Marzieh Ghiasi

At a painter’s doors in the Narenjestan-e Qavam (Shiraz, Iran)

November 24th, 2009 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The book, along with Marx’s The Communist Manifesto is the most important work of the 19th century. Like the other, Origin challenged both the scientific establishment and the social establishment, and as a result, generated a lot of controversy, which it continues to do so to this day.

Origin of Species must also be considered one of the most influential books of all time. I can’t think of any work that has so rapidly and in a such a way shifted the prevailing paradigm and changed humankind’s perception of the world and itself– so it’s no surprise that the book is said to have brought about a revolution in science, much like Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Unlike Copernicus, however, Darwin himself foresaw this and wrote in the last pages of Origin:

When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, or when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history. -Chapter XV, On the Origin of Species

In the words that follow, I explore the origins of Origin and pose that the revolution in fact started a year and some months earlier with the publication of the Linnean papers. I also examine the brilliant naturalist and elusive figure, “Mr. Wallace”, and his role in putting forward evolutionary theory.

The Linnean Papers
Darwin, Wallace & A Nascent Revolution

By Marzieh Ghiasi (Nov 2009)

n July 1st, 1858, in a special meeting of the Linnean Society, held in London, two brief papers describing natural selection as a mechanism of evolution were read. The Linnean papers, published later in August 20th as part of the society’s proceedings, were the start of a movement in science that became known as the Darwinian revolution. One essay was by Charles Darwin, an English naturalist whose name has become the cornerstone of evolutionary theory. The other essay was by Alfred Russel Wallace, an English naturalist whose name has become largely restricted to the annals of history. The traditional approach has been to set Darwin and Wallace as rivals in a fight for priority of publication, one which the majority of literature has argued Darwin won. The Linnean papers, however, can be examined as an outcome of a cooperative trajectory in which a common theory of evolution was developed by two vastly different individuals. This paper focuses on the association between Darwin and Wallace with respect to the Linnean papers, arguing that the interactions of the two naturalists offered them mutual benefits that would have been unlikely otherwise. As well, the interactions between the two men created a cohesion and unity critical in a field at its nascent stages.

Two Men Worlds Apart

Victorian Britain was highly class-conscious and its science was viewed as a domain of the upper class. Charles Darwin, born in 1809 into a prestigious and wealthy English family and educated in the University of Edinburgh and University of Cambridge, was an ideal representative of these values. Alfred Russel Wallace, conversely, was born in 1823 to a low income family and class relations played a tremendous role throughout his life.^[1] Although his father was a lawyer, he never practiced and the family had to learn to rely on self-sufficiency. Wallace never received formal schooling beyond the age of thirteen, when he was withdrawn and sent to an apprenticeship because his family no longer could pay for his education. By the time he was fourteen, he joined his brother as an apprentice land surveyor. However, Wallace was precocious and determined, and began to teach himself many subjects including taxonomy for which he had grown a great affinity.^[2] Unlike Darwin, who was well positioned for a life in pursuit of science, Wallace’s challenge was to break through rigid social barriers and prove himself as a scientist.

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Every year, for more than twenty years or so, the McGill Anatomy & Cell Biology Students Society has held an “anatomically correct” bake sale at the systemic human anatomy class. This year’s bake sale was pretty amazing and apparently in an hour managed to raise nearly two-thousand dollars for a charity for deaf students here in Montréal! I took a couple of (low-quality) cell-phone pictures. Yes the last one is legs and kind of NSFW.

Today is writer and scientist Carl Sagan’s 75^th birthday. Carl Sagan is remembered for his remarkable ability to take scientific knowledge and present it in an elegant and comprehensive way to the broader public. An ability that I’ve truly come to appreciate as I’ve become more involved with communicating science. But it’s not just limited to that. Carl Sagan’s approach, along with that a few of his contemporaries, was a vestige of the approach by the natural philosophers who pushed forward the scientific revolution. These communicators not only put science in comprehensible terms for the public, but by describing the fragments together, they provided an avenue for science itself to become consolidated. They were concerned with epistemology, They posed questions the nature of human and his place in the universe, and with every question they shifted our views about who we are. Finally, they were pioneers who scoped the skies with spectacles of imagination to see not just what is, but what may be.

From my post two years ago: I just wanted to share a quote from Carl Sagan that I found tremendously inspiring when I was younger. Pale Blue Dot, displayed below, is the infamous picture of Earth, 4 billion miles out in space, at the edge of the solar system, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, followed by Carl Sagan’s remarks on what this picture represents. I would like to share this because I find what Sagan presents to be both unsettling and moving on a fundamental level. Sometimes I find the existentialist parts of me, parts that desire to set the human definition and experience as encompassing all that is real and all that matters at odds with his perspective. At the same time however, I find myself awed by the profound truth in Sagan’s description of the entirety of humanity’s experiences on this planet.

I’ve found it quite hard to write for the past little while. Normally I find that when I don’t write for a couple of days, I get bent out of shape and it becomes harder to do so. But this has been rather a surprising development because I wrote regularly during the summer in Iran. Since returning, however, I feel uninspired despite being overwhelmed perhaps with thoughts and ideas. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that for whatever reason I am suffering from a bad case of writer’s block. After reading on the subject, I’ve decided to not force it though. It seems that, herbal remedies and all, the only reasonable antidote to this malaise is to let words and ideas find their way back into the mind naturally. While conducting my little investigation I found this interesting letter by Fyodor Dosteovsky to his brother Mikhail, discussing Dosteovsky’s experiences and toils writing. I figure if the gods themselves struggled, then there is hope for the rest of us yet.

One thing is a pity: he (Pissemsky) writes too fast. He writes much too fast, and much too much. A man should have more ambition, more respect for his talent and his craft, and more love for art. When one’s young, ideas come crowding incredibly into one’s head; but one should not capture each and all of them as it flies, and rush to give it forth. One should rather await the synthesis, and think more; wait till the many single details which make up an idea have gathered them-selves into a nucleus, into a large, imposing picture; then, and not till then, should one write them down. The colossal figures, created by the colossal writers, have often grown out of long, stubborn labour…

But I have vowed to myself that, however hard it may go with me, I’ll pull myself together, and in no circumstances will I work to order. Work done to order would oppress and blight me. I want each of my efforts to be incontrovertibly good. Just look at Pushkin and Gogol. Both wrote very little, yet both have deserved national memorials. Gogol now gets a thousand roubles a printed page, while Pushkin had, as you know well, as much as a ducat a line of verse. Both — but particularly Gogol — bought their fame at. the price of years of dire poverty…
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This year I’ve begun to venture into acrylics. I’m still trying to get used to the medium and learning how to manipulate the colors. But, I seriously love it. It’s so much fun to work to paint. This following is a 4″x6″ I completed today. I assure you though I am not a narcissist, I just use the most readily available subject.

Each river, a sea,
Each bodhi, a buddha had become.

*Image source unknown.

With the hustle and bustle of classes well underway, it’s become hard to find the time (and energy) to breath, let alone sit down and write something without highlighters in the other hand.

I returned from Iran almost a month and a half ago, after spending two months in the country. Of that time I spent about a month in Tehran; and in the rest I traveled southward and eastward from the capital towards Shiraz and Mashhad. Before, during and after my trip I was asked over and over, why now?… why after all this time?… and I didn’t have a good answer for it. I still don’t. But while there is some debate to be had about fate, there was a wheel was set in motion months before the events in Iran that led me to return to the country after all these years.

I went to Iran, and I came back and the only thing I could write was: “Back from Iran. I witnessed devastating courage and found a part of myself, I witnessed ancient beauty and and left a part of myself behind.” and no more. But today there are still so many images drifting in my mind, desperately seeking to be pinned down, written about, made sense of. Thousands of pictures, thousands of journal entries, thousands of news stories later… I am wondering, what do I tell?

Do I tell you about the changes in country I left ten years ago, or do I tell you I about the changes I witnessed while I was there? Do I talk about the antiquity that permeated every alley, or the immense highways the bridged the edges of the metropolis Tehran? Should I speak of my pilgrimages to the silent mausoleums of dead poets, or of my excursions to the loud streets of chanting heroes? What do I say about incongruities, about contradictions? How do I sum up faithless believers? How do I put beauty and ugliness in a sentence?

While in Tehran, I visited an exhibition in the Sa’adabad Palace Museum complex which showcased the travels of Issa and Abdullah Omidvar. The brothers, whose last name incidentally means “hopeful”, were two Iranian explorers who starting in 1954 traveled all over the globe for more than 7 years on motorcycle. When I was leaving Montréal I wrote that I wanted… hoped to see with eyes unclouded. What I saw was this motto of the hopefuls:

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/articles/20738

Diagnosis gone digital
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, October 5th, 2009

Almost every field has adopted digital technology, and medicine is no exception. However, the transformation of health informatics in the past decade has not simply been a change in tools of the trade, but a change in the very way knowledge is acquired and applied.

13th century Anatomical Illustration | Source

As a discipline that brings together health care and information science, health informatics is involved in setting up resources like search engines that doctors can use to retrieve clinical data. These tools can be grouped into two categories – information retrieval systems (IRS) and clinical decision support systems (CDSS).

Pierre Pluye, a physician and associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University, investigates these electronic resources. He explained how IRS provide a way to filter the staggering amount of available information down to only the most relevant.

“There are 19 million abstracts on Medline [an online biomedical database]. Physicians do not have time [to read every single one]… because basically you would have to read 24 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep updated,” said Pluye.

CDSS differ from IRS in that they provide patient-specific information. Clinicians can use calculator-type programs that look at a patient’s history to determine their likelihood of contracting diseases or experiencing medical complications.
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