Have a light Ten Days of Newton

In her Wild Side column yesterday in The New York Times, evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson pointed out that:

Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics and mathematics, and arguably the greatest scientist of all time, was born on Christmas Day.
    ...Newton was born in England on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar...But by the 1640s, much of the rest of Europe was using the Gregorian calendar (the one in general use today); according to this calendar, Newton was born on Jan. 4, 1643.

Ms. Judson suggests that an alternative reason for our annual winter holiday could be to have an extended festival in honor of Newton.

After all, the festival of Christmas properly continues for a further 12 days, until the feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6. So the festival of Newton could begin on Christmas Day and then continue for an extra 10 days, representing the interval between the calendars.

For an explanation of why the Julian calendar was supplanted, plus a summary of Newton's career (including his interest in religion and alchemy), I recommend Ms. Judson's column.

She even suggests a song in honor of Newton’s Birthday festival. The final verse begins:

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me...

For another article on Newton, you might consult Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.

From the wild side

I recommend the article, "The Repeater," by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson, published January 29, 2008 on the author's "Wild Side" column on the web. It addresses the question, "How evolution repeats—or, what we can learn from the itineraries of sticklebacks." (I've included here one of the photos that illustrate the article. Sticklebacks are small scaleless fish having two or more free spines in front of the dorsal fin.)

Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is the author of Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, which was made into a three-part television program. Ms. Judson has been a reporter for The Economist and has written for a number of other publications, including Nature, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Natural History. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London.

The article opens:

Here’s an evolutionist’s dream: 10,000 planet Earths, starting from the same point at the same time, and left to their own devices for four and a half billion years. What would happen? Could you go on safari from one planet to the next seeing an endless procession of wildly different organisms? Or would many of the planets be home to life forms that are broadly similar?

The conventional answer to this question — the one championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, for example — is that chance events, from mutations to asteroids, play such a large role in evolution that each of the planets would be totally different. And probably, after four and a half billion years, they would be. I wish we could do the experiment, though. It might hold some surprises.