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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   794 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 24, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Sayers' Whose Body? Also reading Abelson's The Seven Liberal Arts after rereading Sayers' essay The Lost Tools of Learning.

Currently reading Descent of Man by Charles Darwin. What's striking to me is how much of a not-Darwinist Darwin is. I mean, he's a naturalist, yes, but check this out:

As the voice was used more and more, the vocal organs would have been strengthened and perfected through the principle of inherited effects of use

That sounds like Lamarckism to me. Bro be out there batting for the other team. And it's not like he wrote this when he was 12, before he had his head screwed on straight. This was toward the end of his life!

The classroom story we were told about the history of evolution, at least in my school, was very misleading. In my school, we were taught Lamarck was basically the Aristotle of evolution, saying a bunch of harebrained nonsense he made up, and Darwin was basically Newton who came along and explained how it akshually worked. But that is not at all how this played out.

Just because he used the word “perfected?” I don’t like it when colloquialisms get verbally captured by their misuses in the history of a discipline. That’s the only thing that leads me to make that comparison. I was taught in a way similar to you from the sound of it, but I’m not really seeing the problem here. I think the passage is going a little more work for you than it otherwise should be.

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