Darwin’s Origin of Species took many years of compilations and it was even accelerated by Alfred R. Wallace paper on the same subject in 1858. Origin of Species was really groundbreaking, because Darwin not only proposed common ancestry – that was in the air since Humboldt and Lamarck, and “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” -, but he proposed also a process for the underlying mechanism of the diversity of species. His theory of evolution had 2 principles: common ancestry and natural selection. Natural selection can be described with 5 words: Variation, Inheritance, Selection, Time ..read more

Recently, in a talk to a small group of Catholic women scientists, I suggested we need to see events in the 17th century from the perspective of 17th century history and scientific knowledge. Indeed, from today’s perspective, it may seem completely antiquated not to know that the Earth is orbiting the Sun, and not vice versa. In the early 17th century, though, there were (at least) 4 models of our planetary system: the Ptolemaic system (geocentric), the Copernican system (heliocentric), the Tychonic system (geo-heliocentric), and the Keplerian system (heliocentric, elliptic orbits) The Gali ..read more

I learned from my colleague Sinto Varghese that Giuseppe Moscati was not only a physician and a saint, but also a scientist and researcher. Sinto Varghese writes on ‘Church and Science’: you find him on X, formally Twitter: @ChurchNScience, and on FB https://www.facebook.com/CatholicsandScience. I am using his entry with permission. Giuseppe Moscati (25 July 1880 – 12 April 1927) was an Italian physician who made pioneering contributions to medicine in his time. He seamlessly integrated traditional clinical diagnostic methods, primarily reliant on physical examination, with the insights of ph ..read more

Pope Francis employs powerful words to articulate his concern regarding anthropogenic climate change. He calls for immediate action from those in positions of authority, within communities, nations, and the international community of states. Sharing these concerns, both as a Catholic and a scientist (albeit not a climate science expert), I am committed to more than worry and complaint. Consequently, I suggest approaching “Laudate Deum” (“Praise God”, LD) with the perspective of personal learning, to enhance our reverence for and care of Creation, and to take responsibility for our environment ..read more

We presented several women scientists in previous blog posts. This post will bring them all together. Following rules were applied: (1) they should have had an impact on science and/or science education at their time and (2) their lives were informed, transformed, and inspired by their Christian faith. I was looking for some kind of proof that their Christian faith – in whatever faith tradition, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox  – was important to their personal life (being the daughter of a pastor or coming from a Catholic country just wasn’t enough to be presented here).  Hil ..read more

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