history of science
cmooney | February 12, 2009Over at Science Progress, I've been involved in putting together not one but two items timed for Darwin Day.
The first is an op-ed coauthored with my prof here at Princeton, D. Graham Burnett, who teaches Darwin. We argue for historical nuance, which leads one to reject the idea that Darwin should be considered an icon of conflict between science and religion. In fact, we call that idea "a hackneyed story, lacking in historical nuance and ultimately running counter to the project of drawing helpful lessons from the life of one of history's greatest scientists." A brief excerpt:
...Science-…
jwhitfield | February 12, 2009After careful reflection, I'd say it is worth reading The Origin of Species. Biology doesn't erase it's past, as I thought. It just forgets to cite it.
The Origin is biology's hub -- all the routes that the science has taken since seem to pass through it. This, I think, is partly because Darwin had such a complete vision of the living world, and partly because his ignorance of some areas was so great that he had to hedge his bets, and mention everything in just in case.
The book is so rich that I could have written about entirely different subjects in each post.
To give just one example, in…
cmooney | February 11, 2009This is a post simply to ask for comment on my last three (here, here, here) as a kind of genre exercise. Each post has been about my new foray into studying the history of science here at Princeton and testing out what it's like to be a student again. (The most insane kind of culture shock, is the short answer.)
Anyway, this is a very different kind of thing for the Intersection, although certainly not outside of its mandate. And so far, I like the response it has generally prompted. But I don't have to blog about the history of science for the next three to four months...it's just a…
gregladen | February 11, 2009Everyone knows about Darwin's Finches, of the Galapagos Islands. But of course, Darwin made observations of birds throughout his travels on The Beagle. Here, I present a number of passages from The Voyage that include some of these observations.
Struthio Rhea
I will now give an account of ... the Struthio Rhea, or South American ostrich. This bird is well known to abound over the plains of Northern Patagonia, and the united provinces of La Plata. It has not crossed the Cordillera; but I have seen it within the first range of mountains on the Uspallata plain.... The ordinary habits of the…
laelaps | February 11, 2009There has been an awful lot of hand-wringing going on over Charles Darwin lately. Some have picked up a long-running meme and proclaim "One hundred fifty years without Darwin is too long!" while others declare that we should kill every Darwin we meet. Just as every American president must "Get right with Lincoln" every biologist must "Get right with Darwin" in one way or another. (Thus far, I think Ed is the only one who has really got it right.)
What I find particularly amusing, however, is that those who assert that we must sweep Darwin under the rug to save biology do little to produce the…
jwhitfield | February 11, 2009So, what is there left to say? Not much. As its title suggests, the fourteenth and final chapter of the origin, 'Recapitulation and Conclusion', mostly restates things that Darwin has already said, often several times.
This relentless piling, sorting and re-arranging of evidence can make Darwin seem a little OCD, like an intellectual version of Wall-E. But he also knows that beneath all the case studies, there's a logical core to evolution by natural selection, even if he can't put it in an equation. Darwin brackets this chapter by showing that, if you accept the most basic evidence the…
clock | February 10, 2009Lots of excitement this week on science blogs and other fans of reality.
The biggest biggy of the biggest biggies is Blog For Darwin blog swarm - submit your entries here.
But there are some other, smaller initiatives out there. For instance, this Darwin Meme. And Darwinfest haiku contest.
And if you are blogging more seriously and sholarly about Darwin's place in history, or his publications, then certainly that would fit into the next Giant's Shoulders carnival.
On Twitter, follow and use the #Darwin hashtag. On FriendFeed, I am assuming that the Life Scientists room will be the place to…
clock | February 10, 2009This will be on the campus of UNC Wilmington and I'll do my best to be there if possible:
Darwin's Legacy: Evolution's Impact on Science and Culture
March 19-21, 2009
UNCW's Evolution Learning Community will be hosting "Darwin's Legacy: Evolution's Impact on Science and Culture," a multidisciplinary student conference on March 19-21, 2009.
The conference will be a unique opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts who are conducting research or creative endeavors related to evolution to present their research, investigate…
gregladen | February 10, 2009Charles Darwin wrote a book called Geological Observations on South America. Since Fitzroy needed to carry out intensive and extensive coastal mapping in South America, and Darwin was, at heart, a geologist more than anything else (at least during the Beagle's voyage), this meant that Darwin would become the world's expert on South American geology. Much of The Voyage is about his expeditions and observations. Part of this, of course, was figuring out the paleontology of the region.
reposted with minor revisions
Bahia Blanca is a port at the northern end of Patagonia. Chapter V of The…
cmooney | February 10, 2009In the last post, I introduced Francis Bacon--chiefly via the New Atlantis--and described a very interesting, if ultimately perhaps too strong, feminist reaction. But it's as though some feminists are Bacon's only enemies.
Neoconservative bioethicists, for example, see Bacon as the place where it all started to go wrong. Leon Kass, the great granddaddy of this school, and first head of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, took Bacon to task in his 1985 book Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs, a polemic against many new reproductive and biomedical technologies. As Kass…
cmooney | February 10, 2009
Male chauvinist pig? Or worse?
I haven't even read Copernicus yet, and probably won't at least until this weekend. As far as my reading goes, the scientific revolution hasn't yet started and I'm still stuck with Ptolemaic glasses on.
History 293, though, is churning away, and yesterday we did our section on Francis Bacon and The New Atlantis. (Not satisfied with the course packet excerpt, this is the version I ordered from Amazon.) Man, here was a dude who, although writing in the early 1600s, sounds stunningly "modern"--a term I must now put in quotes due to the fact that I'm studying…
laelaps | February 10, 2009
A restoration of Dunkleosteus, from Fishes, Living and Fossil.
About 370 million years ago, at a time when creatures like Tiktaalik were wallowing in the muddy shallows of freshwater lakes and rivers, the sea covered much of what is now North America and Europe. These waters were home to a diversity of fish, but among the most fearsome was Dunkleosteus, a 20-foot long terror with sharp plates around its moth that created a shear that could slice through the body of any animal unlucky enough to be its prey.
The creature we now call Dunkleosteus used to go by a few different names, however.…
clock | February 10, 2009No, really, it was Anne-Marie's idea. She started it! Yeah, don't look at me!
Charles Darwin is on Twitter, Alfred Wallace is on Twitter, Richard Owen is on Twitter, even Bishop Wilberforce (aka Soapy Sam) is on Twitter. Where is Huxley?
We are already having fun retweeting non-existent Darwin tweets ;-) I hope the real Darwin and others respond with humorous stuff:
@BoraZ I can see it; "@arwallace: damn!"
Bora: @rowen next time I'll block you!
BoraZ: RT @cdarwin Please: need info on modification/domestication in pigeons for a book
BoraZ: RT @cdarwin w00t! Going on a cruise: Argentina,…
gregladen | February 9, 2009We're half way through Darwin Month, and only a tiny ways through the voyage. Need to hurry up! So, let's skip ahead a bit and hit the Gauchos....
reposted with minor modifications
Well, you don't really want to hit at Gaucho ... they hit back rather hard....
The Gauchos are the cowboys of the so-called Southern Cone and Pampas. The Gauchos are a Latin American version the horse mounted pastoralists that emerge wherever four things are found together: Grasslands, horses, people and cattle. Like all horse-mounted pastoralists, they have been known to have certain cultural tendencies or…
gregladen | February 9, 2009Eventually, the Beagle headed south to the area of Uruguay and Argentina, still on the Atlantic Coast, where extensive mapping of the coastal waters was required.
The Parana and Uruguay Rivers meet in the Atlantic estuary known as Rio de la Plata. On the north side of this huge body of water is Montevideo, Uruguay, and on the south side, the northern coast of Argentina. There is an interesting story linked with early European exploration of this area. A Spanish ship is the first known European craft to explore La Plata. The ship's captain and a small crew went inland, and never came…
clock | February 9, 2009
As you may remember, this week we have a special guest here in the Triangle - Carl Zimmer is coming to enjoy NC BBQ and, since he's already here on the 12th, to give the Darwin Day talk at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh (directions):
"Darwin and Beyond: How Evolution Is Evolving"
February 12, 2009
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Please join us for a Darwin Day presentation by Carl Zimmer. Mr. Zimmer is well known for his popular science writing, particularly his work on evolution. He has published several books including Soul Made Flesh, a history of the brain, Evolution: The…
laelaps | February 9, 2009
William Buckland, from Reminiscences of Oxford.
In the year 1166 a woman quietly passed away in a cave on Mount Pelligrino, Sicily. It was the end she chose for herself. At the age of twelve she had left home to become a hermit and devote her life to worshiping God, and her remains were left to rot in the isolated cave that was her home. Her name was Rosalia.
Then, in 1624, a deadly epidemic spread through Palermo. It was at this time that a sick woman claimed to have seen a vision of Rosalia, and for the plague to be ended, the apparition instructed, Rosalia's bones would have to be…
cmooney | February 9, 2009So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore.
The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few; they are Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species--which I already own and have read, although right now they're somewhere in the middle of the country in transit--and Michael Adas's Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell Studies in…
laelaps | February 6, 2009
The African lungfish Protopterus, from A Text-Book of Zoology.
Standing before the Linnean Society in 1839, the celebrated British anatomist Richard Owen delivered a detailed description of a strange new creature. Owen called it Lepidosiren annectans, an African relative of an eel-like animal that was found by the Austrian explorer Johan Natterer in the depths of the Amazon jungle in 1837. The naturalist sent two specimens back to the Vienna Museum where they were quickly described by Leopold Fitzinger under the name Lepidosiren paradoxa.
Fitzinger considered the organisms to be "…
laelaps | February 5, 2009
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February 12, 2009 will mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and the naturalist shares his birthday with Abraham Lincoln. There will surely be a few articles comparing the two famous figures, particularly their views on race and slavery, but such articles will probably miss the greatest commonality shared between them. Both men have been written about extensively but are still poorly understood by…