[HN Gopher] Austen and Darwin converged on the question of beauty
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       Austen and Darwin converged on the question of beauty
        
       Author : gmays
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2024-11-19 13:29 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (aeon.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
        
       | kitd wrote:
       | Something not mentioned is that Austen lived very close (c. 2
       | hour walk away) to the home of Rev Gilbert White, who many regard
       | as the world's first naturalist.
       | 
       | His method of detailed observations of common animals, insects
       | and plants living in their natural habitats (rather than dead in
       | cases) was quite revolutionary in its day, became popular in the
       | scientific world at that time and almost certainly influenced
       | indirectly Darwin's own studies. He even wrote a detailed study
       | of earthworms, something Darwin did later famously, though
       | there's no suggestion of direct influence.
       | 
       | It would not be a surprise if Austen became well acquainted with
       | the works of a famous local "celebrity" as White as well.
        
       | delichon wrote:
       | I read someone call Austen the Drosophila melanogaster of
       | evolutionary psychology. They seem to study her work like
       | theologists study bibles. The fruit fly comparison makes it sound
       | like they are studying a specimen. But my theory is that they
       | recognize her as a colleague who happened to write in a different
       | genre.
        
       | Electricniko wrote:
       | I was recently reading Washington Irving's first book, from 1809,
       | where he mentioned Darwin arguing that humans are descended from
       | monkeys, and I thought "that seems a little early." Turns out he
       | was talking about Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, who laid
       | some of the groundwork for Charles, and he was famous for writing
       | romantic poems about scientific subjects like reproduction of
       | flowers to help encourage more people to get involved with
       | science.
        
         | graemep wrote:
         | Ideas about some form of evolution go back a long way - to
         | ancient times.
         | 
         | What Darwin (and Wallace) did was provide an explanation of the
         | mechanism that drove it.
        
       | Anotheroneagain wrote:
       | Ornamentation makes perfect sense as long as it consumes rare
       | resources.
       | 
       | When you can find enough resources to build expensive
       | ornamentation in good times, you can probably survive hard times
       | decently well, only your ornamentation will suffer.
       | 
       | But when you use all the resources that you can get for breeding
       | as much as possible in good times, the population will probably
       | collapse in bad times.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-19 23:02 UTC)