Darwin and Design

This lecture covers Wells' The Time Machine and the final utopia, naturalistic and evolutionary model of the human condition and the Time Machine.

This lecture covers Huxley, the state of nature, the state of art, horticultural process, colonization process, Galton, eugenics and Yan Fu.

This lecture covers Turing and the Thinking Machine, von Neumann architecture, digital computers, the child machine, evolution and machine Learning, Weizenbaum, Eliza, and the rise of the Chatterbots.

This lecture covers dualism and personality in post-evolutionary fiction, the rise of modernism, the emergence of the "unconscious"/underground, Victorian degeneration theory and the Fin-desiecle cultural thought.

This lecture covers evolution and cybernetics, Wiener, the problem of control, evolution as phylogenetic learning, biological versus machine reproduction, sorcery versus science and an increasingly automated world.

This lecture covers Butler, technological autonomy, Watt, steam engines, Victorian railway system, infrastructure, Babbage, difference engine, machines, self-replication.

This lecture covers naturalism and utopia, Butler's Erewhon, eugenical thought, Victorian England, musical banks, Mid-Victorian religion and satire.

This lecture covers Darwin and the Fuegians, Neander valley discoveries, Huxley, man's place in nature, Lyell, the antiquity of man, the natural origins of culture, sexual selection, human characteristics, human evolution and paleoanthropology.

Natural selection; Alfred Wallace; The struggle for existence; Web of complex relations; Speciation; Divergence

Darwinian Synthesis; Unity of Type and Conditions of Existence; Instinct and Behavior; Ants - Swarm Behavior; Bees - Complex Nonteleological Construction; Geological Succession; Embryology; Ontogeny; Phylogeny

This lecture covers Darwin and the economy of the natural world, Gall, Galvani, overproduction, imperfect adaptation, Lyell, geologic time, faunal succession, fossils, science in the 19th Century, variation and selection.

This lecture covers Malthus and the Compound Mind, collective irrationality and the French Revolution and Darwin's voyage 1831-36.

This lecture covers Malthus and the Compound Interest World, worldometer, Condorcet, human mind, fixed laws of nature, population growth, instinct versus reason, struggle for existence, Malthus's theory of growth, variable rate compounding.

This lecture covers Adam Smith Wealth of Nations (1776), The idea of an Oeconomy, The division of labor, Specialization, Autonomy versus Intentionality, Self-Interest, Rise of towns.

This lecture covers William Paley, Natural theology, Intelligent design, Argument, Naturalization of the body, Anatomy in the history of art and medicine, William Harvey, Gray's anatomy, Cuvierian comparative anatomy, Great chain of Being.

This lecture covers Philo and the limits of analogy, self-organized matter, unnecessary complexity, the vegetative universe, parsimony in the natural world, the oeconomy of a world: four circumstances of evil, circumstances.

This lecture covers Hume's Dialogues (1752/1779) - natural vs. revealed religion and the three discussants - Demea, Cleanthes, Philo.

This lecture covers Voltaire and the Accidental World, Candide, Optimism, Conflict, War, Lisbon Earthquake, New World, Eldorado.

This lecture covers Genesis, Aristotle, and the emergence of world views, the Aristotelian concept of nature, The Four Aristotelian Causes.

This lecture covers Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll's non-Newtonian World of Nonsense, Alice Liddell, Rules, Identity, Metamorphosis in Alice in Wonderland, A Mad Tea Party.

This lectures covers Darwin, the concept of design, Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, the romantic image of nature, the persistence of time, memory and Frost.