Quite a lot. And I'd say that I process more info by typing than by simply reading. I typed the first edition and got the printed second edition too after.
I always searched videos of what he was exemplifying and found quite amazing material for many (enslaver ants, ants tickling aphids, honeycomb construction).
Was super impressed to hear about Darwin's peers which he calls out by name every time, how there were people specialised in breading races, judging what constitutes species.
Was kind of stunned to find out that people didn't know dogs were all the same species, how hard it was even for specialised breeders to identify that their pigeons were changing, since they were not really taking pictures.
How Darwin published a book that was approachable to common folks, how the book was built on mountains of hand-collected data.
There's so, so, so much more I could talk about (tree of life, organs, descendant resemblance happening at the same age, embryology weirdness) but biggest mind-fuck would be the anti-teleological stance he holds. Basically, out of nowhere (although I saw that he read Hume [0]), Darwin figures out that things don't happen 'for a reason'. Things don't live because they're 'better'. All the creatures we see today are simply the things that survived. There's no final goal, no 'ought to be' in the world. We're simply patterns that survive that resemble patterns that happened to survive.
Quite a lot. And I'd say that I process more info by typing than by simply reading. I typed the first edition and got the printed second edition too after.
I always searched videos of what he was exemplifying and found quite amazing material for many (enslaver ants, ants tickling aphids, honeycomb construction). Was super impressed to hear about Darwin's peers which he calls out by name every time, how there were people specialised in breading races, judging what constitutes species.
Was kind of stunned to find out that people didn't know dogs were all the same species, how hard it was even for specialised breeders to identify that their pigeons were changing, since they were not really taking pictures.
How Darwin published a book that was approachable to common folks, how the book was built on mountains of hand-collected data.
There's so, so, so much more I could talk about (tree of life, organs, descendant resemblance happening at the same age, embryology weirdness) but biggest mind-fuck would be the anti-teleological stance he holds. Basically, out of nowhere (although I saw that he read Hume [0]), Darwin figures out that things don't happen 'for a reason'. Things don't live because they're 'better'. All the creatures we see today are simply the things that survived. There's no final goal, no 'ought to be' in the world. We're simply patterns that survive that resemble patterns that happened to survive.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/