How Darwin Managed His Inbox

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an MSNBC article on how Darwin and Einstein managed their inboxes. From the article: "A new study finds that the correspondence of Albert Einstein, as well as that of Charles Darwin, followed patterns similar to modern e-mail communication. Einstein sent more than 14,500 letters. But he received more than 16,200, and responded to only a quarter of them. Darwin mailed more than 7,500 letters. He responded to 32 percent of the roughly 6,530 letters he received."

only the strongest email will survive

[pintomp3]

the heading threw me off. i was thinking some kind of new spam filtering technology in which good emails with non-spammy qualities get through to the inbox. i imagined a darwinian inbox that shrinks on it's own as crapy messages are deleted in favor of good ones. guess i gotta stop smoking early in the morning.

Actual Statistics?

[adavies42]

I'd like to see the real statistics involved (number of letters in various times to reply). It sounds like it might be a power-law distribution, but with coverage this lame, it's hard to tell.

Re:Spam

[Nuklearwanze]

i just compared the amount of spam i get "snail-mailed" to that i get by email: i get like 1 letter (usually bills or finacial stuff) every other day, but i get about six "spam-snail-mails" a day. that's a ratio of 1:12 - looking at the emails i got this week i have to say that my elecronic inbox doesn't recieve that much spam: i got 332 "normal" emails since monday, plus 150 spam mails - ratio 2:1! my email inbox receives 24 times less spam than my postal inbox. i'm pretty sure the "survey" did not take the amount of spam einstein and darwin recieved into account - and im absolutely certain that they too did get spam-mails... (THAT survey would actually be much more interesting!)

Many Posters Missing the Point

[awol]

Many of the posters here are say in various ways, "Big Deal, they responded to mail the way we respond to email, so what?". But it is an interesting finding.

But there are many components of the analysis that need to be understood. First, assuming that the mail was from their celebrity period then we should ask does pre-email celebrity present a parallel to email in terms of unsolicited incoming messages. If so does it present a way of trying to manage it.

Second, the fact that people in the pre-email days are responding to the same kind of fractions as we are with email then we can try and understand if email is a complete parallel for regular mail. In which case many things follow, for exampl the question about whether the "massive" penalties for mail interference should be extended to email.

Then we could think about the social impact of mail. Is the proportion of responded email a "guilt" thing or a measure of the relevance of the mail. In otherwords do we reply to X% of our mail because to do less makes us feel bad and if we bump up the number of incoming does the amount of responding increase, or do we settle for a lower X.

These are all interesting questions and historical data from a parallel, perhaps corellated, source is a worthy place to do analysis.

Re:besides that

[mikrorechner]

Beisdes that, since they were nerds, what other type of intercourse could they get?

Oh, to the contrary, Einstein was quite the ladyman:

Einstein wanted and enjoyed the company of women, and his intellectual celebrity certainly wouldn't have hurt his chances with the socialites of Berlin or, later, the women of America. The relationships rarely lasted, however - usually once they were established, Einstein cooled off and looked elsewhere. Avoiding deep emotional ties in this way may have given him the solitude he needed to pursue his work, but few would find such behaviour admirable.
(source [2ubh.com])

I don't know about Bohr, though.

Re:only?

[jsveiga]

On "Selected Letters on Evolution and Origin of Species", it is interesting that some of the letters really have a conversation "sequence", considering the long "latency" time between each packet. This was specially true during Darwin's trip, but also when he was at home.

Something like we will experience when exchanging emails with colonies on other planets or solar systems: You write, and your grandson gets the answer.

When a quick response was expected, they'd send a messenger and ask that recipient answered by return mail (and the messenger would wait for the answer to be written).

Also, something as easy as sending an article you wrote for a friend to review (attach/send today) would require that someone hand-copied your writings or that you send the only original and wait for it to come back with the review. You didn't keep a copy on your "sent items".

In the book, Darwin's son says his father was troubled by the chore of processing mails, and spent a lot of time just doing that.

Those were the times.

Re:Except they were doing real work...

[ucblockhead]

When Darwin was out studying birds on a far away island, he was a nobody and likely got few letters. After he published and became famous he stayed at home.

But what I think a lot of people don't quite realize in their gut is that back then, email was the *only* means of communication. You couldn't just pick up the phone and call a biologist in Germany.

Re:besides that

[Anonymous Coward]

The relationships rarely lasted, however - usually once they were established, Einstein cooled off and looked elsewhere.

The fact that Einstein was circumcised might explain the cooling off. Missing 2000 pleasure receptors, missing the estrogen receptors (also pleasure receptors), missing the natural dam of loose skin that keeps the woman's lubrication in during intercourse, and with his glans numbed by constant contact with his underwear instead of being protected until needed, it is no wonder that his relationships where short.

Re:You are miscategorizing Darwin

[nobody69]

According to both of your wiki links, Darwin and Wallace had no knowledge of Matthew and Wells. People had been hypothesizing about all of this biodiversity, including ideas resembling evolution by natural selection, since the ancient Greeks. Darwin was the first to take these vague ideas and tie them together with his observations from the Beagle voyage, combined with the gradualist theories of contemporary geology and come up with a unified and fairly complete method for how evolution worked. Then he sat on, er, "polished" it for years until Wallace sent him a letter (Hey, look something on topic in my post.) with some of his ideas regarding natural selection, prompting Darwin to get off his butt and publish. The importance of Darwin's work was that it gave a _why_ to biology.

Since then, of course, natural selection theory has been subject to many changes, ther biggest probably being punctuated equilibrium, but still stands as the foundation of modern biological thought.

Re:Darwin's Inbox?

[Eric Giguere]

Unfortunately, scientists say there's no evidence of "feathered dinosaurs" [sciencedaily.com].

Eric

Re:besides that

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that comment a troll? In Canada physicians advise the mothers of newborn boys to not circumcise. Educated Jews have replaced circumcision with a ritual nick, merely loosening the foreskin. Sexually active women (those who aren't into rape fetish) refer to circumcised men as sexual cripples. (The rape fetish thing is that circumcised men can only get enough stimulation to climax by thrusting very violently. Sadly, once they reach middle age they are physically unable to do this long enough to climax unless they are extremely physically fit. By old age, when the uncircumcised are still fathering children the circumcised have turned to gin, sloth, and unhappiness as their preoccupations).