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EvC Forum: "You are not really a scientist. You are a biologist" -->
EvC Forum: "You are not really a scientist. You are a biologist"
teen4christ asked about my Grandfather (Willard Stanley) and so as not to take that discussion off topic I have responded here.
There is a lot on Willard Stanley
in this defunked thread on EvC. He was a geneticist in Zelensky’s lab (Sewall Wright also studied there).
before DNA, an accomplished ornithologist, a teacher of evolution, and pretty much the worlds’ authority on BioPhilately. Those derogatory remarks about biology being stamp collecting pretty much describes my Grandfather. He was not an especially noted biologist. He was your average Darwinian. He seemed like a bit of a recapitulationist but I found a “working paper” from Zelensky’s lab that shows how to think about embryology evolutionarily and this isn’t all that different than the current interest today in “developmental constraints.”
He did not publish a lot. He did encourage many students at SUNY Fredonia (he was the second science teacher there(teaching all of science at the start in the 30s)) and James Lloyd who eventually discovered fire fly flashing patterns. He kept copious notes about animal behavior in the field and established his own place to do this (
Fredonia College Lodge). He as a conservationist and was offering some of the first courses on field biology in the SUNY system.
He passed on Mendelism to me during the Cold War. I knew I was learning something that was not common to everyone in NYC. He also informed me (my mother knew of this as well) of how molecular biology “took over” biology departments after DNA was discovered. He warned me about it before I had the ability to understand what he was warning me about. Richard Lewontin and other organacists are aware of this general phenomenon in biology departments across the board. Physicists can be on the extreme end of this problem as was queried in the thread you asked me from.
Here are a couple of his lectures.
And a general view on the relation of biology to society in general.
Edited by Brad McFall, : fixedevclink
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