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He ruminated in his “D” notebook about “the warring of the species as inference from Malthus.” The geometric population increase of animals, as of humans, is prevented by such Malthusian checks, he wrote. He imagined it all freshly. Take the birds of Europe. They are well known to naturalists and their populations are (or were in his time, anyway) relatively stable. Every year, each species suffers a steady rate of death from hawk predation, from cold, from other causes, roughly maintaining its net population level against the rate of increase from fledglings. Food supply remains limited, nesting space remains limited, but breeding, laying, and hatching continue to push against those limits. Everything is interconnected and uneasily balanced. If the hawks decrease in number, the bird populations they prey upon will be affected, somehow. With new clarity Darwin saw predation, competition, excess reproduction, death—and their consequences. “One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges,” he wrote, and that it’s trying to “force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the oeconomy of Nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.” The final result of all this wedging, Darwin added, “must be to sort out proper structure & adapt it to change.” In shorthand scrawl, he had his big idea. Years later he would articulate the details and call it “natural selection.”
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
David Quammen
Edison now went to work on his own and constructed a similar machine for himself, in order to study the principle of the thing. It incorporated the initial discovery that the sound-induced vibrations of a diaphragm could open and close an electrical circuit (by the make-and-break contact principle) thus acting on an electromagnet at the receiving station and causing it to give forth a corresponding sound or pitch. Edison found that while words were only indistinctly perceptible on the Reis apparatus, “the inflections of the voice, the modulations of interrogation, wonder, command, etc., attained distinct expression.”188 He attempted at first some electrochemical experiments with the simple Reis transmitter, then realized that one of the main problems would be to control and balance the variations of current. Shortly before moving to Menlo Park he had devised an apparatus for analyzing the various waves produced by different sounds. It consisted of two hollow metallic cylinders, one inside the other with a metallic base acting as a diaphragm. To this diaphragm was attached a magnet, which ran through the center of a coil and acted as a miniature generator, inducing slight currents in the coil according to the sound vibrations of the diaphragm. On January 14, 1876, he filed a caveat and drawings with the United States Patent Office, giving warning of this invention-in-progress and describing it. Then he put the matter aside, busying himself with other aspects of acoustical telegraphy and with several completely unrelated projects. Edison was late in entering the race for the telephone; half a dozen expert men had begun the investigation of the speaking telegraph years before him. He also showed great courage in undertaking such work in view of the fact that he was very hard of hearing.
Catching a Contagious Goal Like the common cold, goals are remarkably contagious. The sight of someone pursuing a particular goal is one of the more potent triggers of unconscious goal pursuit psychologists have discovered. You don’t even have to know the guy doing the pursuing. All that matters is that he and his goal are seen positively. Unappealing people, and unappealing goals, make lousy triggers.
Succeed
Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D. and Carol S. Dweck
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