A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy

DNA as information: at the crossroads between biology, mathematics, physics and chemistry

“…However, if we are allowed a free interpretation of the image, the analogy with the information transfer leading to the synthesis of proteins is impressive. 1 We see Mercury with his helmet and caduceus. The latter is formed by two serpents intertwined on a rod in the fashion of the double helix of DNA.…”

Brocchi, Darwin, and Transmutation: Phylogenetics and Paleontology at the Dawn of Evolutionary Biology

“…In his autobiography (Barlow 1958), Darwin writes that, along with Humboldt's Narrative, Herschel's Introduction (sic) to the Study of Natural Philosophy, first published in 1830 (Herschel 1987), were the two books that he read at Cambridge that "stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. "…”

“…It is essentially what Brocchi and the authors of the two anonymous essays had already said-in if anything a more prominent place. If Darwin had somehow managed not to learn of Brocchi's ideas from his mentors-Grant and Jameson in Edinburgh, and perhaps from even the intellectually curious Henslow at Cambridge (Kohn 2005)-he could hardly have missed these words in Herschel (1987).…”

Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology 10/2005

“…(Darwin 1859, 63) More broadly, there was the overall influence of Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology (1830-33) not only inspired Darwin in his early days as a geologist but whose general philosophy, of explaining the past by reference to causes now in operation, was the ruling method that Darwin used in his evolutionary theorizing. And complementing this was the influence first of the empiricist philosopher John F W Herschel (1830Herschel ( , 1841, whose writings probably drove Darwin to make so much in the Origin of the artificialnatural selection analogy. Plus the rationalist philosopher William Whewell (1837, 1840, whose argument that the best science shows a "consilience of inductions" -different areas of science brought together under one causal hypothesis -is precisely the argument of the second half of the Origin.…”