American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. Founded in 1780, the Academy is dedicated to honoring excellence and leadership, working across disciplines and divides, advancing the common good. Membership in the academy is achieved through a thorough petition and election process and has been considered a high honor of scholarly and societal merit since the academy was founded during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, others of their contemporaries who contributed prominently to the establishment of the new nation, its government, the United States Constitution. Today the Academy is charged with a dual function: to elect to membership the finest minds and most influential leaders, drawn from science, business, public affairs, the arts, from each generation, to conduct policy studies in response to the needs of society. Major Academy projects now have focused on higher education and research and cultural studies and technological advances, politics and the environment, the welfare of children.
Dædalus, the Academy's quarterly journal, is regarded as one of the world's leading intellectual journals. The Academy carries out nonpartisan policy research by bringing together scientists, artists, business leaders, other experts to make multidisciplinary analyses of complex social and intellectual topics; the Academy's current areas of work are Arts & Humanities, Democracy & Justice, Energy & Environment, Global Affairs, Science & Technology. David W. Oxtoby began his term as the organization’s President in January 2019. A chemist by training, he served as President of Pomona College from 2003 to 2017, he was elected a member of the American Academy in 2012. The Academy is headquartered in Massachusetts; the Academy was established by the Massachusetts legislature on May 4, 1780. Its purpose, as described in its charter, is "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor and happiness of a free and virtuous people." The sixty-two incorporating fellows represented varying interests and high standing in the political and commercial sectors of the state.
The first class of new members, chosen by the Academy in 1781, included Benjamin Franklin and George Washington as well as several international honorary members. The initial volume of Academy Memoirs appeared in 1785, the Proceedings followed in 1846. In the 1950s, the Academy launched its journal Daedalus, reflecting its commitment to a broader intellectual and socially-oriented program. Since the second half of the twentieth century, independent research has become a central focus of the Academy. In the late 1950s, arms control emerged as one of its signature concerns; the Academy served as the catalyst in establishing the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. In the late 1990s, the Academy developed a new strategic plan, focusing on four major areas: science and global security. In 2002, the Academy established a visiting scholars program in association with Harvard University. More than 75 academic institutions from across the country have become Affiliates of the Academy to support this program and other Academy initiatives.
The Academy has sponsored a number of awards and prizes, now numbering 11, throughout its history and has offered opportunities for fellowships and visiting scholars at the Academy. Charter members of the Academy are John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Bacon, James Bowdoin, Charles Chauncy, John Clarke, David Cobb, Samuel Cooper, Nathan Cushing, Thomas Cushing, William Cushing, Tristram Dalton, Francis Dana, Samuel Deane, Perez Fobes, Caleb Gannett, Henry Gardner, Benjamin Guild, John Hancock, Joseph Hawley, Edward Augustus Holyoke, Ebenezer Hunt, Jonathan Jackson, Charles Jarvis, Samuel Langdon, Levi Lincoln, Daniel Little, Elijah Lothrup, John Lowell, Samuel Mather, Samuel Moody, Andrew Oliver, Joseph Orne, Theodore Parsons, George Partridge, Robert Treat Paine, Phillips Payson, Samuel Phillips, John Pickering, Oliver Prescott, Zedekiah Sanger, Nathaniel Peaslee Sargeant, Micajah Sawyer, Theodore Sedgwick, William Sever, David Sewall, Stephen Sewall, John Sprague, Ebenezer Storer, Caleb Strong, James Sullivan, John Bernard Sweat, Nathaniel Tracy, Cotton Tufts, James Warren, Samuel West, Edward Wigglesworth, Joseph Willard, Abraham Williams, Nehemiah Williams, Samuel Williams, James Winthrop.
From the beginning, the membership and elected by peers, has included not only scientists and scholars, but writers and artists as well as representatives from the full range of professions and public life. Throughout the Academy's history, 10,000 fellows have been elected, including such notables as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon, Joseph Henry, Washington Irving, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Edward R. Murrow, Jonas Salk, Eudora Welty, Duke Ellington. International honorary members have included Jose Antonio Pantoja Hernandez, Leonhard Euler, Marquis de Lafayette, Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Ranke, Charles Darwin, Otto Hahn, Jawaharlal Nehru, Pablo Picasso, Liu Kuo-Sung, Lucian Michael Freud, Galina Ulanova, Werner Heisenberg, Alec Guinness and Sebastião Salgado. Astronomer Maria Mitchell was the first woman elected to the Academy, in 1848; the current membership encompasses over 5,700 members based across the United States and around the world.
Academy members include more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. The current membership is divided into five classes and twen
Augustin Pyramus de Candolle
Augustin Pyramus de Candolle spelled Augustin Pyrame de Candolle was a Swiss botanist. René Louiche Desfontaines launched de Candolle's botanical career by recommending him at an herbarium. Within a couple of years de Candolle had established a new genus, he went on to document hundreds of plant families and create a new natural plant classification system. Although de Candolle's main focus was botany, he contributed to related fields such as phytogeography, paleontology, medical botany, economic botany. Candolle originated the idea of "Nature's war", which influenced Charles Darwin and the principle of natural selection. De Candolle recognized that multiple species may develop similar characteristics that did not appear in a common evolutionary ancestor. During his work with plants, de Candolle noticed that plant leaf movements follow a near-24-hour cycle in constant light, suggesting that an internal biological clock exists. Though many scientists doubted de Candolle's findings, experiments over a century demonstrated that ″the internal biological clock″ indeed exists.
Candolle's descendants continued his work on plant classification. Alphonse de Candolle and Casimir Pyrame de Candolle contributed to the Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis, a catalog of plants begun by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle. Augustin Pyramus de Candolle was born on 4 February 1778 in Geneva, Switzerland, to Augustin de Candolle, a former official, his wife, Louise Eléonore Brière, his family descended from one of the ancient families of Provence in France, but relocated to Geneva at the end of the 16th century to escape religious persecution. At age seven de Candolle contracted of a severe case of hydrocephalus, which affected his childhood, he is said to have had great aptitude for learning, distinguishing himself in school with his rapid acquisition of knowledge in classical and general literature and his ability to write fine poetry. In 1794, he began his scientific studies at the Collège Calvin, where he studied under Jean Pierre Étienne Vaucher, who inspired de Candolle to make botanical science the chief pursuit of his life.
He spent four years at the Geneva Academy, studying science and law according to his father's wishes. In 1798, he moved to Paris, his botanical career formally began with the help of René Louiche Desfontaines, who recommended de Candolle for work in the herbarium of Charles Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle during the summer of 1798. The position elevated de Candolle's reputation and led to valuable instruction from Desfontaines himself. De Candolle established his first genus, Senebiera, in 1799.de Candolle's first books, Plantarum historia succulentarum and Astragalogia, brought him to the notice of Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. de Candolle, with Cuvier's approval, acted as deputy at the Collège de France in 1802. Lamarck entrusted him with the publication of the third edition of the Flore française, in the introduction entitled Principes élémentaires de botanique, de Candolle proposed a natural method of plant classification as opposed to the artificial Linnaean method; the premise of de Candolle's method is.
In 1804, de Candolle published his Essai sur les propriétés médicales des plantes and was granted a doctor of medicine degree by the medical faculty of Paris. Two years he published Synopsis plantarum in flora Gallica descriptarum. de Candolle spent the next six summers making a botanical and agricultural survey of France at the request of the French government, published in 1813. In 1807 he was appointed professor of botany in the medical faculty of the University of Montpellier, where he would become the first chair of botany in 1810, his teaching at the University of Montpellier consisted of field classes attended by 200–300 students, starting at 5:00 am and finishing at 7:00 pm. While in Montpellier, de Candolle published his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, which introduced a new classification system and the word taxonomy. Candolle moved back to Geneva in 1816 and in the following year was invited by the government of the Canton of Geneva to fill the newly created chair of natural history.
De Candolle spent the rest of his life in an attempt to elaborate and complete his natural system of botanical classification. De Candolle published initial work in his Regni vegetabillis systema naturale, but after two volumes he realized he could not complete the project on such a large scale, he began his less extensive Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis in 1824. However, he was able to finish two-thirds of the whole. So, he was able to characterize over one hundred families of plants, helping to lay the empirical basis of general botany. Although de Candolle's main focus was botany, throughout his career he dabbled in fields related to botany, such as phytogeography, paleontology, medical botany, economic botany. In 1827 he was elected an associated member of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands. Augustin de Candolle was the first of four generations of botanists in the de Candolle dynasty, his son, Alphonse de Candolle, whom he fathered with his wife, Mademoiselle Torras succeeded to his father's chair in botany and continued the Prodromus.
Casimir Pyrame de Candolle, Augustin de Candolle's grandson contributed to the Prodromus through his detailed, extensive research and characterization of the Piperaceae family of plants. Augustin de Candolle's great-grandson, Richard Émile Augustin de Candolle
Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis
Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis known by its standard botanical abbreviation Prodr. is a 17-volume treatise on botany initiated by A. P. de Candolle. De Candolle intended it as a summary of all known seed plants, encompassing taxonomy, ecology and biogeography, he authored seven volumes between 1824 and 1839, but died in 1841. His son, Alphonse de Candolle took up the work, editing a further ten volumes, with contributions from a range of authors. Volume 17 was published in October 1873; the fourth and final part of the index came out in 1874. The Prodromus remained incomplete. In the Prodromus, De Candolle further developed his concept of families. Note that this system was published well before there were internationally accepted rules for botanical nomenclature. Here, a family is indicated as "ordo". Terminations for families were not. Neither of these phenomena is a problem from a nomenclatural perspective, the present day ICBN provides for this. Within the dicotyledons the De Candolle system recognises the list: ordo I.
RANUNCULACEÆ ordo II. DILLENIACEÆ ordo III. MAGNOLIACEÆ ordo IV. ANONACEÆ ordo V. MENISPERMACEÆ ordo VI. BERBERIDEÆ ordo VII. PODOPHYLLACEÆ ordo VIII. NYMPHÆACEÆ ordo VIIIbis. SARRACENIACEÆ ordo IX. PAPAVERACEÆ ordo X. FUMARIACEÆ ordo XIbis. RESEDACEÆ ordo XI. CRUCIFERÆ ordo XII. CAPPARIDEÆ ordo XIII. FLACOURTIANEÆ ordo XIV. BIXINEÆ ordo XIVbis. LACISTEMACEÆ ordo XV. CISTINEÆ ordo XVI. VIOLARIEÆ ordo XVII. DROSERACEÆ ordo XVIII. POLYGALACEÆ ordo XIX. TREMANDREÆ ordo XX. PITTOSPOREÆ ordo XXI. FRANKENIACEÆ ordo XXII. CARYOPHYLLEÆ ordo XXIII. LINEÆ ordo XXIV. MALVACEÆ ordo XXV. BOMBACEÆ ordo XXVI. BYTTNERIACEÆ ordo XXVII. TILIACEÆ ordo XXVIII. ELÆOCARPEÆ ordo XXIX. CHLENACEÆ ordo XXIXbis. ANCISTROCLADEÆ ordo XXIXter. DIPTEROCARPEÆ ordo XXIXter. LOPHIRACEÆ ordo XXX. TERNSTROEMIACEÆ ordo XXXI. CAMELLIEÆ ordo XXXII. OLACINEÆ ordo XXXIII. AURANTIACEÆ ordo XXXIV. HYPERICINEÆ ordo XXXV. GUTTIFERÆ ordo XXXVI. MARCGRAVIACEÆ ordo XXXVII. HIPPOCRATEACEÆ ordo XXXVIII. ERYTHROXYLEÆ ordo XXXIX. MALPIGHIACEÆ ordo XL. ACERINEÆ ordo XLI. HIPPOCASTANEÆ ordo XLII.
RHIZOBOLEÆ ordo XLIII. SAPINDACEÆ ordo XLIV. MELIACEÆ ordo XLV. AMPELIDEÆ ordo XLVI. GERANIACEÆ ordo XLVII. TROPÆOLEÆ ordo XLVIII. BALSAMINEÆ ordo XLIX. OXALIDEÆ ordo L. ZYGOPHYLLEÆ ordo LI. RUTACEÆ ordo LII. SIMARUBEÆ ordo LIII. OCHNACEÆ ordo LIV. CORIARIEÆ ordo LV. CELASTRINEÆ, ordo LVI. RHAMNEÆ ordo LVII. BRUNIACEÆ ordo LVIII. SAMYDEÆ ordo LIX. HOMALINEÆ ordo LX. CHAILLETIACEÆ ordo LXI. AQUILARINEÆ ordo LXII. TEREBINTHACEÆ ordo LXIII. LEGUMINOSÆ ordo LXIV. ROSACEÆ ordo LXV. CALYCANTHEÆ, ordo LXVbis. MONIMIACEÆ ordo LXVI. GRANATEÆ ordo LXVII. MEMECYLEÆ ordo LXVIII. COMBRETACEÆ ordo LXIX. VOCHYSIEÆ ordo LXX RHIZOPHOREÆ ordo LXXI. ONAGRARIEÆ ordo LXXII. HALORAGEÆ ordo LXXIII. CERATOPHYLLEÆ ordo LXXIV. LYTHRARIEÆ ordo LXXIVbis. CRYPTERONIACEÆ ordo LXXV. TAMARISCINEÆ ordo LXXVI. MELASTOMACEÆ ordo LXXVII. ALANGIEÆ ordo LXXVIII. PHILADELPEÆ ordo LXXIX. MYRTACEÆ ordo LXXX. CUCURBITACEÆ ordo LXXXI. PASSIFLOREÆ ordo LXXXII. LOASEÆ ordo LXXXIII. TURNERACEÆ ordo LXXXIV. FOUQUIERACEÆ ordo LXXXV. PORTULACEÆ ordo LXXXVI. PARONYCHIEÆ ordo LXXXVII.
CRASSULACEÆ ordo LXXXVIII. FICOIDEÆ ordo LXXXIX. CACTEÆ ordo XC. GROSSULARIEÆ ordo XCI. SAXIFRAGACEÆ, ordo XCII. UMBELLIFERÆ ordo XCIII. ARALIACEÆ ordo XCIV. HAMAMELIDEÆ ordo XCV. CORNEÆ ordo XCVbis. HELWINGIACEÆ ordo XCVI. LORANTHACEÆ ordo XCVII. CAPRIFOLIACEÆ ordo XCVIII. RUBIACEÆ ordo XCIX. VALERIANEÆ ordo C. DIPSACEÆ ordo CI. CALYCEREÆ, ordo CII. COMPOSITÆ. STYLIDIEÆ ordo CIV. LOBELIACEÆ ordo CV. CAMPANULACEÆ ordo CVI. CYPHIACEÆ ordo CVII. GOODENOVIEÆ ordo CVIII. ROUSSÆACEÆ ordo CIX. GESNERIACEÆ ordo CX. SPHENOCLEACEÆ ordo CXI. COLUMELLIACEÆ ordo CXII. NAPOLEONEÆ ordo CXIII. VACCINIEÆ ordo CXIV. ERICACEÆ Arbuteae Andromedae Ericeae Rhodoreae Rhododendreae Rhododendron Buramia Hymenanthes Eurhododendron Pogonanthum Chamaecistus Tsutsusi Kalmia Ledeae ordo CXV. EPACRIDEÆ ordo CXVI. PYROLACEÆ ordo CXVII. FRANCOACEÆ ordo CXVIII. MONOTROPEÆ ordo CXIX. LENTIBULARIEÆ ordo CXX. PRIMULACEÆ ordo CXXI. MYRSINEACEÆ ordo CXXII. ÆGICERACEÆ ordo CXXIII. THEOPHRASTACEÆ ordo CXXIV. SAPOTACEÆ ordo CXXV. EBENACEÆ ordo CXXVI. STYRACACEÆ ordo CXXVII.
OLEACEÆ ordo CXXVIIbis. SALVADORACEÆ ordo CXXVIII. JASMINEÆ ordo CXXIX. APOCYNACEÆ ordo CXXX. ASCLEPIADEÆ ordo CXXX LEONIACEÆ ordo CXXXI. LOGANIACEÆ, ordo CXXXII. GENTIANACEÆ ordo CXXXIII. BIGNONIACEÆ ordo CXXXIV. SESAMEÆ ordo CXXXV. CYRTANDRACEÆ ordo CXXXVI. HYDROPHYLLACEÆ ordo CXXXVII. POLEMONIACEÆ ordo CXXXVII. CONVOLVULACEÆ ordo CXXXVIII. ERICYBEÆ ordo CXXXIX. BORRAGINEÆ. HYDROLEACEÆ ordo CXLII. SCROPHULARIACEÆ ordo CXLII. SOLANACEÆ, out of sequence ordo CXLIV. OROBRANCHACEÆ, ordo CXLV. ACANTHACEÆ ordo CXLVI. PHRYMACEÆ ordo CXLVII VERBENACEÆ ordo CXLVIII MYOPORACEÆ ordo CXLIX SELAGINACEÆ, ordo CL. LABIATÆ ordo CLI. STILBACEÆ ordo CLII. GLOBULARIACEÆ ordo CLIII. BRUNONIACEÆ ordo CLIV. PLUMBAGINEÆ ordo CLV. PLANTAGINACEÆ, ordo CLVI. PHYTOLACCACEÆ ordo CLVII. SALSOLACEÆ ordo CLVIII. BASELLACEÆ ordo CLIX. AMARANTACEÆ ordo CLX. NYCTAGINACEÆ ordo CLXI. POLYGONAC
Clarke Medal
The Clarke Medal is awarded by the Royal Society of New South Wales, the oldest learned society in Australia and in the Southern Hemisphere, for distinguished work in the Natural sciences. The medal is named in honour of the Reverend William Branwhite Clarke, one of the founders of the Society and was to be "awarded for meritorious contributions to Geology and Natural History of Australasia, to be open to men of science, whether resident in Australasia or elsewhere", it is now awarded annually for distinguished work in the Natural Sciences done in the Australian Commonwealth and its territories. Each discipline is considered in rotation every three years. Source: Royal Society of New South Wales
Samuel Bentham
Sir Samuel Bentham was a noted English mechanical engineer and naval architect credited with numerous innovations related to naval architecture, including weapons. He was the only surviving sibling of philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Samuel Bentham was one of two surviving siblings of Jeremiah Bentham, his father was an attorney, his older brother was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, five other siblings having died in infancy or early childhood, their mother dying in 1766. At the age of 14, Bentham was apprenticed to a shipwright at Woolwich Dockyard, serving there and at Chatham Dockyard, before completing his 7-year training at the Naval Academy in Portsmouth. In 1780 he moved to Russia, where he was employed in the service of Prince Potemkin, who had an establishment designed to promote the introduction of various arts of civilization. Hired as a shipbuilder, he soon discovered other opportunities to use his talents as an engineer and inventor, constructing industrial machinery and experimenting with steel production.
He designed and constructed many novel inventions, including an amphibious vessel and an articulated barge built for Catherine the Great, the first Panopticon. He was decorated for his part in a decisive victory in the war against the Turks, commanded a battalion of 1,000 men in Siberia, he came to have complete responsibility for Potemkin's factories and workshops, it was while considering the difficulties of supervising the large workforce that he devised the principle of central inspection, designed the Panopticon building which would embody that principle and was popularized by his brother Jeremy. In 1782, Bentham travelled along the Siberian route to China, visiting Kyakhta and its Chinese pendant Naimatchin, spending over a month at the border fluvial city of Nerchinsk, where he was able to study Chinese ship designs those of junks. Back in Europe, he campaigned for the introduction of watertight compartments, an idea which he acknowledged he had got from seeing large Chinese vessels in Siberia.
Samuel returned to England in 1791, for the next few years was involved with his brother Jeremy in trying to promote the Panopticon scheme and he designed machinery for use in it. It was during this period that he met his future wife, Mary Sophia Fordyce, the daughter of Scottish doctor and scientist George Fordyce, a friend of Jeremy Bentham; the two were married in October 1796. In 1795 the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty asked him to design six new sailing ships with "partitions contributing to strength, securing the ship against foundering, as practiced by the Chinese of the present day"; these were built by the shipyard of Hobbs & Hellyer at Redbridge and incorporated a number of other novel features such as interchangeable parts for masts and spars, allowing easy maintenance while at sea. In March 1796 Bentham was appointed Inspector General of Naval Works, responsible for the maintaining and improving the Royal dockyards, a post which involved a lot of travel, he produced a great many suggestions for improvements, which included the introduction of steam power to the dockyards and the mechanisation of many production processes.
However, his superiors at the Navy Board were resistant to change and many of his suggestions were not implemented. Bentham is credited with helping to revolutionise the production of the wooden pulley blocks used in ships' rigging, devising woodworking machinery to improve production efficiency. Bentham's 1793 patent for woodworking machinery has been called "one of the most remarkable patents issued by the British Patent Office". Fifty years in a woodworking machinery patent case the Crown Judges said "the specification of his patent of 1793 is a perfect treatise on the subject. Marc Isambard Brunel had independently conceived designs for mortising and boring machines, which he showed to Bentham, who recognized the superiority of Brunel's designs. Henry Maudslay, the mechanic who built the machines, became a prominent machine tool builder; the Portsmouth Block Mills marked the arrival of mass production techniques in British manufacturing. In 1805 Bentham returned to Russia, this time on government business, remained there for two years with his family, chartering an entire ship to take his establishment, his servants and his companions.
Samuel's mission for the British government in Russia was blocked by constant obstacles and he returned home in 1807 without having achieved any of his official objectives. During this time he supervised the construction of a Panopticon School of Arts on the banks of the Okhta River in St. Petersburg, the design which he had first conceived while in Krichev in 1786; the building is only known from drawings. Bentham designed a full cast-iron nine-arch bridge for the Butterly company, for Vauxhall Bridge in London, which would have been the first iron-built bridge over the Thames; the choice of cast iron was said to be because it was "cheaper than masonry", but some of the inspiration for the bridge has been traced to Bentham's experience of China, where numerous such arched iron-cast bridges existed. The design was abandoned after doubts about its quality, in favour of a "cast iron arches on masonry piers" design by James Walker, completed in May 1813. Bentham discovered upon his return to England that his post as Inspector General had been abolished while he was absent, indeed came to believe that he had been sent to Russia to get him out of the way while the post was abolished.
In 1814, he and his family relocated to the south of France, where they lived until 18
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin, was an English naturalist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. His proposition that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors is now accepted, considered a foundational concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s, the scientific community and a majority of the educated public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations, it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution.
Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life. Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science, his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author. Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations, in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority, he was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay that described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories.
Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, his research on plants was published in a series of books, in his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, he was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. Since 2008, a statue of Charles Darwin occupies the place of honour at London's Natural History Museum. Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, on 12 February 1809, at his family's home, The Mount, he was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin and Susannah Darwin. His grandfathers Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood were both prominent abolitionists.
Both families were Unitarian, though the Wedgwoods were adopting Anglicanism. Robert Darwin, himself a freethinker, had baby Charles baptised in November 1809 in the Anglican St Chad's Church, but Charles and his siblings attended the Unitarian chapel with their mother; the eight-year-old Charles had a taste for natural history and collecting when he joined the day school run by its preacher in 1817. That July, his mother died. From September 1818, he joined his older brother Erasmus attending the nearby Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder. Darwin spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shropshire, before going to the University of Edinburgh Medical School with his brother Erasmus in October 1825. Darwin found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so he neglected his studies, he learned taxidermy in around 40 daily hour-long sessions from John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who had accompanied Charles Waterton in the South American rainforest.
In Darwin's second year at the university he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural-history group featuring lively debates in which radical democratic students with materialistic views challenged orthodox religious concepts of science. He assisted Robert Edmond Grant's investigations of the anatomy and life cycle of marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth, on 27 March 1827 presented at the Plinian his own discovery that black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech. One day, Grant praised Lamarck's evolutionary ideas. Darwin was astonished by Grant's audacity, but had read similar ideas in his grandfather Erasmus' journals. Darwin was rather bored by Robert Jameson's natural-history course, which covered geology—including the debate between Neptunism and Plutonism, he learned the classification of plants, assisted with work on the collections of the University Museum, one of the largest museums in Europe at the time. Darwin's neglect of medical studies annoyed his father, who shrewdly sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge, to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican country parson.
As Darwin was unqualified for the Tripos, he joined the ordinary degree course in January 1828. He preferred shooting to studying, his cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to the popular craze for beetle collecting.
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, anthropologist and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, human culture and societies; as a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, anthropology, political theory, literature, biology and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority in English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and, in the 20th century." Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined after 1900: "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937. Spencer is best known for the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology, after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
This term suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he made use of Lamarckism. Spencer was born in England, on 27 April 1820, the son of William George Spencer. Spencer's father was a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism, who seems to have transmitted to his son an opposition to all forms of authority, he ran a school founded on the progressive teaching methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and served as Secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a scientific society, founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, vicar of Hinton Charterhouse near Bath, completed Spencer's limited formal education by teaching him some mathematics and physics, enough Latin to enable him to translate some easy texts.
Thomas Spencer imprinted on his nephew his own firm free-trade and anti-statist political views. Otherwise, Spencer was an autodidact who acquired most of his knowledge from narrowly focused readings and conversations with his friends and acquaintances. Both as an adolescent and as a young man, Spencer found it difficult to settle to any intellectual or professional discipline, he worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830s, while devoting much of his time to writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in their religion and radical in their politics. From 1848 to 1853 he served as sub-editor on the free-trade journal The Economist, during which time he published his first book, Social Statics, which predicted that humanity would become adapted to the requirements of living in society with the consequential withering away of the state, its publisher, John Chapman, introduced Spencer to his salon, attended by many of the leading radical and progressive thinkers of the capital, including John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes and Mary Ann Evans, with whom he was romantically linked.
Spencer himself introduced the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who would win fame as'Darwin's Bulldog' and who remained his lifelong friend. However it was the friendship of Evans and Lewes that acquainted him with John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic and with Auguste Comte's positivism and which set him on the road to his life's work, he disagreed with Comte. The first fruit of his friendship with Evans and Lewes was Spencer's second book, Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, which explored a physiological basis for psychology; the book was founded on the fundamental assumption that the human mind was subject to natural laws and that these could be discovered within the framework of general biology. This permitted the adoption of a developmental perspective not in terms of the individual, but of the species and the race. Through this paradigm, Spencer aimed to reconcile the associationist psychology of Mill's Logic, the notion that human mind was constructed from atomic sensations held together by the laws of the association of ideas, with the more'scientific' theory of phrenology, which located specific mental functions in specific parts of the brain.
Spencer argued that both these theories were partial accounts of the truth: repeated associations of ideas were embodied in the formation of specific strands of brain tissue, these could be passed from one generation to the next by means of the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance. The Psychology, would do for the human mind what Isaac Newton had done for matter. However, the book was not successful and the last of the 251 copies of its first edition was not sold until June 1861. Spencer's interest in psychology derived from a more fundamental concern, to establish the universality of natural law. In common with others of his generation, including the members of Chapman's salon, he was possessed with the idea of demonstrating that it was possible to show that everything in the universe – including human culture and morality – could be explained by laws of universal validity; this was in contrast to the views of many theologians of the time who insisted that some parts of creation, in particular the human soul, were beyond the realm of scientific investigation.
Comte's Système de Philosophie Po