User talk:Cosans

Welcome!

Hello, Cosans, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Guettarda (talk) 23:36, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Owen

Hi, thanks for your edits! The source you're adding looks interesting, if controversial, and your user name suggests you may be Christopher Cosens, author of the new book on Owen's Ape and Darwin's Bulldog. This does raise the question of Wikipedia:Conflict of interest policy – have a read of that, it gives useful advice. Your expertise is welcome, and I hope you'll appreciate that Wikipedia:Neutral point of view policy requires us to give due weight to expert views in proportion to their prominence, so where published views argue against the current expert consensus that should be shown accordingly. We do recommend editors to Be bold!, but you'll notice from that advice that if your edits are reverted, you should take the issue to the article talk page and present evidence in discussion to gain consensus for an agreed outcome – see WP:TALK. Simply continuing to revert to your preferred version is against edit warring policy, and is blockable. So, look forward to constructive discussion and cooperative work to improve these articles! Thanks again, . dave souza, talk 11:49, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Replying here so that you get a "new messages" banner, you did find out how to reply! As the bot has reminded you below, remember to sign with four tildes, ~~~~ This is the main way of communicating person to person, and of course the article talk pages are the place to discuss improvements to the articles themselves. It's a matter of choice whether to reply on the same page or post a reply on the orinator's talk page, as I'm doing here. The first requires keeping an eye on your watchlist for a reply, but has the advantage of making the conversation easier to follow.

I'm aware at a fairly basic level of the shifts in perception in Owen's time, and of the way in which Huxley and associates rewrote history into the conflict thesis: his aim was to discredit Owen, it's another issue as to what extent it was unfair. It does seem to me problematic to describe Owen as favouring evolution, as he seems to have been very much opposed to what a modern reader would understand as evolution. All the same, he was putting forward divinely ordained development, or at least his axiom of the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things. There does seem to be a parallel with Chambers, but I don't think Owen would have liked the comparison. A comment about Owen's Edinburgh Review article: his praise for Darwin's research into insects and pigeons is rather barbed: "These are the most important original observations, recorded in the volume of 1859: they are, in our estimation, its real gems,—few indeed and far apart, and leaving the determination of the origin of species very nearly where the author found it.." A classic put-down, understandable that Darwin, Huxley and Lyell thought it insincere and spiteful. Oh, and I'm also aware that there are some areas where current historians disagree. The BBC's current Darwin series is producing plenty of arguable examples! . . dave souza, talk 21:32, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I've responded briefly to your comments at User talk:dave souza#more on Owen. We're at the stage where all or part of these comments could usefully be transferred to talk:Richard Owen to open up a wider discussion on improvements to related articles, including Talk:Thomas Henry Huxley#Recent changes regarding edits which appear to have been made by yourself without logging in. Trust you've got these pages on your watchlist. So, are you OK with me transferring relevant parts of the comments to start that wider discussion? . dave souza, talk 09:54, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure what you mean by "message section", but probably it simply means this page, your own user talk page. See Wikipedia:Talk page – "After someone else edits your user talk page, the alert "You have new messages" is automatically displayed on all pages you view until you view your user talk page." Slightly inconsistent use of language, just one of these things that you get used to. So, now that I've edited your talk page, you'll get the banner next time you look at any Wikipedia page, just as I got the banner after you edited my talk page. It's a bit of a maze this place, the links in the "interaction" box can be useful, particularly Help. Hope that helps, . dave souza, talk 17:50, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Basically, that's it. Discussions in the open, and anyone looking at a talk page can join in. The watchlist gives every user account a way of tracking when there are new comments. Editors who enable email, giving an email address in their account settings, can be contacted by using the "E-mail this user" link in the toolbox on their user page or user talk page – that gives them the address of the emailer, so they can reply by email if they want to. Pretty basic, really, as the emphasis is on open debate. . dave souza, talk 22:47, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Your recent edits

Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. If you can't type the tilde character, you should click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot (talk) 18:03, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just adding some hints here, as the other section's getting a bit big. You seem to have inadvertently added two identical sections to Talk:Thomas Henry Huxley, the only distinction being that you've signed the second one. The WP:TALK page guideline is that we shouldn't edit other people's postings, other than adding signatures where they're unsigned, but you can archive off-topic posts and delete any posts from your own talk page. When discussing a long post it is ok to intersperse replies in a way that makes it clear who said what, so I'll aim to copy the signature onto your first section, then start interspersing some discussion on the second.

The Five Pillars give basic guidance on article content, including WP:NPOV which means giving proportionate due weight to various notable viewpoints rather than picking one as The Truth, and on the Huxley article we wouldn't want to devote too big a proportion of the article to explaining Owen's views. There's a tension between giving enough detail to fully explore issues, and article size for readability: the software nags us when articles go over 32kb, and while references can be added to that, articles much over 100kb are slow to load and ideally are pruned down. The main way is "summary style", which takes a section out into a new sub-article, leaving behind a concise summary and a link to the main or detailed article about that topic. The logical place for exploring Owen's views and how they were received is in his biography, with care then taken to accurately summarise that aspect in other related articles rather than trying to repeat the whole thing in every article. If it turns out to be too big, there would be a case for a new article, perhaps titled the Owen–Huxley debate or the great hippocampus debate – title to be negotiated!

Hope that helps, will comment on the article talk pages when time permits. . . dave souza, talk 10:51, 11 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Meant to reply to your question earlier: your contributions to Galen look good, and you seem to have met with a favourable response. You've replied to some pretty old comments, it's worth checking if the issue has already been sorted out in the article, and as Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines#Layout advises, it's best to thread comments by adding colons immediately in front of your statement :Thusly, so

Your response to a comment is indented,

and the next column further indented. Click edit to see how that works.

Your user page is for telling others about yourself, it's pretty much optional and there's a rather egalitarian tradition of judging people by their edits, and letting people be anonymous. A well publicised hoax led to a lot of discussion about credentials, and there's really no practical way to check them so we rely on verification from published sources which others can check, with no original research policy cautioning that any analysis has to come from secondary sources, with primary sources only being used for obvious statements. Some people do describe their work and give a list of their publications, others don't say much. You may find Wikipedia:WikiProject History of Science useful for finding interested people.

You've been adding references which is good, ideally if you can give an ISBN number, a link or a DOI or PMID number that makes it easier for other people to look it up. Wikipedia:Citing sources gives useful hints on optional formats, and has a Tools section for ways of automating it. dave souza, talk 23:04, 14 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Galen

The Galen page has been identified as in need of some work. It turns out I wrote a dissertation on and have published articles on Galen. I have made some changes on the page and posted some comments on it. If anyone has any thoughts on all this or any questions please post them here. I have a training in history of science, Greek and anatomy. Cosans (talk) 17:37, 13 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your recent contributions, much appreciated. I will respond to your latest comments on the Talk page. --Taiwan boi (talk) 05:29, 16 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Owen and Darwin

As you say, a lot of what you hear about Owen is recycled versions of Darwin's complaints, and it shouldn't be forgotten that we're reading private correspondence between close friends and allies, written at a time when Darwin was suffering from illness and stress. John van Wyhe strongly suggests, in the context of "it is like confessing a murder", that Darwin had a taste for humorously melodramatic statements,[1] and we may be taking gossip too literally. The discussion Owen and Darwin had about the advance copy of Origin in December 1859 seems to have been a pivotal point, Desmond and Moore in Darwin ISBN 0393311503 p. 478 emphasise the hope that Owen was sympathetic, noting his encouraging remarks in this letter which isn't transcribed at that source, while Browne in The Power of Place ISBN 0691114390 pp. 98–99 plays up Darwin's doubts, and her version seems to be supported by this letter. She also says that it was a tense time for Owen as Huxley and Hooker were thwarting his efforts to get his Natural History Museum built, causing delays. (Note that Owen was annoyed by being included in the list as "We see this in the plainest manner by the fact that all the most eminent palæontologists, namely Cuvier, Owen, Agassiz, Barrande, Falconer, E. Forbes, &c., and all our greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, &c., have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species.",[2] and it's amusing that he was simply omitted from "all the most eminent palæontologists" in the second edition, then that was more tactfully amended in the third edition) Any hopes of a sympathetic review by Owen appear to have been dashed by Huxley's "naughty remark" about him in the Times review.[3] Darwin, Hooker and Huxley read Owen's review together, and Darwin wrote to Lyell about "the bitter spite of many of the remarks against me; indeed I did not discover all myself" before writing "It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me."[4] Rather over the top, but Owen and Huxley were clearly enemies and Darwin had taken Huxley's side. . dave souza, talk 23:52, 14 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

...all of this makes a lot of sense. Many historians have struggled with why Owen was so critical of the Origin. I think Desmond in one of his books also suggests that it was seeing Huxley pick up the Origin as advancing a reductionist metaphysics that change Owen's perspective to take a critical tone. I think one methodological issue is what can we infer from evidence, and that in turn makes us ask if we have a "witness'" writings was that witness in a location to see what we want to know. The best historical evidence as to how Owen felt about Darwin would be something like a letter from Owen's wife describing her husband's mood at the time. We don't have that kind of direct historical evidence on this one....so we end up having to conjecture some. As I read through all the sources you looked up, they do all seem consistent with other things I have read in primary and secondary sources. Rupke takes a lot of time looking at the incident over how much Owen resisted efforts of some to get him to write a critical review of the Vestiges and Rupke argues Owen's efforts of his resistance show his hand as having gone over to evolution (Rupke, Nicolaas, 1994, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN-10: 0300058209 ). My main expertise on Owen is not from reading the personal letters but from looking at his science (because people like Rupke and Desmond have worked with and published his letters, I can build on their research by working at a different angle)...looking at what he published and redoing some of his dissections....and from that perspective it seems to me that there were real questions of science in addition to whatever interpersonally issues that gave Owen motive for not being happy with the Origin(Cosans, Christopher, 2009, Owen's Ape & Darwin's Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and Creationism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp 39-45, 97-103, ISBN-10: 0253220513). Basically Owen was working on evolutionary theories that fit with certain data (Owen, Richard, 2007 reprint of 1849 work. On the Nature of Limbs. Edited by Ron Amundson, with a preface by Brian Hall, and essays by Ron Amundson, Kevin Padian, Mary Winsor, and Jennifer Coggon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-10: 0226641937), and Darwin presented an evolutionary theory that looked at different data (Cosans, above, pp. 76-88). It might not have been so bad from Owen's perspective but Darwin presents his theory of evolution as The One True theory of evolution (Cosans,above p. 83), rather than as a part of how evolution works. Darwin writes the Origin not unlike Harvey's account of the heart and circulation. Harvey is careful to give a full account of everything people had written on the heart and vessels, then give lots of experiments that support his new theories about the matter, then tell us how he takes us beyond the earlier work (Harvey, William, 1993 originally published in 1628, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings, Everyman, ISBN 0-460-87362-8). I think a problem is that evolution is more complex than circulation, and while Harvey does get the whole story about the heart and the vessels, the Origin gives us an important part of but not the whole story about evolution. Hence it took a lot of smart people about 30 years from about 1930 to 1959 to synthesize Darwin's theory with genetics, and a lot of smart people have been working in the last 30 years over how to synthesize developmental biology with evolutionary theory (evo-devo)(Amundson, Ron, 2007, The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo. New York: Cambridge University of Press. ISBN-10: 0521703972). There is a lot more data to be considered on "how evolution works" than on "how the heart works", and in the Origin Darwin does not consider all the possible data that he could....including data that Owen found most important in his thinking about evolution. If you know a lot of the different theories about evolution that were around in 1859, you can see Owen as giving data in his review that fits those theories, but that does now work as well with Darwin's specific theory. I do think that it is clear that Huxley did not like Owen very much, and a personal rift eventually developed between Darwin and Owen, all of which seems quite tragic. Cosans (talk) 14:45, 15 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]