Darwin's Great Blunder—and Why It Was Good for the World

discovermagazine ^ | October 27, 2009 | Bruno Maddox

[Natural Law]

"Is this the basis of your asservation?"

I don't disagree with the conclusion of the author, only the rhetorical style. It is, to use another 19th century phrase, off putting.

[stormer]

Very interesting - not a work I’m familiar with. Note the lack of a “period” after the J - according to his daughter, he threw the initial on his name to give himself more gravitas and because he didn’t like being called “Harley”.

[eclecticEel]

you would be safer lighting a Marlboro off a burning American flag than being caught with a copy of On the Origin of Species

What exactly does the author think would happen to him?

[Steelfish]

“But it does make you wonder, as you dig inside your hiking boot trying to find the annoying heather burr that’s gotten wedged in your sock, whether it mightn’t be time for those of us in the business of defending Charles Darwin to quietly retire the proposition that he was a towering genius with superhuman powers of observation and objectivity. “

No Newton or Einstein here.

[JoeProBono]

[dr_lew]

There's a lot of on-line material on this, and I was able to track down "Col R2" from this note in Darwin's collected works:

4. Lauder had failed to find any overflow col on the level of Road R2, and Darwin recognized this as a major anomaly. The head of Glen Fintac, which is a small valley tributary to Glen Gluoy, was a plausible point to search for such a col from Glen Roy; in fact the col connecting them is much too high, and the overflow col for R2 was later discovered in a quite different position on the other side of Glen Roy (Glen Glaster).

I found the names, with variations ( Glen Glaster is Gleann Glas Dhoire! ) on this Map of Bohuntine Hill in Highland. Presented as a tourist map, it nevertheless has extensive topo markings. This col, or spillway, is visible at the very top of my Google Maps screen shot. It cuts to the right off the top of the image by that green patch.

And I might as well note this map of Charles Darwin's from Charles Darwin visits the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy.

You can see from the footnote above that figuring all this out was not just a matter of standing on top of the hill and looking around.

[stormer]

You gotta real purty mouth!

[JoeProBono]

BWAHAHA!

[SunkenCiv]

...they stood at their present level not because the ocean had sunk or somehow drained away but because the earth itself had risen, as it practically had just then, right beneath his feet. If he could show that the roads in Glen Roy had been formed by the same process as those in Coquimbo on the other side of the world, then he could propose a theory of global "crustal uplift" as the prime mover in the creation of the continents, which would be an impressive, career-making thing to do...

Thanks, JPB! So close, Chuck, and yet so far. ;')

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[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks JoeProBono. One theory, popular among the locals, was that the roads had been the private hunting tracks of Fionn MacCumhail, a.k.a. Fingal, the mythical Celtic giant. Hey, whaddayamean mythical? :') "...of the hero, Finn MacCuill, that if a day goes by without his name being mentioned, the world will come to an end." Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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