Our Journey, Day 90

It's Halloween, which is my sister's birthday as well as my wedding anniversary. It's also Day 90 of my little journey into the unknown. This morning I noticed an interesting article on Medium, about Charles Darwin's note-making system, which Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle (who coined the term taxonomy) praised as being much like his own:

Another friend and a contemporary of Darwin, The Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, also wrote positively about Darwin’s note-taking method. In his book La Phytographie: Or, The Art Of Describing Plants Considered From Different Points Of View, de Candolle discussed the benefits of using slips of paper to record observations, a practice that he and his father had used in their own work. He noted that Darwin had independently developed the same method, and that he was “more impressed with it than ever”.

Here is an excerpt from de Candolle’s book (translated from the French):

“Mr. Darwin, whom I had the pleasure of seeing, used for his notes exactly the same method of loose slips that my father and I have followed, and which I have described in detail in my Phytographie. Eighty years of our experience have demonstrated to me its value. I am more impressed with it than ever, since Darwin devised it on his own. This method gives the work more accuracy, supplements memory, and saves years.”

https://medium.com/@iPadNotes/natural-selection-for-your-brain-using-darwins-techniques-to-process-information-more-efficiently-2dfa5e26412e

The author suggests that part of Darwin's success lay in his thought process, which was enabled by an ability "to break down complex information into smaller, more manageable pieces and make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas." It stands to reason that you can't make innovative syntheses and comparisons, if you can't easily bring ideas to mind when they're needed and then manipulate them efficiently. This fits right in with what I've been thinking about the importance of paraphrasing and "translating" other people's ideas into something of our own.