history of science
clock | February 24, 2009The very first, inaugural, and absolutely amazing edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival is now up on Urban Science Adventures. Wow! Just wow! Totally amazing stuff.
And what a reminder of my White privilege - a couple of names there are familiar to me, as I have read their papers before, never ever stopping to think who they were or how they looked like! What a wake-up call!
For instance, I have read several papers by Chana Akins, as she works on Japanese quail. And I am somewhat familiar (being a history buff and obsessive reader of literature in my and related fields) with the work…
laelaps | February 23, 2009
Moropus, a chalicothere. From The Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History.
Suppose for a moment that you are walking across a dry, wind-swept landscape known to be rich in fossils. During your perambulations you notice a large fossilized claw sitting on the surface; what sort of animal could it be from? There is a lot you would have to know about the area, like how old the rock in that spot was, but it would seem reasonable that the claw belonged to a large predator.
Nature, of course, is not so straightforward. Panda bears have teeth and claws that reveal their carnivoran…
laelaps | February 22, 2009
It would be fair to say that, until a week ago, I knew virtually nothing about J.B.S. Haldane. I knew he was a British biologist who helped form the subdiscipline of population genetics, but that was about it. Then, unexpectedly, Oxford University Press sent me a copy of What I Require From Life: Writings on Science and Life From J.B.S. Haldane.
What I Require From Life is neither an autobiography nor a comprehensive compilation of Haldane's writings. Instead it is a motley collection of Haldane's short essays written for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker (1937-1950) and pieces he…
laelaps | February 20, 2009
The "Newberg" (or Warren) mastodon. From Elements of Geology. Note the claw-like restoration of the feet.
How did the mastodon, Mammut americanum, feed itself? It is a fairly simple question best answered by looking to living elephants, but things were not always so straightforward. Early discussions of the mastodon focused, in part, on whether it was an herbivore or a carnivore. That its teeth were more rough and pointed surely meant that it had different dining preferences than mammoths or living elephants, both of which had flat molars for grinding plants. (If you want to learn more…
laelaps | February 19, 2009
The "Navel of the earth." From Paradise Found.
In 1885 the theologian William F. Warren, then president of Boston University, could no longer keep silent. Society was turning away from "old time religion" in favor of an ever-expanding naturalism that made(in Warren's view) the world a colder, darker place. The removal of the supernatural from science threatened all Warren held dear;
For many years the public mind has been schooled in a narrow naturalism, which has in its world-view as little room for the extraordinary as it has for the supernatural. Decade after decade the representatives…
cmooney | February 19, 2009Man, Copernicus has been kicking my butt. All the star tables, geometry, etc were turning me in to a pumpkin. So I pulled down a secondary source--Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution--and night became day. I honestly think one of the reasons that Kuhn's later and more famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had such a dramatic impact is that the author wrote and expounded so clearly.
I don't know what I was expecting from Copernicus, but Kuhn's book (so far) helpfully explains the relationship between the highly technical and the broad and general in the Copernican Revolution. As…
cmooney | February 18, 2009I've been thrilled at the comments I'm getting in response to my posts on Nicholaus Copernicus. See for example here. So I've thought of a plan to invite blog readers to join me throughout the next several months as I push through a large number of other texts like De revolutionibus.
For the remainder of this week, the primary reading will be Copernicus. (I still have a ways to go to finish.) Secondary readings will be Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read and Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution.
After that, here's the schedule I'm working from, and will strive to keep to--with Amazon…
laelaps | February 17, 2009Everyone knows that 1859 was the year in which Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published, but there was a significant event in September of that same year that is often overlooked. It involved the new understanding that humans and extinct mammals (like sabercats and mammoths) had lived alongside one another in ancient Europe. This may not seem like a particularly controversial point now (who today could imagine "cave men" without mammoths and woolly rhinoceros plodding about the landscape?) but during the first half of the 19th century it was…
cmooney | February 17, 2009
[Copernicus: Yet Another Pluto Hater?!?]
In my last post, I talked about the "radically strange" in Copernicus; today, let's go on to catalogue the "strangely modern" aspects of the work:
Strangely modern: The idea that the heavens are immense compared to the puny little Earth. Copernicus put it this way:
I also say that the sun remains forever immobile and that whatever apparent movement belongs to it can be verified of the mobility of the Earth; that the magnitude of the world is such that, although the distance from the sun to the Earth in relation to whatsoever planetary sphere you…
laelaps | February 16, 2009
An illustration of the Yale mastodon mount.
While planting corn on his Iowa farm around 1872 a farmer named Peter Mare found a curious carving. It was a smoking pipe in the shape of an elephant, a very odd item indeed, and he used it for its intended purpose until he moved to Kansas in 1878. At that time he gave it to his brother-in-law, but soon after a Reverend Gass came calling. Gass, an amateur archaeologist, wanted to purchase it, but the pipe was not for sale. Even so, the owner of the pipe allowed Gass to photograph it and make some casts, which he shared with the members of the…
cmooney | February 16, 2009
In my last post I remarked on how "radically strange--and yet strangely modern" I expected the 1543 work that kicked off the "scientific revolution" to be. Now that I've read the first two books of De Revolutionibus, I can say, boy was I right.
This is the first of several posts about my experience of reading Nicholaus Copernicus in the original (er, translation). So first, let me point out the things I found "radically strange" about the work, with the "strangely modern" to come in the next post:
Radically strange: Instructions for how to build an astrolabe. Vast tables of star locations,…
gregladen | February 15, 2009"The Giants' Shoulders" is a monthly science blogging event, in which authors are invited to submit posts on "classic" scientific papers. Information about the carnival can be found here.
The last Giants' was hosted at The Questionable Authority, here. The next issue will be hosted at The Evilutionary Biologist: All Science, All The Time, which resided here.
Since this is Darwin Month in Darwin Year and almost, indeed, Darwin Day, we start with ... Paleontology. We'll get to Darwin at the end.
Early palaentologists and the Giant killer lungfish from Hell as well as the Revenge of…
cmooney | February 14, 2009
Sane people right now are celebrating Valentine's Day.
I am holed up trying to read Nicholas Copernicus's On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium). Having been an official student of the history of science for two weeks now, and not feeling particularly satisfied with my progress, I've decided it is far past time for me to cast aside Ptolemaic and Aristotelian things, and enter the modern world.
I'll have plenty more to say about the experience of reading Copernicus once I've gotten somewhere. And after Copernicus, it's Galileo. But for now, here's an…
clock | February 14, 2009On Thursday, for Darwin's 200th birthday, I went down to Raleigh to the Museum of Natural Science to hear Carl Zimmer's talk. The room was packed - I got the last empty seat and there were people standing in the back. A very mixed audience, as Museum talks usually are - there were evolutionary biologists there from Nescent and the W.M.Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at NCSU, there were Museum staff, and then there were interested lay-people, museum-goers, with no formal background in science but interested and curious. It is not easy giving a talk to such a mixed audience - how to keep the…
clock | February 14, 2009John McKay has been blogging his research on the early days of mammoth discoveries in Asia and it is an amazing read! Who ever said that academic writing has to be dull!?
Fragments of my research - I:
Studying early knowledge of mammoths presents two problems. The first, is that the people who found mammoth remains were almost never literate and the people who wrote about mammoth remains were so far removed that they almost always got their information second or third hand or worse. The second problem is that, lacking a common name for mammoth remains, it is a huge task to sort out…
laelaps | February 13, 2009I cannot recall precisely why, but okapis were on my mind this morning. Specifically, I was wondering what had become of the first photograph ever taken of a live okapi, an illustration I had heard about but had been unable to find. I was first put on the trail of the picture when, last September, the Zoological Society of London declared that they had the first photographs ever taken of an okapi in its natural habitat.
I was immediately skeptical of this claim. Had no one ever photographed an okapi in the wild? In my efforts to find an answer to this question I stumbled across references to…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question:
How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems,…
gregladen | February 12, 2009In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of biogeography and evolution.
reposted
In the vicinity of Rio Tercero...
Hearing ... of the remains of one of the old giants, which a man told me he had seen on the banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the…
laelaps | February 12, 2009Two hundred years ago today, in the little country town of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Charles Robert Darwin was born. No one then could have known that, fifty years and nine months later, Charles would deliver a treatise that would forever change our understanding of our place in nature. That is precisely what he did, though, and today many are honoring the evolutionary synthesis Darwin presented in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (to say nothing of his other works).
Indeed, today we are not so much celebrating Darwin's birth (if this were his primary achievement we…