Posts Tagged ‘botany’
“If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill”*…
As we consider revising our New Year’s resolutions…
The term wellness was popularized in the late 1950s by Dr. Halbert L. Dunn, the so-called father of the movement. Writing in the Canadian Journal of Public Health in 1959, Dunn defined “high-level wellness,” the organizing principle behind his work, as “a condition of change in which the individual moves forward, climbing toward a higher potential of functioning.” Dunn drew a distinction between good health—the absence of illness, or the passive state of homeostasis—and wellness as an active, ongoing pursuit. While good health is objective, dictated by the cold, hard truths of modern medicine, Dunn’s wellness is subjective, based on perception and “the uniqueness of the individual.” Dunn’s ideas have gained a steady following, approaching near-ubiquity in the 21st century—in 2015, the global wellness industry was valued at $3.7 trillion.
But without the emergence of Europe’s middle classes, without the wealth and leisure afforded by the Industrial Revolution, today’s wellness culture wouldn’t exist…
The full– and fascinating– story at “The False Promises of Wellness Culture.”
* Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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As we reconsider that cleanse, we might spare a thought for Swedish botanist Carl Linné, better known as Carolus Linnaeus, “the Father of Taxonomy,” born this date in 1707. Historians suggest that the academically-challenged among us can take heart from his story: at the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was “less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else.” Still, he made is way from Lund to Uppsala, where he began his famous system of plant and animal classification– still in use today.
“Why should things be easy to understand?”*…
Dunning-Kruger Effect
The less competent an individual is at a specific task, the more likely they are to over-estimate their ability at that task.
Sure, ignorance is bliss. But being convinced you’re an expert at something, even though actually you’re ignorant — DAYUM — that’s the the best thing ever. People with poor abilities at some task can sometimes mistakenly believe that they are much more skilled at the task then they actually are. Examples of this are everywhere, from people who have never played a sport before, but just know they’ll be great at it, to people who’ve had one semester of french back in high school, but have no doubt that when the plane lands in Paris they’ll be able to talk like a native…
More on this all-too-timely phenomenon here— one the regular entries in Chris Spurgeon‘s marvelous newsletter, The Laws of the Universe, a regular series of postings…
Every once in a while — very rarely in the grand scheme of things — someone figures out how a tiny, tiny bit of the universe works. Through this newsletter I celebrate these discoveries, and the people they’re named after.
These tiny discoveries are known by many terms — laws, rules, constants, principles, theorems, effects. And they pop up in all areas of human endeavors — science of course, but also law and politics, arts and entertainment, popular culture and everyday life. Hubble’s Law, Dunbar’s Number, the Barbara Streisand Effect, Murphy’s Law — they’re all fair game. The only rules are:
1) the law must be named for someone, and
2) the law must shine a tiny bit of light onto one tiny bit of how the universe operates.
Browse the archive (and sign up) here.
* Thomas Pynchon
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As we revel in rules, we might spare a thought for Gregor Johann Mendel; he died on this date in 1884. After a profoundly-unpromising start, Mendel became a scientist, Augustinian friar, and abbot of St. Thomas’ Abbey in Brno, Moravia (today’s Czech Republic). A botanist and plant experimenter, he was the first to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics (of which he is now consider the “Father”). Over the period 1856-63, Mendel grew and analyzed over 28,000 pea plants. He carefully studied for each their height, pod shape, pod color, flower position, seed color, seed shape and flower color– and from those observations derived two very important generalizations, known today as the Laws of Heredity.
“Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed”*…
click here for zoomable version
This map of medicinal plants depicts one or two important species that grew in each state in 1932, identifying the plant as native or cultivated and describing its medical uses. A few species of seaweeds float in the map’s Atlantic Ocean, and the border identifies important medicinal plants from around the world.
The map, printed by the National Wholesale Druggists’ Association for use of pharmacists during a promotional campaign called Pharmacy Week, was intended to boost the image of the profession. At a time when companies were increasingly compounding new pharmaceuticals in labs, pharmacists wanted to emphasize their ability to understand and manipulate the familiar medicinal plants that yielded reliable “vegetable drugs.” “Intense scientific study, expert knowledge, extreme care and accuracy are applied by the pharmacist to medicinal plants and drugs,” the box of text in the map’s lower left-hand corner reads, “from the point of origin through the intricate chemical, botanical, and pharmaceutical processes employed in preparing medicine.”
As historians Arthur Daemmrich and Mary Ellen Bowden write, the early 1930s were a turning point in the pharmaceutical industry. In the previous decades, chemists working for large companies had begun to systematically invent new medicines for the first time, developing synthesized aspirin and vaccines for diseases like tetanus and diphtheria. The 1938 Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act would bring a heightened level of federal regulation to the production of new medicines. And in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, researchers would go on to invent a flood of new antibiotics, psychotropics, antihistamines, and vaccines, increasingly relying on synthetic chemistry to do so. The pharmacist’s direct relationship to the preparation of medicine would diminish accordingly.
More at “A Depression-Era Medicinal Plant Map of the United States“; visit the map’s page on the David Rumsey Map Collection website.
* Genesis 1:29
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As we take our pick, we might recall that it was on this date in 1727 that Dr. James Lind, a Royal Navy surgeon, began an experiment designed to determine a remedy for the scurvy that was afflicting many British sailors. Suspecting that diet was involved, Lind divided a dozen crewmen on the HMS Salisbury who were stricken with scurvy into six groups of two and administered specific dietetic supplements to each group. The two lucky sailors who were fed lemon and oranges for six days recovered, and one was even declared fit for duty before the Salisbury reached port– thus demonstrating (before Vitamin C had been identified) that regular intake of citrus could prevent (or cure) scurvy.
A Little Traveling Music, Please…
On the heels of yesterday’s nod to the music of Miami Vice, a reprise…
click here for a larger, interactive version
Follow the journeys that various music genres took as one style developed into another: “How Music Travels – The Evolution of Western Dance Music.”
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As we celebrate the interconnection of influence, we might send tightly-woven birthday greetings to Johannes Eugenius Bülow “Eugen” Warming; he was born on this date in 1841. A globe-trotting botanist, he wrote the first textbook (1895) on plant ecology, taught the first university course in ecology, and gave the concept its meaning and content. So, though the term “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, (the retrospectively-poignantly named) Warming can be considered the father of Ecology as a discipline.
That’s life…
Virus (source: Flickr/Razza Mathadsa)
Writing in The Scientist, Professor Edward N. Trifonov tackles the most fundamental of questions:
The definition of life is as enormous a problem as the phenomenon of life itself. One could easily collect from the literature more than 100 different definitions, none satisfactory enough to be broadly accepted. What should the definition contain, to be suitable for all varieties of observable life? Humans, animals, plants, microorganisms. Do viruses also belong to life?
There are two tendencies in the attempts to define life. One is to formulate an all-inclusive definition, accommodating life’s attributes and manifestations from all levels of complexity. Another tendency is to reduce the attributes to only those which are common to all forms of life. But we do not know what would be the “simplissimus” from which everything, probably, started…
Spoiler alert! In “What is Life?” he presses down and further down the hierarchy of scale and process to suggest that “The border between life and nonlife may, actually, be placed anywhere within the realm of the abiotic processes.” (For those distant from their biology classes: “abiotic.”) Trifonov’s conclusion is fascinating– at once, inspiring and humbling:
… life never stopped emerging, starting some 4 billion years ago with replicating RNA, and continuing to this day within the genomes of every living organism.
As we revisit Walt Whitman, we might send germinating birthday greetings to botanist Charles Joseph Chamberlain; he was born on this date in 1863. Chamberlain was a specialist in the cycad genera (palmlike, cone-bearing plants). His work laid the foundation for understanding the life histories, distribution, ecology, and diversity of cycads (and other primitive seed plants), postulated a course of evolutionary development for the spermatophyte (seed plant) ovule and embryo, and led to speculation about a cycad origin for angiosperms (flowering plants).
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