John M. Lynch is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett the Honors College at Arizona State University. He's also affiliated with ASU's Center for Biology & Society. When he's not an historian of anti-evolutionism, he's an evolutionary morphologist. Much to his surprise, in 2007 he was named the Arizona Professor of the Year. No doubt his students were surprised as well.
(Another book review, this time from 2002 and the Journal of the History of Biology. Both books are still in print and worth reading)
The simplicity (and adversarial nature) of the phrase "science versus religion" belies the diversity of ways in which these two fields of knowledge can, and do, interact. Thanks to the work of Ian Barbour, four modes of interaction are now generally accepted (conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration). It has been realized that in these post-1859 times, religion has had to face the radical reconfiguration of the human experience that appears to be required by the acceptance of modern scientific theories such as evolution, quantum mechanics, and electromagnetism. However, within such an arrangement, one must ask how science is, if at all, modified by religious beliefs. As John Hedley Brooke notes in Science in Theistic Contexts, we must avoid essentializing "science" and "religion," and imagining that our current boundaries would be acceptable to the scientists of times past. The two works under review offer potent illustrations of how scientific theory and religious belief have in the past influenced and affected each other, and we thus have no reason to imagine that this will not be the case in the future.
The ever anonymous "PhysioProf" has managed to slander the whole medical profession. Orac, Mark Hoofnagle, and PalMD (who actually know something about medicine) rightly call shennanigans.
As Mark notes:
In medicine, we take attitudes like this towards students and doctors seriously, and the only reason PP gets away with this crap is because he abuses anonymity. Anonymity can be a good thing, and I hope the internet becomes a place where it can be used reliably so people can feel safe speaking honestly. But when used like PP uses it, merely to be able to say indefensible nonsense about good people, it's just cowardice and I hold him in nothing but contempt (and have for some time).
Orac raises a good question:
If PP has such utter contempt for physicians and the medical students who will ultimately become physicians, why on earth does he continue to have anything to do with them?
Quite. For PhysioProf's sake, I hope he is never treated by the caricature of medical professionals he presents. Or for that matter, be treated by someone who has read his bullshit.
There's another one of thosebooklists circulating - a list of 100 works of which it is claimed that the average American has read only six. Whether that is true or not (and Chad doesn't believe it), the list contains the usual mixed bag of works.
Below the fold is the list; bolded works were read and finished (31), italicized were either not finished or are compilations (8).
(Another review that was published a few years back, in this case in Isis in 2001. Alter's book is still in print and still worth reading.)
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was written in a vivid style and, as such, is frequently studied as much as literature as scientific text. Particularly notable is Darwin's use of analogy and metaphor. In the work under review, Stephen G. Alter focuses on two of Darwin's literary devices - the metaphor of the tree and the analogy between languages and species - and in so doing demonstrates how both the supporters and opponents of transmutation used ideas and images from linguistics to present their case.
Over at Crooked Timber they are discussing a review of Steve Fuller's latest expectoration Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism. As the review notes:
The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.
As part of the exchange over at CT, Jeff Rubard claims that "Steve Fuller knows a hell of a lot more about science than you" to which Steve LaBonne rightly points out:
[Fuller] knows nothing about anything except how to parlay being a pompous ass into a minor academic career and a certain amount of notoriety.
I am not, by the way, by any means a reflexive opponent of STS or whatever they're calling ti [sic] these days. But people like Fuller give that discipline a bad name and many of its practitioners would be happy to tell you so themselves.
Exactly. Fuller encapsulates everything that is wrong and solipsistic about STS. And I say this as someone who is affiliated with the nearest thing ASU has to an STS program.
(The following is the text of a review I wrote that appeared in Journal of the History of Biology in 2000. As both of the books are still in print - and the Gould book is his exposition of Nonoverlapping Magesteria - I thought the review was worth posting.)
Most of us are familiar with the icons of warfare between science and religion, and have grown up hearing the stories of Bruno, Galileo, and Scopes. The two works under review offer differing viewpoints on the relationships between science and religion, and are aimed at differing audiences. Conkin's volume is part of an academic series examining the place of intellectuals in American life, while Gould's work is in a popular series in which "America's most original voices tackle today's most provocative issues" - issues including Jones v. Clinton, Tiger Woods, and the Disney empire.
I recently co-authored a paper that discussed the utility of history of science for science (Isis 99: 322-330). The abstract reads:
This essay argues that science education can gain from close engagement with the history of science both in the training of prospective vocational scientists and in educating the broader public about the nature of science. First it shows how historicizing science in the classroom can improve the pedagogical experience of science students and might even help them turn into more effective professional practitioners of science. Then it examines how historians of science can support the scientific education of the general public at a time when debates over "intelligent design" are raising major questions over the kind of science that ought to be available to children in their school curricula. It concludes by considering further work that might be undertaken to show how history of science could be of more general educational interest and utility, well beyond the closed academic domains in which historians of science typically operate.
Below the fold I have posted the portion that may be of most interest to readers of this blog, a section that I wrote discussing the utility of history of science in the service of educational activism. I'm interested in hearing what folks - particularly historians of science - think. (Note: I have removed footnotes but full references can be found in the original paper.)
Recently anthropologist John Hawks was granted tenure by the University of Wisconsin (congratulations to him!) and he feels that his blogging did not impede his evaluation. He has begun a four part series that "covers a different portion of the tenure process, from starting and establishing the tone of your blog, up to documenting your blog for your tenure dossier."
The full story is divided into four parts. In the final installment, which may be most useful to current bloggers, I will describe the specific strategies that I applied to quantify my blog's role as a service to the field and to the public. Over the next two weeks, I'll be discussing strategies to build a blog's reputation and readership in the years leading up to tenure review, and some ways to integrate research with blogging.
Today, I weigh the pluses and minuses of starting a blog on the tenure track, including the key question of anonymity. This will be especially relevant if you are newly on the tenure track and considering starting a blog. You may also find some of it useful if you have a blog already and are considering shedding a pseudonym and making a blog part of your academic life.
I'm relatively lucky, I'm not on a tenure-track (and don't want to be on one), and what I do here is largely independent of my academic career, though I receive some notice from my colleagues. I will however be following John's series as I'm sure there will be some gems of wisdom for all of us who blog and work in the academy.
I've been remiss for a while and those of you who like the Monday Mustelid haven't been getting your fix. So here is a little something to tide you over. Three video full of badgery goodness.
The world's most fearless animal - the ratel, Melivora capensis. This guy is 100kg of attitude in a 10kg body.
Like many on the blogosphere, I've had the opportunity to view Randy Olson's latest production Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. Billed as "an effort to understand the confusion around the global warming," the movie claims to be a "novel blend of three genres - mockumentary, documentary, and reality" and that alone illustrates the problem with the movie - it doesn't know what it's trying to be and after spending 85 minutes with it, I had no real clue what point Olson was trying to make and to whom he is making it. Indeed, it is only out of a sense of duty that I continued watching beyond the first fifteen minutes.
Very sad news for those of us who do physical anthropology. Charles ("Charlie") Lockwood (University College London) was killed today in a motorcycle accident in London. He is survived by his parents and sisters.
Charlie was a talented morphologist both in the sense of being a descriptive anatomist and quantitative biologist. I met him in the late 90's when he came to ASU's Institute of Origins for a post-doc after completing his PhD at the University of Witwatersrand. He, Bill Kimbel and I shared the pain of rejected NSF grant proposals before receiving NSF money to study the use of geometric morphometrics to study temporal bone variation in hominins. Three papers resulted:
Lockwood,C.A., Lynch,J.M., Kimbel,W.H. (2002). Quantifying temporal bone morphology of great apes and humans: An approach using geometric morphometrics. Journal of Anatomy 201(6), 447-464.
Lockwood,C.A., Kimbel,W.H., Lynch,J.M. (2004). Morphometrics and hominoid phylogeny: Support for a chimpanzee-human clade and differentiation among great ape subspecies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101(13), 4356-4360.
Lockwood,C.A., Kimbel,W.H., Lynch,J.M. (2005). Variation in early hominin temporal bone morphology and its implications for species diversity. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 60(2), 73-77.
There was other research we intended to do but, somehow, with Charlie's move to London in 2004 and all that involved, we never got round to it. He was soon to be returning to South Africa to take a position at Wits. I'm proud to have known Charlie as a colleague and a friend. He will be missed.
My own research seeks to reveal what makes today's manufactroversies work. First, I've discovered that modern-day sophists skillfully invoke values that are shared by the scientific community and the public, such as free speech, skeptical inquiry and the revolutionary force of new ideas against a repressive orthodoxy. It is difficult to argue against someone who draws on these values without seeming unscientific or un-American.
Second, the modern sophists exploit the gap between the technical and public spheres. Scientific experts who can't spare the time for public communication are then surprised when the public distrusts them.
Third, today's sophists exploit a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data. Any dissent is cited as evidence that there's no consensus, and thus that truth must not have been discovered yet.
A more accurate portrayal of science recognizes it to be a process of debate among a community of experts in which the side with superior evidence and argument wins. Unanimity of belief never exists, but the process of science moves forward with the weight of a supermajority.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
