History and Philosophy (often of Science)
jlynch | September 7, 2008Back in 2006 I briefly discussed sociologist Rodney Stark's book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random, 2005). Now over at Evolving Thoughts, John provides a guest post by Thony Christie that discusses Stark's claims about the history of science.
jlynch | August 26, 2008Via Cocktail Party Physics, a list of popular science books. Rules are simple: Bold those you've read in full, asterisk those you intend to read, add any additional popular science books you think belong on the list (I'll try and do that next weekend, class prep allowing), and link back to Jennifer (who has never read Origin, horror!). Here we go:
Micrographia, Robert Hooke
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin - oh, so many times
Never at Rest, Richard Westfall
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney
The Devil's Doctor, Philip Ball…
jlynch | August 22, 2008A few days back I noted Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's latest ejaculation. John Wilkins brings to my attention that Fuller has finally shown his true colors and joined the madhouse that is Uncommon Descent with a post attempting to deflect Sarkar's piece. It's amazing how individuals who claim to be dispassionate observers of ID eventually reveal their true colors and climb into bed with Dembski. He, Fuller and Denyse "I'm a serious journalist" O'Leary make quite a threesome!
As one would expect, Fuller's piece is full of sound & fury, signifying nothing, and Wilkins takes him…
jlynch | August 17, 2008
Mike Price has a nice piece over at Smithsonian.com on how the rediscovery of Galilaeus Galilaeus His Life: In Five Books, by Thomas Salusbury, a biography of Galileo written just twenty years after his death is causing some to reinterpret the cause of Galileo's trial. In short, Salusbury proposed that Galileo was raked over the coals because Urban VIII wanted to punish the Duke of Medici.
jlynch | August 11, 2008We've mentioned Steve Fuller before on this blog both when he was giving "expert" testimony in Kitzmiller and when he went and produced a book (Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism) on his thoughts regarding intelligent design. Now, John Wilkins brings to our attention a review of Fuller's book by philosopher of science Sahotra Sarkar. John has got his own favorite quote (which I will admit is wonderful), but I like this short, sharp, summation:
Fuller's analysis of the intellectual disputes over contemporary ID creationism is almost vacuous.
Do read the whole…
jlynch | August 11, 2008Tim @ Deltoid beat me to posting about the new (online at least) Naomi Oreskes talk in which she discusses the tactics of the Western Fuels Association (go here), so instead I'd like to take the opportunity to highlight a paper she and Zuoyue Wang contributed to the Isis Focus section on the value of history of science. The abstract reads:
Historians of science have participated actively in debates over American science policy in the post-World War II period in a variety of ways, but their impact has been more to elucidate general concepts than to effect specific policy changes. Personal…
jlynch | August 11, 2008Amazing letter from Charles Darwin to Klara Pölzl, one that likely to change Darwin scholarship for the future. Written in 1881, a year before his death, Darwin could clearly see the vast implications of his life's work for Twentieth century thought. I'm going to have to take some time to digest this before I comment.
jlynch | August 10, 2008Following last week's discussion of blogging within the history of science community, I've stumbled on a few more resources. In no particular order, here's everything I have so far.
Group or Organizational Blogs
History of Science in America
HSS Graduate and Early Career Caucus
Society for the History of Technology News (SHOTnews)
HSTM at Minnesota (University of Minnesota graduate students)
Logan Lounge (University of Pennsylvania graduate students)
In Retrospect (University of Utrecht graduate students)
Individual Blogs by Historians of Science
John M. Lynch - yours truly, faculty at…
jlynch | August 4, 2008Ben Cohen over at The World's Fair has gotten me thinking about something: is there really a readership for blog posts about the history of science [HoS]?
My own experience is that there may not be such a readership, or at least may not be one that engages in commentary. Admittedly, my evidence is fragmentary. Over the past two weeks I have been posting HoS-based material, namely a series of book reviews and a commentary on the value of HoS for science education. The former series generated virtually no comments and the latter a meager nine comments (it also wasn't picked-up by any other…
jlynch | August 3, 2008PZ has a post up discussing some abject stupidity over at WorldNetDaily. Sign #1 of stupidity is that the WND columnist (a lawyer, no less) refers to "Origins [sic] of Species" as being Darwin's 1859 work which legitimized "a pagan, anti-God worldview rooted in fascism, socialism and eugenics and to propagate these diabolical ideas throughout the world." PZ notes:
What logically follows from Darwin's theory is that fit individuals are those that survive and have offspring. There is no presumption that there is only one possible strategy to accomplish that survival: if we maintain a state that…
jlynch | August 3, 2008The preliminary program for the History of Science Society's annual meeting (November in Pittsburgh) has been placed online and it looks like the best series of sessions in a long while with the organizers managing to avoid scheduling sessions on similar themes at the same time. It's a three-day meeting but I'll only be around for the Friday & Saturday. Here's what my preliminary schedule looks like:
Friday
9:00 - The Hard Parts: Paleontology and the Evolutionary Synthesis. Some nice papers here on Sewall Wright, species concepts, Osborn, random drift, and ID.
12:30 - lecture by Gar…
jlynch | August 3, 2008(This review was supposed to appear in Isis in 2001 but for some reason never did. It appears here for the first time.)
Most students of the history of science are familiar with the effect that Lysenko's application of his political beliefs to scientific research had on genetic research and the economy of the USSR in the middle of this century. Equally well known is the supposed influence of Stephen Jay Gould's Marxism on his theorizing, and works such as Levins and Lewontin's The Dialectical Biologist. In the work under review, thirteen contributors from Europe and the United States attempt…
jlynch | July 26, 2008(This review appeared in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 2005)
As human beings, we like to tell stories--we are story-telling apes. As scientists, however, we tend not to see ourselves as telling stories for, we are led to believe, stories are mere fiction. Yet when faced with answering the question of why or how we became story-telling apes, we are often presented with a series of hypotheses with little empirical evidence to distinguish between them. In many ways, Wiktor Stoczkowski claims that it is because we are storytelling apes, and that because stories often represent…
jlynch | July 23, 2008(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…
jlynch | July 22, 2008Over 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…
jlynch | July 22, 2008(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…
jlynch | July 22, 2008I 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…
jlynch | July 8, 2008Leah Ceccarelli in the Seattle Times:
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…
jlynch | June 21, 2008A few months ago, I quoted George Sarton's low opinion of Plato's Timaeus. Jonathan Barnes has reviewed David Sedley's Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity and has this to say about Timaeus:
Above all, Sedley lauds the Timaeus. It is a 'uniquely rich and seminal text'. It is 'the most influential of all Plato's works, and probably the most seminal philosophical or scientific text to emerge from the whole of antiquity'. And 'it could hardly be denied that Plato had been stunningly successful in explaining the natural world as the product of craftsmanship.' Well, I deny it with both hands.…
jlynch | June 10, 2008Razib presents some interesting data on donations to the two main political parties by scientists. What struck me is that if you rank the professions from most Republican to most Democrat, you get the following:
Civil Engineering [0.75]
Chemical Engineering [0.79]
Geology [0.92]
Mechanical Engineering [0.96]
Electrical Engineering [1.17]
Chemistry [2.31]
Biochemistry [5.09]
Mathematics [5.44]
Physics [6.19]
Biology [10.3]
Now what I find interesting here is that if we use the Discovery Institute's 2007 list of 700 Dissenters against Darwinism, we see that the top five groups represented are…