Abe, Chuck, and Louie
Feb. 12th, 2006 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacToday's paper has a stirring editorial praising those two great emancipators whose 197th birthdays fall today: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. "Lincoln, of course, freed slaves. Darwin liberated science from the dogma ..." you know the drill. But not all is well, as this simile shows: "Ignorance lurks in the body politic like recessive genes. In a CBS poll last year, 51 percent of Americans rejected the theory of evolution."
An article on an exhibit of 1906 earthquake photos is text-only on the web, but the print edition reproduces a number of the photos, including a much broader and wider view than I have here of perhaps the funniest post-earthquake scene ever photographed:
This is a statue of Louis Agassiz that toppled off its perch at Stanford (not, as sometimes reported, UC Berkeley) in the quake and landed head-first in the pavement. Though Agassiz is remembered as the geologist who developed the concept of ice ages, he was also a zoologist, the last major one to resist Darwinian evolutionary theory. (He also never taught at Stanford, though the caption to the Merc's photo says he did.)
The story is that the committee of professors sent around the Stanford campus to assess the quake damage came across this sight and stared at it for a minute until one of them said, "Poor Agassiz: he was always so much better in the abstract than in the concrete." History does not record whether the professor was fined for that remark.
An article on an exhibit of 1906 earthquake photos is text-only on the web, but the print edition reproduces a number of the photos, including a much broader and wider view than I have here of perhaps the funniest post-earthquake scene ever photographed:
This is a statue of Louis Agassiz that toppled off its perch at Stanford (not, as sometimes reported, UC Berkeley) in the quake and landed head-first in the pavement. Though Agassiz is remembered as the geologist who developed the concept of ice ages, he was also a zoologist, the last major one to resist Darwinian evolutionary theory. (He also never taught at Stanford, though the caption to the Merc's photo says he did.)The story is that the committee of professors sent around the Stanford campus to assess the quake damage came across this sight and stared at it for a minute until one of them said, "Poor Agassiz: he was always so much better in the abstract than in the concrete." History does not record whether the professor was fined for that remark.
