[HN Gopher] Darwin's Children Drew All over the "On the Origin o...
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Darwin's Children Drew All over the "On the Origin of Species"
Manuscript (2014)
Author : arbesman
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-04-16 14:28 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theappendix.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (theappendix.net)
| impish9208 wrote:
| My favorite Darwin fun fact is his detailed pros and cons list on
| whether to get married.
|
| https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/14/darwin-list-pros-a...
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| "better than a dog anyhow"
| Epa095 wrote:
| Well, this hit harder than I thought it would
| My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one's whole
| life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.
| -- No, no won't do.
| ty6853 wrote:
| In those those days though I'm not sure the calculus of
| working for the sake of the children was quite the same.
|
| You might have kids, and then they work the farm, then you
| manage the farm and slowly the children take over the manual
| labor and hard work of it. In old age the investment in the
| children pays off and a reciprocal relationship is formed
| where you take care of the grandchildren and your own
| children take care of you.
|
| Now that is flipped on its head. The parent makes the lions
| share of the investment in the child, but the benefits of the
| child is largely socialized. Want daycare, food,
| recreational, extra-cirricular activities -- basically
| anything other than public schooling you pay taxes for
| already? Go fuck yourself.
|
| But once the children is grown up, well well well we are a
| society here! Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social
| security benefits around to everyone including people that
| didn't raise any children. And if you directly want a piece
| of the investment from the children, as people got in the old
| days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
| -- it is only morally right when all of society does the
| exact same thing to the kid.
|
| There is every possible incentive in today's society to
| encourage others to have kids, ensuring your own retirement,
| but to reneg on doing it yourself because some other poor
| bastard can front most the costs and then you can tax the
| shit out of the kid for your retirement / social benefits. I
| think children were a rational decision in Darwin's day, now
| they are definitely not, because you are on the sucker end of
| a tragedy of the commons deal.
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| None of this applies to Darwin though, he was wealthy and
| didn't need to think about "working the farm".
| lukan wrote:
| But apparently he needed to think about having to work
| for income to sustain a family.
| nartho wrote:
| A farm, in the middle of 19th century London ?
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Charles Darwin actually only lived in London for a few
| years, and spent most of his life in what was at that
| time the county of Kent. Although in any case, as you
| say, his home did not involve a farm.
| Always42 wrote:
| You can see the consequences of this playing out in highly
| developed countries
| lurk2 wrote:
| Another interesting cultural development here is that the
| scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into
| what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating
| parents to pay for their child's post-secondary education.
| By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations
| to their parents in old age. This privileges those who
| invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children,
| since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the
| investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their
| old age.
| dunham wrote:
| I try to remember Vonnegut: "We are here on Earth to fart
| around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."
| jkingsman wrote:
| For such a giant of the scientific community, he was after all
| human.
|
| My two favorite journal entries:
|
| "But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody &
| everything."
|
| "I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and
| today I hate them worse than everything."
| rolisz wrote:
| Huh, I feel much closer to Darwin now
| boringg wrote:
| Children -- (if it Please God) -- Constant companion, (& friend
| in old age) who will feel interested in one, -- object to be
| beloved & played with. -- better than a dog anyhow.- Home, &
| someone to take care of house -- Charms of music & female chit-
| chat. -- These things good for one's health. --
|
| """but terrible loss of time. --""" !!!!
|
| So ruthless in his calculus. One wonders if he was on the
| spectrum?
| Gormo wrote:
| The article makes no mention of the name "Babbage" in Emma's
| diary. Could that relate to Charles Babbage, who was a
| contemporary?
| squeedles wrote:
| I'm wondering about Wednesday April 15, 1840 -- "Much
| flatulence"
|
| Sometimes history provides too much information to future
| generations.
| criddell wrote:
| It's TMI only because he lived for a long time after. If he
| had died on April 16th, it might point to some type of
| illness or mariticide.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Oh, if you think that's bad, see Samuel Pepy's diary
| (conveniently syndicated in realtime here:
| https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social; think
| they're on the third run through, currently doing 1662). No
| detail of everyday life, no matter how objectionable, left
| uncovered.
| behnamoh wrote:
| This is one of the few things children still do even centuries
| later. In many aspects, we have changed so drastically that I
| think 100-year-ago people would find us weird and unsociable.
| rayiner wrote:
| Not at all. Young children, in particular, do the same things
| they've been doing since modern humans evolved, if not even
| earlier than that. My three and six year old boys wake up in
| the morning and pretend to be puppies. I'm sure kids their age
| were doing that 30,000 years ago when humans domesticated dogs.
|
| They were playing tic tac toe the other day, and asked my dad
| whether he played tic tac toe when he was a kid. My dad--who
| grew up in a village in Bangladesh--explained that he did,
| except they drew the game in the dirt with sticks.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Relevant only by virtue of also being about historical children's
| drawings, but it reminds of another example of a child's drawings
| preserved for us to see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
|
| > ... Onfim, was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky
| Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or
| 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft
| birch bark, which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.
|
| I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the
| emergence of anatomically modern humans, you'd find they're just
| like us. I don't think that's particularly controversial or
| surprising, but it's easy to forget that people who came long
| before us were really no different from us (or put differently,
| were no different than them), and it helps to better understand
| history if you think of them that way.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| this is insane. 6 year olds 800 years ago went to school ?
| hnax wrote:
| Charles Darwin: the greatest pseudo-scientist (aka con-artist) in
| human history (read "Angles, Apes and Men" by Stanley L Jaki:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/956203.Angels_Apes_and_M...)
| Suppafly wrote:
| You need to get help.
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