One of the friends I’m visiting in Boston is Andrew Berry, who teaches evolutionary biology at Harvard. You may recall that Berry, whose other passion is mountaineering, placed a copy of WEIT atop Mount Darwin in California.
Berry has recently posted an account of his mountaineering homage to Charles Darwin: a combined climbing/backpacking expedition with another evolutionist. The team ascended Mounts Darwin, Wallace, and Lamarck in the Sierra Nevada. His account includes interesting information on how these mountains got their names (others in the range include Mounts Huxley, Spencer, and Mendel). Berry is unenthusiastic about the suggestion (seriously) that another peak in the range be named Mount (Stephen Jay) Gould; he favors Mount [R. A.] Fisher instead.
Photos from the 2009 expedition:
I tend to favor a vote for Mount Fisher as well, but that just my bias as someone who enjoys statistics as well as the biological sciences.
OK, Andrew Berry needs to go to the Canadian Rockies – there is a Mount Fisher there, & very daunting it looks!
http://www.peakfinder.com/peakfinder.ASP?PeakName=mount+fisher
The mtns at bottom R sorta remind me of an Easter Islander in repose.
If Mt. Spencer is named after Herbert Spencer perhaps it could be renamed after Gould. I see no reason to honor Spencer, a man that misused evolutionary theory to develop that hideous philosophy of Social Darwinism. Especially since the name of the philosophy is a misnomer that besmirches Charles Darwin and the theory of Natural Selection.
Fisher is more than deserving of the honor because of his role in establishing the modern synthesis AND continental drift. Here’s a story about R.A. Fisher told by Persi Diaconis in his beautiful monograph Group Representations in Probability and Statistics. (The relevance here is Fisher’s analysis of hypothesis testing using measurements on a sphere.) Diaconis’s story is about the proof of Wegener’s theory of continental drift, in which Fisher played an important role in the 1950s, and a really nasty academic dispute with geophysicist/Bayesian statistician Harold Jeffreys:
Fisher also wrote about why “intelligent design” arguments are absurd given the fact of evolution”
Have you considered publishing a limited edition stone or ceramic, possibly cuneiform version of the text to intrigue and enlighten the future descendents of the Morlocks and Eloi?
Joking only to a point. Posterity aside, it would be nice for humanity to have something to counter 31st-century holy books. It would also be easier for future archaeologists to read than the failing bits of the last DRM server of the information age 🙂
I can’t comment on SummitPost, so I’ll say it here: Well done, Dr. Berry! A very entertaining report on your trip to the Evolution Range. Wow, do I want to go!
Mount Fisher sounds cool 😀
Would Mount Dawkins be improbable?
Is the focus on individuals who made great scientific contributions (Darwin, Wallace, Mendel) or on popularizers of science (Darwin and Wallace again, along with Huxley and Spencer)? If the former, then Modern Synthesis pioneers like Fisher and Wright are better candidates. If the latter, then Gould and Dawkins would be better.
Having hiked that region a couple of five-six-seven(?) times that is some gorgeous territory. I’m surprised they didn’t comment about the cold. I remember it being 20 or so in mid August in the morning during my 2004 trip. Evolution Lake and Darwin’s Bench are the coldest places I ever stayed, I don’t think it was ever above 30 in the morning. During the day it 70 plus, but when night falls, so do the temperatures.
Mount Hamilton?