…a clerk in the Patents Office in Zurich when his great papers on quantum theory and relativity were published in 1905. Charles Darwin never had an academic post. Darwin would have been classified as pseudoscience straight away on the TED criteria. I think…

…Zurich when his great papers on quantum theory and relativity were published in 1905. Charles Darwin never had an academic post. Darwin would have been classified as pseudoscience straight away on the TED criteria. I think they've got themselves They made a…

…say that historically speaking, some of the best science we have was based on what ordinary people found and experienced. Charles Darwin, who's one of my heroes, based his research on plant breeders, animal breeders, pigeon fanciers. It was based on the…

…people have now been marginalized from biology and it's confined just to what happens in labs. Now, I think that if we look at Darwin as a model of real science, it was based on this rich soil of experience that many people have. And when we're dealing…

…principles in nature. And interestingly, one of the founders of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace, who, like Charles Darwin, thought up the idea of natural selection, was quite unlike Darwin in his interpretation of evolution. Instead of saying…

…theory of evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace, who, like Charles Darwin, thought up the idea of natural selection, was quite unlike Darwin in his interpretation of evolution. Instead of saying that evolution happened by chance or through blind forces or in a…

…it greatly needs. And we have to remember, of course, that many of the great scientists in the past were amateurs. Charles Darwin, for example, was an amateur naturalist. He never had an academic position. He never had a government grant. He worked at…

…he drew came from amateur gardeners, plant breeders, animal breeders, farmers, colonial administrators, and so forth. So, and if in fact Darwin had had to apply for government grants to do what he did, almost certainly they would have been turned down.…

…20th century because far fewer scientists work independently. You know, in the 19th century, a lot of scientists were independent. Charles Darwin, for example, never had a government job, never had an academic post, never had a grant. He was independently…

…1860s, and partly because he married an heiress, the daughter of the owner of the Wedgwood Pottery, Josiah Wedgwood's daughter. So Darwin could work independently. He didn't have to toe the line. And then Faraday, who was another great innovator, was working…

…from the top down is a very old dichotomy and thinking about creation. I mean, the, the, the scientific view in the light of Darwin and Darwinism has tended to have a bottom up view. You know, we start with tiny single proto cells and they get more…

…messages and giving inspiration for top-down causation. Alfred Russell Wallace, who co-discovered the principle of natural selection with Charles Darwin, of course, as I think we've discussed before, believed that the entire evolutionary process was guided by…

…sense we're co-creators with the evolutionary process and I think where that's most obvious in biological terms is the areas that Darwin himself was so interested in namely plant and animal breeding because in plant breeding in horticulture you know if you…

…that there'd be so much beauty in the insect realm and indeed in the whole of nature. Yeah, you reminded me again of Darwin, where he talks about the female, I think it's pheasants, who are looking at the male pheasants displaying. And it seems quite…

…talks about the female, I think it's pheasants, who are looking at the male pheasants displaying. And it seems quite clear to Darwin that there's an aesthetic appreciation in the female pheasants, the peahens, as much as, you know, just a sort of pure…

…educated public what is Darwinism, you wouldn't hear any of those four. No, I think you see the major misunderstandings of Darwin and their vernacular misunderstandings, though there are many professional ones as well, have to do with the fact that evolution…

…environments of that place. Since the vector of environmental change through time is effectively random, if organisms under Darwin are tracking those environmental changes, you're not going to generate a directional pattern eventually leading up to human…

…those environmental changes, you're not going to generate a directional pattern eventually leading up to human beings. Now, Darwin was also an eminent Victorian, not quite willing completely to divest himself of these psychological comforts and sociological…

…the bare-bones mechanics of natural selection, which does not validate that notion of progress. And one of the reasons why Darwin has been so difficult to assimilate is this radical philosophical message of his theory. Steve, one thing about your diagnosis…

…process that is introduced, the self-planning into it. Before we dive into consciousness, Stephen Jay Gould, this famous statement, Charles Darwin, about a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, horrible works of nature.…

…as unconscious and non-moral and our own species as conscious and moral? Can we make this distinction and we know where we are? Darwin wrote, you have to understand the context of that letter, he wrote it in 1855 to Joseph Hooker and it was, I think…

…letter, he wrote it in 1855 to Joseph Hooker and it was, I think it was a sardonic and sarcastic comment And I think Darwin had a very definite solution in mind. He points out that if one were to try and extract moral messages from nature, and rather…

…ecosystems of nature, thereby telling us that we can not only infer God's existence, but also his benevolence, his goodness, his omniscience. Darwin says, but if you really look at nature, there's so much out there that is ugly. And the examples he chooses…

…they don't want to kill it and cause it to decay, saving the heart and nervous system for last. And the second example Darwin gives is that a cat should play with mice, and when we watch cats playing with not-yet-dead mice, usually some sense of horror…

…can be said to have the experience. You don't have to report an experience to experience. Manifest is the important thing. So when Darwin wrote his book, remember, he called it Expression. Well, let's go a bit lower. What about what it is like to be a…

…variation is the only intrinsic reality and that types and means are only the abstractions. But with respect to multiple functionality, Darwin himself was quite clear on this, but it's almost a logical need, although there are plenty of empirical evidence in…

…a local anesthetic. Those pigeons home straight off with no delay. It's a fascinating literature. For 30, 50 years, 100 years, Charles Darwin suggested the idea in his paper in Nature in 1873 on the origin of instincts, that they remember the way out.…

…heritability problem. There's much more openness than there was because it's clear we haven't figured it all out. Interestingly, Charles Darwin was not a neo-Darwinian. Neo-Darwinian evolution theory says it's all done by the genes. Evolution is just about…

…This is the basis of Richard Dawkins' work, for example. His book The Selfish Gene is based on that model. Darwin actually believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He thought that animals could inherit the fears of their fathers and…

…it's an electric fence, and it shocks you, there's movement through the bloodstream that teaches your sperm this? Well, that's what Darwin thought. He wrote a book called The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. It's less well known than his…

…to explain the mice inheriting the fear of their fathers. That aspect of Darwin's work has been airbrushed out of scientific history. Darwin also wrote a paper in Nature about a dog that he came across that whenever this dog got near to a butcher's…

…dog that he came across that whenever this dog got near to a butcher's shop, the dog was completely terrified of butchers. And Darwin figured out that its parents, one of its parents, had been kicked or badly mistreated by a butcher. And this dog had…

…its parents, had been kicked or badly mistreated by a butcher. And this dog had inherited a phobia of butchers. Now, Darwin published that in Nature. That shows you how very different Darwin's ideas on evolution were from his 20th century successors. And…

…I'm saying. What I'm saying in terms of the inheritance of habits through morphic resonance is actually really close to what Darwin himself said. But it's not what neo-Darwinians say because they've tried to say all inheritances in genes and you can't have…

…Well, there's many people that haven't studied Darwin's ideas at all that aren't familiar with the amount of resistance that Darwin received when he was proposing these ideas. Like, these weren't accepted ideas at all. In fact, the majority of scientists…

…majority of scientists at the time, they were more of a Christian faith, weren't they? Yes, but the response to Darwin was particularly interesting, you see, because many scientists many Christians in England after being surprised by his ideas actually said,…

…a career path. It was a struggle. In the 19th century, a lot of scientists in Britain were rather amateurs, like Charles Darwin, who never had an academic job. Faraday. Faraday was at the Royal Institution, not in the university, in a rather eccentric…