Maps, maps, maps. I love ‘em! Always have, since I was a kid -- A.E. Van Vogt notwithstanding (couldn't help the geeky reference to “Null-A” novels that stress the general semantics notion that “the map is not the territory”).

A copy of this with LIVE LINKS to the maps is cross-posted HERE.

The various measuring authorities in the government (USDA’s ERS, the Census Bureau, the Statistical Abstract, etc.) have been working the last few years to redefine urban and rural. More on that later, but for the time being, the point is that they’ve introduced these things called “core-based” units. All the good measurements are done on a county-by-county basis, so the units are counties where there’s a “metropolitan” core population of at least 50,000. Or a “micropolitan” core of 10,000. From that, they create “combined statistical areas” that consist of a “core” and its feeder areas, tied to it by easy commuting routes to work, markets, etc. The result is a map that looks like this:

The purples are the combined statistical areas (CSAs). These are the cities and large towns it’s easy to call urban, and the surrounding counties that may look rural, but are economically tied to these centers. There are also cities and towns outside the CSAs. In Minnesota, for example, Duluth and Mankato (pop.s around 85,000 and 45,000, respectively) are not parts of CSAs. So it’s going to take some thinking to sort this all out.

But in the meantime, there are more colorful maps to look at! The fact that some of them contradict each other only adds to the fun!

This one, produced by the University of Illinois Regional Economics and Public Policy Group (REAP), suggests that over 300 rural counties are “more prosperous” than the national average. That’s interesting, and warrants a close look at the article backing up the map.

This next one, from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, claims “Rural areas across the country generally have seen more growth in employment than have cities.” But the map tells a different story. The “Growth” they’re talking about is actually a slightly smaller DECLINE in rural employment relative to urban employment in some areas. Hardly the happy news advertised in the headline. Especially since there are FEWER JOBS in rural areas, so you’d expect less decline. Or am I missing something?

And here’s one last map for today, to dispel any lingering doubts about how peachy the economy looks in the country. The New York Times built this map showing the increase in people receiving Food Stamps in each U.S. county. 14.6% of rural residents use Food Stamps (vs. 10.8% of urban folks). From 2007 to 2009, the number of people using Food Stamps rose by about 30%, although in many places, only half of those who qualify are actually getting Food Stamps. The cool thing about the NYT map is that you can drag your cursor over it, and the statistics for each county will pop up. It’s SCARY. Good job, NYT.

The Freethinker

I am laughing my ass off at people who still try to defend these Catholic creeps (http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/22/we-did-not-know-that.html -- see comments), and I'm also quite happy that boing-boing led me to The Freethinker (http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/05/21/%E2%80%98we-did-not-know-that-child-abuse-was-a-crime%E2%80%99-says-retired-catholic-archbishop/), started in 1881 by Charles Bradlaugh's successor in the NSS, GW Foote. I wasn't aware it was still in print!

Foote wasn't the biggest fan of Bradlaugh, but I suspect that as he became an insider and later a leader of the National Secular Society (Bradlaugh nominated Foote to be his successor, and he served as President for 25 years), Foote came to appreciate the difficulty of the position. He always retained his own character, though, and never became a clone of Bradlaugh. This is why the Freethinker survuved to the present, and the National Reformer dwindled and disappeared after Bradlaugh's death.

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was the grandfather of Charles Darwin. Erasmus was a fulltime physician who traveled an average of 10,000 miles a year to visit patients. He was a founder of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and a prolific inventor. Among his designs were a canal lift, a speaking machine, a pantograph handwriting copier, the steering system used by modern automobiles, a steam turbine, a hydrogen/oxygen rocket engine, and a multi-mirror telescope. Erasmus was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and a supporter of American independence.

Erasmus Darwin translated Linnaeus from Latin to English, inventing dozens of botanical terms in the process. His two long poems, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of Plants (combined as The Botanic Garden) introduced mainstream readers to the sciences, especially plant biology, with hundreds of pages of essays and notes explaining the concepts in Darwin’s verse. Erasmus used the poems to comment on the events of the day, making no secret of his support for abolition of slavery and the French Revolution.

Zoonomia was Erasmus Darwin’s major scientific publication and the leading medical/biological book of its day. Published in London in 1796, Zoonomia was reprinted the same year in New York, by “T. & J. Swords, printers to the Faculty of physic of Columbia College,” and again the following year by Thomas Dobson of Philadelphia. A “second edition” was published in 1803 by “Thomas and Andrews” of Boston. By 1818, a “Fourth American Edition” was printed in Philadelphia, by Edward Earle. The continued popularity of Zoonomia over more than two decades suggests a wide readership outside of medical schools. The 1815 “Catalog of the Library of the United States” lists Zoonomia, The Botanic Garden, and Erasmus’ posthumous poem, The Temple of Nature.

Like his grandson, Erasmus Darwin wrote about evolution through natural selection. Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from…the parent…to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.

Zoonomia was immensely successful. In addition to American and Irish editions, it was translated into German, Italian, French and Portuguese. The European Magazine said Zoonomia “bids fair to do for Medicine what Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia has done for Natural Philosophy.” The Vatican responded to Darwin’s ideas by placing Zoonomia on its Index of banned books. The Temple of Nature was reviled by the Anti-Jacobin Review for its “total denial of any interference of a deity,” while the Gentleman’s Magazine called the poem “glaringly atheistical.” Even Erasmus one-time friend, Unitarian Joseph Priestley, said “if there be any such thing as atheism, this is certainly it.” Priestley was living in Pennsylvania by this time, and may have seen the poem in T. & J. Swords’ 1804 American edition.

Erasmus Darwin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1793. His fame in the new United States may be partly due to his friendship with Franklin and sympathy for revolutionary struggles in America and France. And it may be partly due to Zoonomia, which was read widely in the nation’s new medical colleges. But Erasmus popularity among regular people may also spring from his straightforward, secular presentation of evolutionary ideas, and his skepticism of authority. Erasmus warned against unreasoning belief. “In regard to religious matters,” he said, “there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of people from their infancy; which prevents their inquiry: credulity is made an indispensable virtue; to inquire or exert their reason in religious matters is denounced as sinful; and…is punished with more severe penances than moral crimes.”

This post based on Desmond King-Hele's Erasmus Darwin, A Life of Unequalled Achievement (London: Giles de la Mare, 1999), and editions of Darwin's books available on google books.

This is the Hall of Science in New York, begun by Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, based on an idea for secular meeting-places pioneered by Robert Owen in Britain. The building housed a small publishing operation and a lecture hall. In addition to Owen and Wright, many guests spoke to New York secular crowds here, including Dr. Charles Knowlton. In this sense, Knowlton is more than the author of a pamphlet used by British secularists to challenge censorship and blasphemy laws. He's part of a similar tradition of secularist organization that existed on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century.

Erasmus Darwins in 19th century Massachusetts

When I was doing research in Ashfield (on Dr. Charles Knowlton), I transcribed the Vital Records of the town onto 3x5 note-cards. It struck me as odd, how many people were given the name Darwin, especially since the birth records end at 1849. In all, six children were named “Darwin” or “Erasmus Darwin” between 1803 and 1847. Erasmus Darwin was Charles Darwin’s grandfather. He lived from 1730-1802, and was a prominent poet, inventor, friend of Benjamin Franklin, and proponent of evolution by natural selection.

That’s right. Erasmus Darwin came up with the idea that all life on earth was descended from a single microscopic ancestor in 1770. In 1796, he published the first volume of his Zoonomia, which was heralded as the Principia of the medical profession, and discusses his ideas on evolution. And in 1803, Darwin’s posthumous poem The Temple of Nature elaborated his position even more explicitly. Darwin also founded Birmingham’s Lunar Society, translated Linnaeus, and was a member of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, and the American Philosophical Society. When his grandson Charles published On the Origin of Species, his critics thought they’d be able to silence him by quoting verbatim from tracts written against his grandfather’s theories.

Erasmus Darwin never visited America, and although he was a political radical and a supporter of American independence (and critic of the Pitt government’s repressions in the 1790s), I’m surprised that he was so well-known in a remote western-Massachusetts hill-town like Ashfield. Looking a little farther, I’ve found there are sixty-three towns in Massachusetts where children were apparently named after Darwin before 1849! I also found 96 towns where there is no record of a child named “Erasmus” or “Darwin” in the Vital Records. (these two groups represent all the towns whose records I was able to find online)

It’s possible that a few of the children named “Erasmus” may have been named for the fifteenth-century humanist, or for remote family members (close ones would have showed up in the records I was searching). But I think most of them were named for the scientist, especially because in most cases they’re actually named “Erasmus Darwin.” Similarly, there is no record of “Darwin” being a common family name in these Massachusetts towns, and Charles Darwin’s only significant publication before 1849 was his The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, published in 5 parts, 1838-1843.

In all, I found 112 children named “Erasmus,” “Erasmus Darwin,” “Darwin,” or, in a couple of cases, “Erastus Darwin.” But this initial search of Vital Record books available online missed 187 towns, whose records are not yet available electronically. So the odds are high that there are many more Erasmus Darwins I haven’t yet discovered!

As bizarre as the mere fact of all these young Darwins in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts towns, is where the towns were. If people were going to be naming their children after a British scientist (obscure or famous), you’d expect them to live in cities, close to institutions of higher learning like Harvard, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be dead wrong.

Most of the people naming their children after Darwin lived in central or western Massachusetts. I found most of them in Worcester, Hampshire, and Franklin Counties. Though they weren’t completely absent from the Boston area, there were more towns close to the coast without a Darwin than with one. The towns marked in green on the map have at least one “Darwin.” Several have more than one. Two towns, Ashfield and Leominster, have six.


I’ve started looking into the histories of these towns, to see who these “Darwins” were. And, perhaps more importantly, who their parents were. In looking at the first dozen or so, it seems that some of them were educated people, ministers or doctors. Others were farmers, shoemakers, and tavern-keepers. The whole thing suggests that people in some of the remotest parts of Massachusetts were thinking about issues and reading books I would never have expected them to be so interested in. It’s a whole different picture of the intellectual life of regular people in the early 19th century than you get in the “standard” texts!

I’m going to try to write little sketches of the lives of some of these people, because I think they’ll turn up interesting insights. Maybe this’ll turn into something, if I can pull together enough of them and they turn up some of the surprises that seem to be lurking in this material…

Happy Easter!

Got a post from the "250,000 Atheists" guy on Facebook this morning. He's a little bummed there are only 3093 members of his group. But who knows how many people are lurking, afraid to put their names down.

His post cheered me up. This holiday always depresses me. Maybe it's the unremitting news coverage of the middle east (oh, dear! when will there be peace in Jerusalem?!). Maybe it's the universal coverage of the Nazi Pope walking the stations of the cross. Anyway, it bugs me, and this Facebook post about the "zombie and the giant bunny" (I visualized Frank from Donnie Darko) cheered me up. So I sent him a little story to cheer him up:

A few days ago, I was at a high school career fair. I had a chat with another "presenter" at a nearby booth. The guy was a distinguished old dude in a nice suit, standing in front of his display, an open, satin-lined, stainless steel casket. I don't know if he was going to offer kids a chance to test the thing out, or just tell them how cool it is, being a funeral director. I think the idea is a little odd, especially when you look at the whole embalming process. It replaces the bodily fluids with a 37% formaldehyde solution. Not at all green, to put it mildly.

I asked this gentleman, what's the split between embalming and cremation these days? He said, the percentage of cremations is always highest in towns with a college or university. I asked, "do you mean that embalming correlates with less educated, more old-time-religion-y places?" He said he didn't know, but last year a couple of local Greek Orthodox people chose to be cremated, and their CHURCH WENT NUTS! In a moderate-sized New England town, WITH a college. So there you go. Still waiting for the last trump, and they've heard solid rumors it's right around the corner. So keep those corpses fresh!

Scraping off the Obama sticker!

A cap on executive compensation that doesn't cover the $18 billion they already STOLE from taxpayers? That's pathetic political posturing. Way to go, Team Obama. There's some change we can believe in. Two weeks in, the honeymoon is over. At least the Bushites were HONEST about their loyalty to the corporate overlords of America. Next time, I'm throwing away my vote on the green candidate rather than wasting it on the make-believe liberal.