Lunar Society
Article
Lunar Society is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 09, 2021 and November 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Erasmus Darwin founded the influential Lunar Society of scientists”; “The Lunar Society was very informal”. It most often appears alongside Aldous Huxley, Andrew Huxley, Charles Darwin.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 09, 2021
- Last seen: November 18, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Aldous Huxley (2 shared issues)
-
- Andrew Huxley (2 shared issues)
-
- Charles Darwin (2 shared issues)
-
- Erasmus Darwin (2 shared issues)
-
- Gavin Newsom (2 shared issues)
-
- Josiah Wedgwood (2 shared issues)
-
- Julian Huxley (2 shared issues)
-
- Matthew Arnold (2 shared issues)
-
- Niels Bohr (2 shared issues)
-
- Royal Society (2 shared issues)
-
- Thomas Huxley (2 shared issues)
-
- 23andme (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Charles Darwin discovered the theory of evolution. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin also groped towards some kind of proto-evolutionary theory, made contributions in botany and pathology, and founded the influential Lunar Society of scientists. His other grandfather Josiah Wedgwood was a pottery tycoon who "pioneered direct mail, money back guarantees, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, and illustrated catalogues" and became "one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of the 18th century". Charles' cousin Francis Galton invented the modern fields of psychometrics, meteorology, eugenics, and statistics (including standard deviation, correlation, and regression). Charles' son Sir George Darwin, an astronomer, became president of the Royal Astronomical Society and another Royal Society fellow. Charles' other son Leonard Darwin, became a major in the army, a Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Geography Society, and a mentor and patron to Ronald Fisher, another pioneer of modern statistics. Charles' grandson Charles Galton Darwin invented the Darwin-Fowler method in statistics, the Darwin Curve in diffraction physics, Darwin drift in fluid dynamics, and was the director of the UK's National Physical Laboratory (and vaguely involved in the Manhattan Project).
Historical nitpick: Erasmus Darwin was not the founder of the Lunar Society, although he was a key member. The Lunar Society was very informal and didn't really have a single founder, but if I *had* to pick one, it would probably be William Small, or maybe Matthew Boulton. (I'm basing this claim on having read several books worth of the correspondence of Boulton and Watt, who were both Lunar Society members.)