A book on the history of biology

Hello, /lit/ Lainons. For about 5 years now I had the desire to write about the history of biology. My mother had a very old children's book on the subject and it was a big part of why I decided to become a biologist myself. The reality of working in a lab of course turned out to be completely different, and even though I learned to love it for what it was, my initial interest never went away. I tried many avenues to realise this project, I was not really picky with implementation. Maybe I could weite a course or at least a few lectures in a course at my university? The department of natural sciences sent me to the history department and the history department, after roping me into some project about the local history of the university never went anywhere. Then I decided to make it a podcast since I'm a huge fan of those. 2 problems though. I'm an ESL with a pretty thick accent and I would have to do this in English because the subject is already extremely niche so it needs to be available to as many people as possible. I bought a cheap mic and... About 1.5 years later I finally opened audacity and started recording sessions to familiarise myself with the tools and started actually writing the script. Half a year later in a 48h frenzy I finally recorded and posted it just to be done with it. A month later I posted a second episode with much improved quality as I saw it... Now it's been a few months, my laptop is dying at the moment so recording new stuff is a bit tricky and life stuff keeps interfering. I'm still reading and making notes when I can, but the subject lay dormant. The original idea was to create this podcast as a beta version and then rework all the notes and scripts into a (audio)book and/or remake the podcast with the experience and extra context that I would have at the end of the project. It will probably take years at this rate, but I'm certain I'll never abandon it fully. The last half of a year was the most progress I made in years, so I'm a bit optimistic. In attached files is essentially all that I have to show for my efforts at this moment apart from some extra notes and stuff in my head. I also have a list of references for the 2nd ep, if nothing else this should be useful if you are into this subject as there's not really that much written on it and it's not easy to find: Books: Morange, M. (2021) "A history of biology" Leroy, A.M. (2014) "The lagoon : how Aristotle invented science" Serafini, A. (2001) "The Epic History of Biology" Mayr, E. (1982) "The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance" Nordenskiöld, E. (1928) "The History of Biology: A Survey" Asimov, I. (1964) "A short history of biology" Tipton, J.A. (2018) "Philosophical Biology in Aristotle’s Parts of Animals" Aristotle, (ap. 350 BC) "On the Parts of Animals", Translation by William Ogle Barnes, J. (2000) "Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction" Barnes, J. (1995) "The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle" Natali, C. (2013) "Aristotle: His Life and School" Barnes, J. (2000) "Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction" Barnes, J. (1995) "The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle"

OP here I realised that I just kind of dumped it all here without some basic explanation as to why. Here goes: All criticism and feedback will be much appreciated. If you have a similar project in mind but you are only getting started, feel free to ask questions, I'll try to educate myself and then explain it to you.

Not to sh!ll but I've heard the Zettelkasten method is one of the best ways to order information in order to publish. Basically you peruse your favorite books, record some of the most relevant content (with citation, page number, whatever) and interesting links to other books in some software like org-roam, and you have most of your book laid out for you. For this I recommend Sönke Ahrens' How to take smart notes.

>>9040 I usually just have my phone at hand while reading to type some thoughts in my private 1 person chat where I save stuff and also check references and look into things if I need to. Ses to be working pretty well as the podcast format requires I put some of my personality in so genuine first time reactions to compare to my thoughts when I finish the research and go over them are a good source for creating a contrast and a logical throughline for the episode. I've heard of it before and will see is something like that. I tried Evernote In high school but it wasn't really useful back then so maybe I'll try that.

>>9041 Well the Zettelkasten works a bit like that, only you have several branching trains of thought, so maybe a new idea can fit in an existing branch, maybe it can branch off at some arbitrary point, and so on. If I understand correctly, it does imprint one's personality by working that way. I haven't really used it seriously. If you use a phone there are some free apps that are better than evernote for that, like orgzly and zettel notes.

>>9042 I downloaded zettel notes. Will see if it's any help. I mostly write inconsistently at the notetaking stage because the method of actually making comprehensive notes like I'm writing for an exam didn't really fit the style. Consistently sitting down and putting words into the text file is important, but after the notetaking process is done. Before then I do it only if it's something very important or I'm feeling a rush of inspiration to go on a tangent. I'm not the kind of guy who thinks that I can have some amazing ideas that are absolutely must be written down in detail for future reference or else they will be lost to time. I like to think that I improve myself with time and so the wild idea that seemed genius a month ago can be seen as just so so or even completely unusable because I learned new information that negated the whole premise. I try to not be married to my reoccurring ideas too much. I do have pet theories and a worldview, but I feel like they can develop naturally without me having my thoughts in the matter circa April 20th of 2020 readily available or those thoughts being rewritten regularly for 3 years. The already written text with a big flaw can be an unnecessary roadblock. Instead of constantly reworking it I try to view it as an exercise draft and just write it again from scratch with minimal borrowing. If the flaw is in pacing or the style I'll rework it. If the flaw is in the substance, better to rewrite it. At least that's how I view it at this moment. I'm under no pressure since nobody I know of so far is really interested in the topic let alone my contributions to it, even authors of several serious books on the subject that I read admit that they wrote them because their students or colleagues harassed them for years since it's such an important thing yet there is so little written on it. So it's a blessing and a curse since I would appreciate at least like 3 people who would actually take time to read or listen and give feedback but at the same time I try not to let it get to my head and distract me from the fact that this is a vanity project at this point and I shouldn't prioritise it over my responsibilities. Oh well, I certainly feel better that I at least started and haven't given up. The pressure of not producing episodes faster is less than the weight of not making anything for years despite planning and paying for some books and equipment.

>>9044 I would be interested in your work, and would be happy to read or listen and give feedback. I'm an ESL too so I don't mind a thick accent. Knowledge compounds, and a seemingly inoccuous idea can later surprise us by giving way to a great idea. Likewise an apparently great insight can end up being irrelevant and end up forgotten. In both cases it's good to keep notes because we never know. I wouldn't be so quick to discard faulty ideas from the past, as they (a) are part of our history in getting to develop our understanding, and (b) are good to keep around to refute with our new knowledge, or to shed light or support new knowledge that may turn our beliefs again in the future. It allows us to keep a conversation with ourselves as we develop our understanding. I think the nice thing about the zettelkasten is that the thoughts are not tightly bound to one another, as in a monolithic document, and you can reuse them and keep the same basic structure without much rewriting, which is in a way your thought process with amendments here and there. We forget a great deal of what we've thought in the past, we lose track of many little things that supported our thinking and at one point seemed so insightful or relevant. Ultimately, the purpose of the system I mentioned is to support the writing process and allow you to develop your publish-able material over time.

Thanks you for your interest. Here's a link to my channel https://youtube.com/@TheHistoryofBiology The first episode is noticeably worse than the second so I would recommend reading it in the document attached the the OP if it gets too annoying or keeping the subtitles on. The second one should be better. I'm much more relaxed and am enjoying the process of recording. Maybe a bit too much though.

>>9046 I listened to one of them and they are pretty fine. The accent is not that bad. I have a coulle suggestions. When you add a side note, in audio the listener doesn't have the visual cues to remember they are reading a digression, like a footnote in a book. I would instead integrate the sidenote in the main flow of the narration, or leave it out altogether if it's not very relevant, interesting as it may be. I also suggest you add some pictures, it's not essential but it would be nice. Because I also have plans to write about my studies, this thread inspired me to look again into the topic of notetaking, specifically, reading Ahrens' book I mentioned in >>9040. I suggest you give it a read too, only the first section, to see if it convinces you, and because it has some good tips on writing a book or article like you want. I'll listen to the other episode and maybe I can give some more feedback later.

>>9054 Thanks for the feedback. Are you familiar with other narrative podcasts? My favourites are the history ones, like Hardcore history or the History of Rome and Revolutions. Long sidenotes on certain specific topics or digressions into discussion of some general phenomena is par for the course in these so I kinda do the same in the greatest form of flattery. It helps that that is how I usually talk and think. Kinda like the metabolic pathways in the pic, the thought goes into a digression and then circles back to the main throughline of the episode. Nevertheless, I'll take it into account. I really should do some slides for the YouTube version but I usually listen to podcasts while at work or home playing games, cooking, cleaning and so on so it's intended to be comfortable with audio only. Essentially I'm making a podcast that I really wanted to be a fan of myself so my target audience is me. Probably not the best way to go about it, but for now it is. I'm reading the book, so far it's interesting but nothing new I could integrate into the workflow. I'm glad that I could encourage you to pursue your project with my humble endeavour. I'll be glad to look at it when you feel comfortable sharing. I'll be looking forward to the feedback on ep 2

>>9055 Yes I 'm a fan of the Chinese History Podcast by Laszlo Montgomery, and Thersites the Historian. The second one is a bit dry, so I usually get lost about halfway, but his episodes about byzantine emperors are good. Non history related, and also not a podcast, is the bright side of mathematics in youtube, I only mention it because it is spoken by a german, who has a very similar accent lol. I mean place pictures just as decoration, not as an integral part of the exposition, of course keep them relevant, if you mention Aristotle's school put a picture of that. Oh yeah I started with ep2 because of your warning btw.

>>9056 Yeah, CHP is good, I've got to get to it at some point though it's kinda hard to get into Chinese and Japanese history before the 19th century for me for some reason. >>9056 Thersites the Historian's Content is more of a lecture series the way I see it and he calls them that too. I'll be the fers to admit that I'm not really a fan of Podcasts in subject X that spend 14 minutes of the podcast on their personal life updates and then kinda read some articles on the web on X without any preparation, tell some anecdotes from their life that are tangentialy related and then tell how many other podcasts and projects they are involved with for 5 minutes. At the same time I'm not exactly convinced with Mike Duncan's approach of being as professional as possible he expressed some time ago, though he seems to have let up on it himself. If you make an independent podcast that is a series that follows some throughline you have to inject some personality and establish some general idea with callbacks and previous episodes strengthening current ones and the current ones setting up the new ones. Well, that's just general philosophy, after a couple rewrites the script can become something completely different just to sound coherent. I usually discover the general theme about half way through writing it.

Hello. OP here. I noticed there were some extra views and watchtime that corresponds with this thread. I appreciate you taking your time to listen, If only for a little bit. It is a dream project so seeing it get to someone is very gratifying. I really should get more out but life stuff happens and I need to take care of myself and my loved ones first. Luckily for me no one is hurt by the lack of new episodes so no pressure there apart from personal feelings of failing to materialize my aspirations. Finished another book and in the middle of another one. They are significantly farther than Theophrastus or Galen, but it seems that's inevitable. I initially wanted to read as I went so my reactions to the progression would be timely but that doesn't really work because then I would need to read only the 1st hand sources and analyse it myself which won't really produce much of any value due to the scope of the project and my own limited knowledge of the historiographic profession. Most works on the topic have a perspective pertaining to the time when they were written so it would inevitably color my understanding anyway. You can't really read about Aristotle and not see authors trying to compare and contrast with Darwin, Garvey or someone else. Not nessesarily a bad thing, just something I have to adjust for I suppose. Hopefully I'll be able to finish some scripts and record at least 2 episodes till the end of year. That seems like an easy enough goal ATM. If I can do more, that would be great too.

Sup, how's it going? Stuff's kinda slow on lainchan, so I figured I'll do a little update on what's I've been up to. I'm suddenly (for me too) changing jobs and there's a lot of family stuff happening so I've been a bit busy. The good news is that it seems I'll get a few days in the interrum between the jobs so I can spend some time in getting further with the project. The laptop kinda works now, though it's not in the best shape. Well, hopefully the plan of doing at least 2 ep this year will work out. I now realise that the 3rd episode will probably be very different from ep 2 which itself was very different from ep 1 in many ways. I'm thinking about rerecording the first episode so it sounds better. Have a feeling a lot of people can't tolerate it so they drop before doing the second one. By the way, how's that stuff you wanted to work on, >>9054 lainon?

>>9103 Hey I was wondering about you. I'm glad you're still at it, despite what life may throw your way. I've been neglecting listening to that other episode, even though I promised myelf I'd keep up with it. Expect my comments in the future... >By the way, how's that stuff you wanted to work on Not good. I kind of burned out before even starting. Well, I finished Ahrens' book, which gave me a bit to process, but I also got sidetracked with different books until I ended up on a more sociological side, while my focus is more ecological. I also have a fat stack of books to consult, and ranging a wide array of topics too! including physics, chemistry, economics, and history. I'm never going to finish, especially since every trip to zlib gives me a stack of new titles. But just today I got back on track, hopefully I'll stay focused enough to make some progress before I end up studying tibetan grammar or something.

>>9106 It's ok, lainon, don't feel obligated to finish the ep. The last thing I want is for listening to my voice rambling about the stuff I love to turn into some sort of torture. If I wanted to do that I would just Forse all of the people I know to go through that. I think the issue you have is that you are too focused on notetaking. I personally don't really believe in the muse and all of that nonsense, but the main point from the War of Art book about treating the job with respect and just showing up and writing for about 4h (or as much as you can afford if you have a job) a day every day instead of waiting for the flash of inspiration. By waiting for the flash I made about 2000 words in 6 months. By the method of just sitting down and writing/researching on the fly I finished the script in about 2 weeks tops. Don't confuse this with a hobby, it's a real job you do, just that you don't get paid for it in money. Treat it that way, and results will occur. At least that's the way I see it. Obviously I've been neglecting my share lately, but that is mostly because I have a real job. On the issue of books what I found is that for research purposes it is completely fine to just read one or two chapters that are involved in what you are looking for and move on. Most academic books are written specifically that way with page references to previous and later chapters within the chapter and it being otherwise self contained and so you can get what you need relatively quickly. Trust me, getting through every book cover to cover is just not a good way to do research, you will get distracted with other stuff. Keep your eyes on the prize. Obviously nothing Wrong with just reading the whole thing for personal enjoyment and future reference, but I treat that and reading for the purpose of research as two different things. Cheers

Hey. OP here again. My new job turned out to be much more demanding (longer commute and constantly staying overtime) than the previous one despite paying essentially the same ammount. Well, that was to be expected since I chose it precisely because it was a freshly opened bioreactor so I wanted to seize on this unique opportunity to learn how that goes. Needless to say, it's a fuarrrking struggle where nothing is optimised at best and not designed to be usable at worst while the commercial department constantly requests samples to present to their potential customers or batches to serve at corporate parties to further interest. "Lucky" for me I got sick with some kind of stomach flu so I got a few days off. Despite high temperature, not eating and sleeping 16h a day it's Ben a nice change of pace. Once I got better I even got around to assembling a bedside table that's been collecting dust for weeks at that point. Unfortunately, none of this is helping me with notetaking, script writing, voice recording and audio editing processes. Around the start of September would be 1 year since I started to actually work on the project so I suppose I'll try to get to some punctuation point by that date. Overall, Things are ok since I made plenty of progress personally but the fact that the project is stagnating is starting to be enough of an issue to switch my priorities around starting today.

OP here Still alive Still working on this when I get the chance. A lot of new stuff That I learnt that made me reconsider rushing new episodes. Not that many people listened to them so I don't feel like I'm disappointing anyone but myself and I'm ok with postponing it a bit more to make it a little better. In light of the recent Plagiarism discourse in YouTube history circles and other places I've been thinking a lot and looking through what I wrote just in case. I have experience with writing articles for journals in the STEM field but obviously the approaches in historic writing are different and there seems to be some extra conventions that apply if you do history videos. I'm not planning to do videos RN but it's still something to consider. As a fan of historical content I must say that I did watch a lot of content that turned out to be questionable and opinionated at best. I relied heavily on the book Morange, M. (2021) "A history of biology" because it is the best recent work on the subject that I was able to find and judging by what the author writes he wasn't able to find anything good that came out after The Growth of Biological Thought in 1982. I would appreciate if you share any thoughts that you have on the subject and maybe even how it relates to my project. PS I actually found a 2ep history of biology podcast by someone else. I don't have the link on me right now, but will post it if I find it again.

Op here Guess what? I just left my job today and I don't think I want to get a new one at least till the middle of June Which means I can unfreeze this project I'll rest for a week or so and then get to it. Hopefully I learned a thing or two during the year I didn't produce any new stuff. Also I found this video and it made me have a Joker moment because it does everything I deliberately avoided doing almost like it's a parody but it's not https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax0yjzbSBa4

Op here Got lost in the sauce

I've always wanted to teach a class on the history of biological thought. I think understanding how theories were developed how the discipline itself has evolved are a sorely missed subject in modern biological teaching. Understanding what biologists used to think gives a more total perspective and can give insight into new ideas and theories.

>>10941 OP here That's interesting. do you have all the sources you need for that? I can share mine since there's much more that I covered up to this point Also Today I'm rerecording my first episode. I don't really want to rewrite the script but after 2 years I might need to add some adjustments based on my new knowledge. It's mostly an exercise in the process of recording and editing since it's been ages since I've done that Plus to keep the dream alive Hopefully I will devote more time to this soon Life has been pretty hectic for a while so I couldn't afford to do that

Wonderful narrative history of the first ichthyologist(s)

>>11175 Wow! Thanks lainon. I greatly appreciate you sharing this with me. In the meantime I'm still chipping away at the project. The recording bit is on a bit of a back burner since it's too hot and the AC is blasting 24/7 but I'm reading. Granted, I've been kinda consumed by the Dominic Sandbrook's series on the British History of the post second world war period but I'm also reading up on historiagraphy. Who would've guessed that bit having a historical education my history writing skills need some more polish, eh?

OP here By the way I kinda... Somehow managed to establish a blog devoted to this project in a discord server?? Not sure how that happened but it's true Feel free to drop by if you want. There's actually a lot of different blogs there that might be of interest https://discord.gg/mumi

>>8995 Growth and Form by D'arcy Thompson. I'm powering through it, 300 pages in so far. It's like gnawing at the roots of the science itself

>>11567 I've heard of it before. Definitely seems interesting but a bit too early for me to tackle it just yet. Gotta get more out of the 19th century.