Erich Wasmann, SJ, was born in 1859, in Tyrol, Austria, the same year Charles Darwin published his seminal work, “On the Origin of Species.” Wasmann is renowned for his efforts to reconcile the Catholic faith with Darwin’s theory of evolution, advocating the idea that the two were compatible. In 1883, Wasmann was asked to contribute articles on eusocial insects to the Jesuit periodical “Stimmen aus Maria Laach,” later called “Stimmen der Zeit”. In 1884, he began studying ants, both in their natural habitat and by constructing artificial ant colonies. Over his lifetime (he died in 1931), Wasma ..read more

St. George Mivart (30 November 1827 – 1 April 1900) was a prominent zoologist and initially a strong proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. However, in 1871, he published “The Genesis of Species”, in which he acknowledged the reality of evolution as a historical fact but criticized natural selection as the sole mechanism driving evolutionary processes. Mivart argued that natural selection had limitations and that other biological factors must be considered in association with it. Charles Darwin found Mivart’s critique significant enough to respond to it in detail in the sixth edition of ..read more

Today’s Doodle is dedicated to an amazing woman: Justine Siegemund (1636-1705), a midwife and author who had a truly scientific outlook and was a deeply pious Lutheran Christian. She is best known for her influential textbook on midwifery, “Die Kgl. Preußische und Churfürstl. Brandenburgische Hof-Wehe-Mutter” (The Royal Prussian and Electoral Brandenburg Court Midwife), which was first published in 1690 and went through many editions in the following centuries. Siegemund began practicing midwifery in the early 1660s and quickly gained a reputation as a skilled and compassionate practitioner. S ..read more

The Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), the national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish Community of Belgium, has found in its archives an interview with Georges Lemaître that was thought to be lost. The cosmologist from Leuven was the founder of the big bang theory in the 1920s and 1930s. He was interviewed about it in 1964, but until recently it was thought that only a short excerpt had been preserved. Now the entire 20-minute interview has been found and published in the original French with Flemish subtitles. A transcript in English has now been published by the Jo ..read more

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware passed away on 24 August 2022. He was a renowned and popular Orthodox Christian theologian of recent decades, and was considered the most prolific and proficient communicator of patristic theology and Orthodox spirituality in our generation. From his insights on the integration of Science and Faith: “Faith in God, then, is not at all the same as the kind of logical certainty that we attain in Euclidean geometry. God is not the conclusion to a process of reasoning, the solution to a mathematical problem. To believe in God is not to accept the possibility of his exi ..read more

Charles Townes (1915-2025), Physicist and Nobel Prize Winner Charles Hard Townes (28 July 1915 – 27 June 2015) was most noted for research that led to the development of the laser, but his work spanned many disciplines, from physics, space exploration, and astronomy. He proved that black holes exist and shape the Milky Way and other galaxies. In 1964, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolay G. Basov for developing the maser-laser principle. His younger colleague Reinhard Genzel (and also a Nobel Prize winner) at the University of California in Berkeley said ..read more

Unfolding the Universe: The first pictures from the James Webb Telescope Yesterday, on 12 July 2022, the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were released These images provide us with the deepest and sharpest view of our cosmos to date, showing thousands of galaxies in clarity like never before. James Webb first image – Galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 / Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI This image covers a patch of the sky “roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone standing on earth”, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said. “We are looking back at more than ..read more

“Princess Therese of Bavaria was a multi-talented, clever and extremely courageous woman who, against much opposition and with incredible energy, followed her thirst for knowledge and studied the diversity of nature and indigenous people on her numerous travels.” – Gudrun Kadereit, Princess Therese von Bayern Chair of Systematics, Biodiversity, and Evolution of Plants. Princess Therese of Bavaria Therese von Bayern (1850-1926) was a Bavarian princess, ethnologist, zoologist, botanist, travel writer, and advocate for the education of women. She was courageous and tough. An adventurer traveling ..read more

This blog post accompanies a poster I will present at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Catholic Scientists taking place at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. Starting in the late 18th century, women were opening carrier paths in many disciplines. This presentation will focus on 12 female Catholic scientists that may serve as role models that can guide us to integrate Science and our Catholic faith into our own lives to become one of the “saints next doors”, as Pope Francis encouraged us recently. 12 Women from the late 18th to the end of the 20 centu ..read more

Agnes Mary Clerke Agnes Mary Clerke (1842 – 1907) was an astronomer and science educator. She was born in Skibbereen, Ireland. Together with her sister Ellen, she received an exceptional level of knowledge, through the Ursuline nuns, and her parents. By the age of eleven she had read Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy. When she was fifteen years old, she began to write her own history of astronomy. Agnes’s father owned a 4-inch telescope and she grew up regularly observing Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons. When she was 19, the family moved to Dublin. At age 25 she went, with her sister Ellen ..read more