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Playful Drawings That Charles Darwin's Children Left on His Manuscripts
by cainxinth
I don’t really care whose they are. I just love seeing any of these drawings.
I have to imagine that drawing was a much greater source of entertainment at the time, and I’m kind of sad that that isn’t the case any more.
You might also enjoy the preserved stick-figure art of a 13th-century kid:
Is it not? My kids with all technology and toys they have access to still often choose drawing. And it's not like their main thing or something they strive to get better at. It's just fun.
So definitely no reason to be sad, it is still a great source of entertainment (and not only for the kids)
They're also surprisingly good drawings. I drew nothing like them as a kid.
And given the current war against boredom it's not going to get better.
My kids draw constantly (including on things they shouldn't), but I also limit screen time so that may have something to do with it
Yeah, starting around age four, all of my kids became prolific artists, going through dozens of sheets of paper per day. With our oldest kid, we tried hanging them up on the wall, but it quickly ended up covering every inch of a long hallway. Now, to keep our house from overflowing, I just photograph[1] all the drawings every night and recycle them (see my other comment about personally using the back sides of some for my own notes).
[1] After four kids, I've fallen behind on sorting through the photos, but we have albums for the artwork that each of them has made. It's pretty cool to see it all in one place, and how their work has become more sophisticated over time.
I mean, they have to be into it too. I love drawing, but my child would rather do anything but.
> The project’s director, David Kohn, “doesn’t know for certain which kids were the artists,” notes Staynor, “but he guesses that at least three were involved: Francis, who became a botanist; George, who became an astronomer and mathematician; and Horace, who became an engineer.”
Are we sure these were all from the children and none were the work of their father? Why couldn't Charley have thrown in a silly doodle himself?
I’m not really exposed to children’s drawings, but these look particularly talented.
I always feel a little weird about generating AI art because it really is standing on the shoulders of giants. I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft.
Any little simple drawing you generate is really off the back of kids and teenagers that draw out of a passion. So I try not to do it, feels icky.
Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style, and hopefully they can get paid out like streaming music artists in the long term. Along with that, we need laws that let you sue people that copy the style with no license.
>I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft.
I think the defining feature of theft is that you deprive the victim of their property. Redefining theft to include copying just feels silly, it's fundamentally a different sin (if it's a sin at all).
Well it hasn't been long since Disney got everyone used to suing each other for making similar drawings either. Which is odd because Mickey wasn't the first mouse drawn with round ears at the time of his first cartoon. A whole Simpsons episode satirised the affair.
You can easily still get the GP’s meaning if you substitute the phrase “sneakily cheating the artist out of any compensation” for “theft” though, right?
The "kids and teenagers that draw out of a passion" in GP's comment are not being cheated out of any compensation.
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> Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style, and hopefully they can get paid out like streaming music artists in the long term. Along with that, we need laws that let you sue people that copy the style with no license.
Years ago, I just kind of assumed that should be true. I'm not so sure anymore. I don't see any evidence that creativity comes from copyright and patent protection. Germany flowered in the 19th century without them.
For the last 20 years, I've been releasing my work under the Boost license which is the most permissible license out there (public domain is my preference, but it is not recognized in some countries).
> Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style
Ideally no one's art would be hindered by having to track down and pay someone for creating something in another "artist's style". Ideally people would just create what they like and be free to intentionally practice and play around with the styles of others as they see fit while they develop their own.
No artist, ever, should own a "style" just as no author should own a "genre". Artists should be the free to express and explore whatever they want using whatever tools they want.
> I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft.
Napster didn't get people used to theft, it got them used to access. It introduced people to music and entire musical genres that they'd never have otherwise encountered. It even got people to buy music and attend concerts they otherwise wouldn't have. Access to culture enriches everyone and inspires the creation of new artistic works. The music industry wasn't worried about theft. They were worried that they'd lose their jobs as useless middlemen and gatekeepers.
> Ideally no one's art would be hindered by having to track down and pay someone for creating something in another "artist's style".
After "you" tracked them down, slurped up their art and spent a lot of electricity to garble it, it's oddly convenient to suddenly get lazy when it comes to giving credit.
And being able to understand, even SEE (or hear etc.) something well enough you can re-create it, that's one thing. That at least implies some common experience between artist and copycat, even in the case of just straight copying the style. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, right? But copying and then garbling it with algorithms, forever and ever and ever, is something else entirely. Different enough that artists should opt-in.
It's like what killer robots are what to soldiers, too, and I'm not joking. At least until now, to create a lot of propaganda in text and image you would have to at least convince or force a proportional amount of humans to do it, which is harder the more atrocities and people they know and love are involved. No such qualms with machines, and no scaling issues.
And hey, the constant drowning out of intelligent and still applicable things that already have been made, in favor of some product, some content, some "take", produced by something someone who happens to live right now (which makes it important I see their thing, and not something made in the past that would do more for me) is already a problem without any machines involved. So I want to be able to opt-in as consumer, too. I don't want to restrict the choice of others, but it just allowing to mingle and drown out everything else by being infinitely cheap to produce predictably will destroy my choice.
If it's so great for creativity, and the results so great, neither should be an issue. I mean, the way you make it sound artists should be pushing for it -- where are they? And if barely any artists want to give away their art for it, and only computer people want them to, well, then the people who want their machines to make art will have to learn making art themselves, first. That is not too much to ask.
No lover of language looks at the output of LLM and thinks "I want to write like that". People who can't write (or "don't have the time" for the thought process while still oddly feeling entitled to the appearance of it) see that, want it for themselves, because it's better than what they can make. Same or even worse with music.
> But copying and then garbling it with algorithms, forever and ever and ever, is something else entirely. Different enough that artists should opt-in.
I'm more sympathetic when when it comes to arguments against corporate controlled AI using the work of artists to extract value and reproduce their work (in whole or part) using algorithms, but I just can't see how granting artists special rights to monetary compensation for AI training or for output that is being done in "their" style won't eventually (or even immediately) result in harmful impacts to human artists including those human artists using AI tools (like photoshop). The result will certainly have a massive chilling effect on artistic output and our freedom of expression.
Copyright in general has become a perversion of its original purpose which was to promote the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of the public, and it needs to be scaled back substantially from what we have today. Any attempt to use copyright to further restrict what artists can do beyond what our current extremely abusive laws burden them with should be heavily scrutinized and avoided wherever possible because history shows us that even with the best intentions in mind the result of those laws will be further abuse and exploitation.
> it just allowing to mingle and drown out everything else by being infinitely cheap to produce predictably will destroy my choice.
There's no doubt that AI will flood the market of currently available things, but there's zero evidence that it would make it impossible for people to access older works. As far I as can tell, AI output will only become increasingly homogenized and uninteresting. You seem to feel that already AI does not deliver the same quality as human artists. AI generated art might come to dominate advertising, or furry art on deviantart or pixiv, but it's not likely to kick renaissance painters out of museums.
> People who can't write (or "don't have the time" for the thought process while still oddly feeling entitled to the appearance of it) see that, want it for themselves, because it's better than what they can make.
This is probably the weakest of all the arguments against AI art. Some artists are threatened by the idea of AI making it possible for more people to create even inferior looking artistic works.
Rather than being excited by the idea that more people will be able to express themselves and their ideas in ways they otherwise wouldn't be able to artists seem angry that they'll no longer have exclusive control over what art gets created and that the people they look down on for not having the ability that draw or paint will suddenly no longer need to come to them to see something close to their vision materialized. As if the person with parkinson's disease, or arthritis who finds it hard to even hold a pencil or draw a straight line is undeserving of creating art. As if it's unfair that bad artists might be enabled to create something above their station. I'm not suggesting that you personally feel that way, but comments like "People who can't write (or "don't have the time" for the thought process while still oddly feeling entitled to the appearance of it)..." strongly echo that position.
We'd all be better off if technology allows more people to express themselves through art. It doesn't devalue the people who are more talented. It doesn't devalue art made when making art was more difficult. It does increase the pool of art, perspectives, and ideas being exchanged, but that is always a good thing.
> I just can't see how granting artists special rights to monetary compensation for AI training or for output that is being done in "their" style won't eventually (or even immediately) result in harmful impacts to human artists including those human artists using AI tools (like photoshop).
By opt-in I simply mean that artists get to decide whether their art is used for training.
The chilling effect of someone not being able to express "themselves" because they need who I am for that, does not exist. If I don't opt-in, nobody's the wiser, nobody lost anything. There may however be a chilling effect of knowing whatever you draw or sing can be garbled and used to promote fascism or laxatives, and when you utter too many words, you can now be impersonated for all eternity.
And I am not arguing "against AI art", I say artists need to opt-in, and the output needs to be labeled. If you think I'll then go around and sneer at people who are happy and proud of how some ideas they had came together, you are mistaken. Some people might, so what. If the solution is to lie, then there is something else going on other than "self-expression".
I'm really just for artists opting in, and labeling the output. Do you have direct arguments against either?
Napster got people used to piracy not theft.
Tape recording was already huge before Napster and it’s also considered piracy.
Class Piracy extends Theft.
It’s just an abstraction. I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole though.
We have laws defining copyright infringement exactly because property rights inherently do not cover piracy.
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Nonsense. Theft by definition requires the original owner to lose something. Me not buying something is not theft.
Depriving them the opportunity to make a sale is still depriving them of something.
That’s a strange idea. I am depriving businesses of sales worth millions every day. Just this morning, I did not buy a single sports car.
What if they're not selling it anymore?
What if you take a fallen branch from someone’s yard when they aren’t going to use it for something? Dealing with edge cases where maybe theft isn’t theft is why we have a court system.
Words themselves are more generic in nature. It’s through phrases, sentences, etc where that ever finer nuances can be described.
This is not academic: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/video-game-preservation...
These are old games, they can't be purchased anywhere, they aren't taking anyone's precious profits, and they still can't be (legally) played.
This is one case at least where "piracy" is definitively not theft.
> can’t be purchased anywhere
At a single moment sure, but many games have gone from a state where you can’t purchase them to you can. I’d be cautious of any argument which suggests watching a movie the day before it hits movie theaters has zero economic impact.
So you’d need to find a game that couldn’t ever be purchased until the end of copyright coverage, which is more a theoretical argument than something you can demonstrate in the moment.
"watching a movie the day before it hits movie theaters" is not the same thing at all. This is more like trying to show racist Looney Tunes cartoons from the 1940s in an educational setting. No one's making any money off "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs" (1943) nor "Pitfall!" (1983) on the Atari 2600. They're not being sold, for reasonable economic reasons, and rigid copyright restrictions should not apply to them.
Corporations already have enough influence over copyright, so I'm loathe to defend a defunct corporation's theoretical ability to resell an ancient game, over an actual person's real interest in preserving and disseminating video game history.
> is not the same thing at all
Then make an argument that has some actual separation here.
> I’m loathe to defend a defunct corporation’s theatrical ability to resell an ancient game
Sure it seems harmless, but find some way to quantify things that doesn’t harm an operating studio’s ability to borrow money because a significant chunk of their IP would be valueless in bankruptcy etc.
It’s easy to call anything a victimless crime, coming up with reasonable objective criteria in the face of counter arguments is a little harder.
If we’re going by the age of sail definition then yeah.
Is recording a song freely broadcast over the air considered piracy or theft? Courts said no.
Is recording video (even premium cable) on your dvr considered piracy or theft? Courts said no.
Is giving a mixtape to your friend considered piracy or theft? Actually I’m not sure…
Copyright is a very recent invention, since 1790. Ownership of property goes back long before recorded history.
> I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft
that’s a bit dramatic, I’d argue the way AI has been used, I.E. scraping up people’s work without consent and then using it to train models that will recreate said work to the best of their abilities so you won’t even need the artist anymore (in the ideal vision of the people running AI companies) is a much more heinous thing.
You’re downloading and using the artist’s work without their consent to train a tool to replace them. Whereas Napster is downloading their work and you might buy their work in the future cause you love it so much.
For the training part. Generating art off someone’s art is nuanced. Let’s say you generate art off Darwin’s kid’s art.
- First off most people won’t ever know, so you don’t even have to hide the theft.
- If you copied a well known style, then you would have to hide that you did so by layering another style on top
- You don’t have to worry about the first two points if you are not stealing and just commission an artist.
- Or you are oblivious and uncaring about all of this, and all is sound in your mind because you bought the fake gem currency fair and square to generate your image.
So, we are talking about taking. Some people have issue with the word stealing.
Ah, how nice is this?
We’re no longer in the “they’re being auctioned off as NFTs soon” phase of digitized historical documents.
Some of those drawings are copies of Edward Lear illustrations. I recognised the style. I didnt see that mentioned in the article although I might have missed it. I like the little drawings though very cute.
>“Children are one’s greatest happiness,” he once wrote, “but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none.”
Brats..
Context for that quote:
> Children are one’s greatest happiness, but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none, — perhaps not a wife; for then there would be nothing in this wide world worth caring for & a man might (whether he would is another question) work away like a Trojan.
— https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/12/darwin-family-work...
Looks like Darwin really loved his wife and ten children. Indeed Wikipedia says “Charles was a devoted father and uncommonly attentive to his children” citing https://web.archive.org/web/20130723181529/http://www.aboutd... which says:
> The home life Charles Darwin was unlike that of most Victorian country gentleman. The most striking difference was seen in how he interacted with his children. […] Charles always took a keen interest in whatever they were doing.
and has many lovely quotes from his children like:
> He cared for all our pursuits and interests, and lived our lives with us in a way that very few fathers do. […] He always put his whole mind into answering any of our questions.
and the author of the page (David Leff) ends with:
> The manner in which Darwin related to his family was truly special. In fact, based on conversations I have had with other Darwin enthusiasts and with some of his descendants, it is safe to say that for Darwin his family life was far more important to him than his research into the natural sciences.
It is like moving to the past in a time machine where you see the importance of horses as transport. Also connected to the Onfim's drawings [1]. Horses as a technology most probably will surpass cars in the way we know them now.
My kids just freely grab sheets of printer paper when they want to draw stuff. To save paper, I later use the other sides of their drawings for any handwritten notes or conceptual sketches that I make. I guess people will be really amused if I ever become a historical figure and they see these.
And of course if your children become historical figures, the future people might be amused by your "conceptual sketches" :)
Very good!
Very cool to have his kids closely involved in his work
> Error 405 Slovenian users must use proxy. > Slovenian users must use proxy.
> Guru Meditation: > XID: 66443665
> Varnish cache server
interesting ...
His children were much better than me at drawing, that’s for sure
All I get is "Error 405 [country] users must use proxy."
I wonder what that's about. GDPR?
Looking at other parts of the site, I expect it's attack/abuse mitigation.
These unfortunate souls are trying to host interesting free content. I expect they are getting crawled to dust and unfortunately, so much nuisance came from your country's IP range they had little other option but to block it.
"We are currently unable to steal your data, please check back later."
> GDPR?
Unlikely. I’m in the EU and can access the website just fine.
>The Darwin kids “were used as volunteers,” says Kohn, “to collect butterflies, insects, and moths, and to make observations on plants in the fields around town.”
Back then, I suppose there were no child labor laws. /s
Crafted by Rajat
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