar as his actions in accord with his ‘social responsi­bility’ reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money.”

How did the corporation’s money somehow become the shareholder’s money? Simple. That is the article’s starting assumption. By assuming away the existence of the corporation as a mere “legal fiction”, hey presto! the corporation’s money magically becomes the stockholders’ money.

Denning then points out how Friedman later, in a conceptual sleight of hand, recasts the money:

The article goes on: “Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money.” One moment ago, the organization’s money was the stockholder’s money. But suddenly… the organization’s money has become the customer’s money…

The article continued: “Insofar as [the executives’] actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.” Now suddenly, the organization’s money has become, not the stockholder’s money or the customers’ money, but the employees’ money.

According to Denning, Friedman’s entire paper rests on the false assumption “that an organization is a legal fiction which doesn’t exist and that the organization’s money is owned by the stockholders.”

The success of the article was not because the arguments were sound or powerful, but rather because people desperately wanted to believe. [emphasis in original]

As a result of Friedman’s writings, self-interest has reigned supreme. His theories justify the impulse to make money by whatever means are available. As recent scandals have made clear, even breaking the law is acceptable, if the corporation gets off with civil penalties that are small in relation to the illicit gains that are made.

Roger Martin, in his book, Fixing the Game, writes:



September 13, 1848 (a Wednesday)

Phineas Gage skull diagram 1868 (left) and skull (right).

Phineas Gage (1823-1860) is one of the earliest documented cases of severe brain injury. He is the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, Gage is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients.

On this date, 25-year-old Phineas Gage and his crew were working on the Rutland and Burlington Railroad near Cavendish, Vermont. Gage was preparing for an explosion by compacting a bore with explosive powder using a tamping iron. While he was doing this, a spark from the tamping iron ignited the powder, causing the iron to be propelled at high speed straight through his skull. It entered under the left cheek bone and exited through the top of the head, and was later recovered some 30 yards from the site of the accident.

Gage recovered almost entirely from his physical disabilities, except for loss of sight in one eye. It is surprising, of course, that Gage survived such a traumatic event at all, but more surprising is the fact that his personality was completely changed as a result of the accident. Gage’s doctor describes how “the equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal propensities” had been destroyed. The changes became apparent as soon as the acute phase of brain injury subsided. He was now “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity which was not previously his custom, manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times perniciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned. . . .” .

These new personality traits contrasted sharply with the “temperate habits” and “considerable energy of character” Phineas Gage was known to have possessed before the accident. Previously, he had “a well balanced mind and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, small businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of action.” So radical was the change in him that friends and acquaintances could hardly recognize the man. They noted sadly that he was “no longer Gage.”  In fact, he was so different that his employers had to let him go shortly after he returned to work. The problem was not lack of physical ability or skill – it was his new character.


  • Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, New York: Avon, 1994.

September 12, 1940 (a Thursday)

Image of a horse from the Lascaux caves.

Image of a horse from the Lascaux caves.

On this date, four teenagers followed their dog down a narrow entrance into a cavern near the village of Montignac, in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. There they discovered the prehistoric artwork today known as the Lascaux cave paintings. The 15,000- to 17,000-year-old paintings, consisting mostly of large animals once native to the region, are among the finest examples of art from the Upper Paleolithic period. (The Paleolithic period is a division of archaeological time roughly coincident with the Pleistocene epoch of geologic time). The paintings were given statutory historic monument protection in December of the same year they were discovered.

Lascaux is located in the Vézère Valley where many other decorated caves have been found since the beginning of the 20th century (for example, Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume in 1901 and Bernifal in 1902). Lascaux is a complex cave with several areas: the Great Hall of the Bulls, the Lateral Passage, the Shaft of the Dead Man, the Chamber of Engravings, the Painted Gallery, and the Chamber of Felines. The cave contains nearly 2,000 figures, which can be grouped into three main categories — animals, human figures and abstract signs. Most of the major images have been painted onto the walls using mineral pigments although some designs have also been incised into the stone.

September 11, 1831 (a Sunday)

Charles Darwin by G Richmond.

On this date, Charles Darwin and Captain Robert FitzRoy began their trip from London to Plymouth to inspect HMS Beagle. Concerned about Darwin’s sea-worthiness, FitzRoy decided they would go by ship rather than by coach, even though it would have been much faster. Apparently, Darwin handled the three day trip very well and FitzRoy was impressed that a land-lover could take to the sea so quickly. This was Darwin’s first sight of the ship on which he would sail a voyage of discovery leading to his famous theory of evolution. However, when Darwin saw the Beagle his heart sank into his stomach. The ship was in tatters! She had no masts, half of the deck had been torn away, and the water-tightness of the hull appeared dubious. FitzRoy assured Darwin that she would be sea-worthy in short order — no expense would be spared in her refitting. As Darwin later wrote in his Autobiography:

When recommissioned in 1831 for her second voyage, she was found (as I learned from the late Admiral Sir James Sulivan) to be so rotten that she had practically to be rebuilt, and it was this that caused the long delay in refitting.

September 10, 1941 (a Wednesday)





September 10, 1788 (a Wednesday)

Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes



The type of handaxe discovered by Boucher de Perthes.


September 9, 1794 (a Tuesday)



September 8, 1892 (a Thursday)



On this date, the Pledge of Allegiance was published in The Youth’s Companion, the leading family magazine and the Reader’s Digest of its day. It was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892 as a critique of the rampant greed, misguided materialism, and hyper-individualism of the Gilded Age. Furthermore, he wrote it in support of President Harrison’s public education programs, which were called socialist in 1892 just as Obama’s health care program is today.

He did not include the phrase “under God” as part of the original Pledge.

Bellamy, who lived from 1855 to 1931, was a Baptist minister and a leading Christian socialist. He was ousted from his Boston church for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist and for his work among the poor in the Boston slums.

Bellamy (cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of two best-selling socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward and Equality) believed that unbridled capitalism, materialism and individualism betrayed America’s promise. He hoped the Pledge of Allegiance would promote a different moral vision to counter the rampant greed he thought was undermining the nation.

In 1923, over the objections of the aging Bellamy, the National Flag Conference, led by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the opening, “I pledge allegiance to my flag” to “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.”  In 1954, at the height of the Cold War — when many political leaders believed that the nation was threatened by godless communism — the Knights of Columbus led a successful campaign to get Congress to add the words “under God.”

The Pledge was now both a patriotic oath and a public prayer. Bellamy’s granddaughter said he also would have resented this second change: He had been pressured into leaving his church in 1891 because of his socialist sermons, and during his retirement in Florida he stopped attending church because he disliked the racial bigotry he found there.


September 8, 1504


Plaster cast of original statue of ‘David’, by Michelangelo, Florence, Italy, 1501-4. Cast by unknown maker, Florence, Italy, about 1857.

On this date, the original statue of David by Michelangelo was unveiled in Florence, Italy.

Interestingly, a replica of the statue of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ was originally presented to Queen Victoria by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1857, but was immediately given by the queen to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). The story goes that on her first encounter with the cast of ‘David’ at the Museum, Queen Victoria was so shocked by the nudity that a proportionally accurate fig leaf was commissioned. It was then kept in readiness for any royal visits, when it was hung on the figure using two strategically placed hooks. In a photograph of the Art Museum taken around 1857-9 the figure of David is shown wearing a fig leaf. The fig leaf is likely to have been made by the Anglo-Italian firm D. Brucciani & Co., based in London.




Hopefully, that’s where it will remain.