Dan asks: > When was the phrase "by the Creator" added or dropped?
In the Second Edition, published 7 January 1860. Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Species#Publication_of_The_Origin By chance, just a little further down in the same article, Ernst Mayr's version of the Darwinian evolutionary algorithm is also presented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Species#The_basic_theory > A last general question - based on your term "ecological physics" and > use of "mechanist" to describe Darwin I wonder if you are in full > agreement with neo-Darwinism and The Modern Synthesis? No problems for > the theory or weak links at all? Statistical mechanics OK for use in > biology and ecology just as in physics? I see major problems with this > and need for "evolution" of our main paradigms and am curious as to > your views. There is no need to "impose" statistical mechanics on evolutionary theory. The flow of philosophies and ideas actually occurred in the reverse direction. As surprising as it may initially seem, statistical mechanical thought is a direct outgrowth of Darwinian evolutionary theory. The aspect of Darwin's writings that Mayr especially celebrated in his own writings was Darwin's introduction of "populational thinking" into biology. For the previous 2500 years, the notion of "essentialism," where each species is of a "type," held sway. Darwin shattered that idea, and Mayr emphasized that aspect of Darwinian evolutionary biology every chance he got, but Darwin's ideas had philosophical impacts further than merely biology. The first great re-interpretation of Darwin's views was accomplished by Ludwig Boltzmann with his "microscopic interpretation" of thermodynamics. Boltzmann was so impressed with Darwin's ideas that he wrote that the 19th Century should be declared the "Century of Darwin" and he hoped to become the "Darwin of Matter." In the first half of the 19th Century, the thermodynamics of Kelvin, Maxwell, Clausius, Watt, Carnot and others was seen as the study of a bulk, fluid-like heat quality. Clausius defined "entropy" (literally meaning "in one turn") as that fraction of ordered energy that is lost to the inaccessible pool of heat in every turn of a gear, never to be recovered. Boltzmann, as a physicist, was well aware of these ideas, but because of his enthusiasm for Darwin's ideas of selection acting on a population of variants, he almost immediately redefined Clausius' entropy. Clausius defined entropy as: S = dQ/dT Boltzmann redefined entropy as: S = k log W In Boltzmann's redefinition, entropy became a measure of the decay of ordered states into disordered ones, and from that revolutionary idea, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics and information theory were later derived. Boltzmann considered his Darwinian thermodynamic equation so important that it's carved on his tombstone: http://www.wellesley.edu/Chemistry/chem120/boltz.jpg [I showed this picture to a student last week and he said, "Damn, he looks just like Tom Hanks!", something I've never noticed before.] If you wish, I've written more on this surprisingly profound relationship of ideas between thermodynamics and evolutionary biology in a short note that appeared a few years ago in the Bulletin of the ESA. It's on-line at: http://aics-research.com/research/esa-shannon.pdf The original title was, "A profoundly repeated pattern. (Comments on the death of Claude Shannon and the intimate relationship of information to life)," but the title was trimmed in publication. Wirt Atmar
