Four Stone Hearth #88: Sit, read and warm yourself

March 20, 2010

Four Stone Hearth #88 rests nicely in the St. Patrick’s Day edition at Ad Hominin.

World history and geography teachers, take special note.  There are real gems in this one.

Lots more stuff.  Which articles do you find compelling?

Odd update, January 23, 2013:  The link to “List of the 100 best blogs for anthropology students” is dead; it went to a page from OnlineDegrees.net.  I have an odd request from that site asking me to remove the link because it’s “over-optimized,” and they are trying to get straight with Google.  It all sounds shady to me.

My apologies, Dear Reader, for having linked to such a shady source as OnlineDegrees.net.  I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.

http://www.onlinedegrees.net/blog/2010/100-best-blogs-for-anthropology-students/

Leave a Comment » | Ancient history, Anthropology, Archaeology, History, Linguistics, Prehistory, Research, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Charles Darwin and the tangled bank

March 20, 2010

A tangled bank, near Sandwalk, Darwin's walking path near his home at Downe House - image by GrrlScientist

A tangled bank, near Sandwalk, Darwin’s walking path near his home at Downe House – image by GrrlScientist

The final paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

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8 Comments | Charles Darwin, Evolution, Literature, Poetry, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell