January 2025 – The Scholar's Stage

Observations From India

05 January, 2025Bharat, Electoral Intrigues, Futuristics, Narrative, Political Theory, Religion, The Middle Kingdom, Things I Do Other Than Blogging

In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see things, India’s relationship with America has been mediated by hostile parties for too long. On the Indian side you have Congress-sympathizing functionaries; on the American side, a set of intellectuals and diplomats who can neither speak for nor to the American right. Direct links between Indian and American nationalists are needed.

So I was invited India.

54 Comments

Science Proceeds One Question at a Time

01 January, 2025Books and Literature, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Small and Simple Things

MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection. By the time Wallace came on the scene Darwin had been sitting on his evolutionary theory for two decades. Reading Wallace’s 1858 paper “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varities” spooked Darwin. He did not want to be scooped. Within a year Darwin had rushed his material into an “abstract which… must necessarily be imperfect” as it only gave “the general conclusions” of his theory, and offered only a “few facts in illustration” to support them. We know this abstract well: it was published as The Origin of Species.

9 Comments

Monthly Archives: January 2025

Observations From India

Science Proceeds One Question at a Time

Archives