history of science
jwhitfield | January 12, 2009
Man, this guy didn't know anything.
I don't mean that as an insult. Darwin, as he admits, knew almost nothing about inheritance, about how variation is produced, or about the origins and history of domesticated plants and animals. You'd think that would be a handicap in using domestication as an analogy for evolution.
And yet, in chapter 1 of the Origin, 'Variation Under Domestication', Darwin uses what little knowledge he has so deftly that nowhere do you feel his conclusions are outstripping his data. This, believe me, is quite a skill, both in a scientist and a writer. What, he asks, is…
clock | January 8, 2009Three chapters a week.
First edition (if you know what is good for you).
Here.
With John Whitfield.
First, read this and this as mental preparation.
laelaps | January 8, 2009
A mass of tusks, teeth, and bones. From William Buckland's Reliquiae diluvianae.
The problem with a lot of folks tapped as "authorities" on Charles Darwin is that they don't seem to know much about history. We assume that eminent evolutionary biologists and vocal personalities in the creation/evolution public controversy have a firm grasp of the context and content of Darwin's work, but they often do not. I would much rather hear what Janet Browne, Adrian Desmond, or Martin Rudwick have to say about Victorian science than E.O. Wilson, James Watson, or Richard Dawkins. (Stephen Jay Gould…
jwhitfield | January 7, 2009Hi! My name is John. I've got a PhD in evolutionary biology, and I've spent much of the past decade writing about evolutionary ideas, as applied to everything from literary criticism, to language, to anti-terror policy, and even on occasion to biology. And I've got a confession - I've never read the Origin of Species.
Do I shock you? Good.
I am not proud of this (really, I'm not), but if my professional life has been less stellar than it might have been, it's not for want of reading Darwin. Here's why. Darwin was working at the dawn of biology. He had none of the specialist knowledge and…
clock | January 7, 2009
From Blog For Darwin:
February 12th-15th, 2009 participating bloggers around the world will be celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth (February 12th, 1809) with a BLOG SWARM, in which posts will be aggregated on BLOG FOR DARWIN to be kept as a resource for educators, students, and others.
CLICK HERE or read below to learn how you can participate!
Yes, there's a month left, but I hope you participate.
clock | January 4, 20092009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species, so a lot of organizations are going full steam in promoting science, evolution and the history of science this year. Here are some of the examples:
The New Scientist has published Darwin's dangerous idea: Top 10 evolution articles (see Larry for some commentary).
Nature is ready for the celebration with a special page - Darwin 200 - collecting all the articles. Check out the most recent one - 15 evolutionary gems (pdf)
Over on The Loom - a three-part interview with Ken Miller…
clock | December 30, 2008Three Obligatory Readings of the Day:
Brian Switek: Stephen Jay Gould's view of life
Larry Moran: An Adaptationist View of Stephen Jay Gould
Greg Laden: How fast does evolution happen?
laelaps | December 30, 2008
Shortly after my wife and I were married in the summer of 2006, but before our apartment was lined with overstocked bookshelves, we used to make at least one weekly stop at the local public library. While she browsed a wide array of sections, I invariably scaled the back staircase to the science section on the second floor. The question was not whether I wanted to read a science book, but which one.
One of the first I picked up was Stephen Jay Gould's essay collection The Lying Stones of Marrakech. Rightly or wrongly, I recognized him as the voice of evolutionary science, a topic that had…
clock | December 30, 2008It is with great sadness that I learned that Dr.Greg Cahill died a few days ago, at the Houston airport, waiting for his flight. I have met Greg at several meetings of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms and while, those being fairly large meetings, we never had big one-on-one conversations, I remember him as a humble and friendly person, beloved by everyone.
He started his scientific career in Mike Menaker's lab, studying the entrainment of the mammalian clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus in vitro. Making preparations of SCN and optic tracts and doing electrophysiology on such…
clock | December 21, 2008There was a good reason why the form and format, as well as the rhetoric of the scientific paper were instituted the way they were back in the early days of scientific journals. Science was trying to come on its own and to differentiate itself from philosophy, theology and lay literature about nature. It was essential to develop a style of writing that is impersonal, precise, sharply separating data from speculations, and that lends itself to replication of experiments.
The form and format of a scientific paper has evolved towards a very precise and very universal state that makes scientist-…
clock | December 19, 2008January issue of Scientific American is devoted to Darwin's 200th birthday and contains several excellent articles. Check out The Latest Face of Creationism in the Classroom by Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott for starters.
But beware, there are other (and I would say better) ways of thinking about some of the issues in some of the articles, so check out what Larry has to say about Why Everyone Should Learn the Theory of Evolution and Testing Natural Selection. You may not agree 100%, but you need to think about it.
clock | December 17, 2008Peter McGrath, Michael Barton and Mike Haubrich brought my attention to a new book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. Their previous biography of Darwin is arguably the best (and there are hundreds of Darwin biographies out there, many more to be published next year as well). The new book, Darwin's Sacred Cause is a result of a lot of study by the duo, especially since the publication of all the Darwin's correspondence. The new thesis is that the driving force behind Darwin's work on evolution was his disgust with racism:
"This book, by Darwin's most celebrated modern biographers, gives a…
clock | December 13, 2008As you know, H.M. died last week.
Listen to this brief (9 minutes) NPR Science Friday podcast - you will be able to hear Henry Gustav Molaison's voice. But most importantly, he has donated his brain to further scientific study. His brain will be sliced and stained and studied at The Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego.
But the way they are going to do it will be in a very Open Science manner. Dr. Jacopo Annese, who is leading the project said, in this interview, that the entire process will be open - there will be a forum or a blog where researchers from around…
laelaps | December 11, 2008
One of the most frustrating factors in studying early descriptions of apes is the multiple meanings of words like "baboon," "Jocko," "Pongo," "mandrill," and "Orang-Outang." Even though we now know apes are our closest living relatives, it has only been recently (within the last 250 years or so) that we have come to know very much about them. Even after they receiving scientific names and the distinct varieties were figured out, there was more myth, legend, and hearsay about them than fact until the latter half of the 20th century!
The confusion over apes in descriptions from the 18th and…
laelaps | December 10, 2008
Up until about three years ago, I had never even heard of creationism or intelligent design. I thought that, for as long as I could remember, evolution had been agreed upon as the way in which life on earth came to exist in its present form. I was wrong, and at my first introduction to creationism I dove into the literature of groups like Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research to find out why they believed what they did. I didn't agree with them, but at least it was interesting.
It didn't take long for me to get bored, and the more I learn about the history of creationism…
laelaps | December 8, 2008
An Ichthyosaurus, from Buckland's Geology and Mineralogy.
Researchers have often made the accumulation of scientific understanding analogous to the construction of a building (Darwin, for instance, did it in the conclusion of Animals and Plants Under Domestication), and William Buckland was no exception. In discussing objections to knowledge gleaned from geology in his contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises, Buckland wrote;
It must be candidly admitted that the season has not yet arrived when a perfect theory of the whole earth can be fixedly and finally established, since we have not…
drorzel | December 8, 2008I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of Competence Fiction), and a pop-science book titled The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Came of Age by Louisa Gilder, because it looked fairly relevant to my own book-in-progress.
Amusingly, my RSS feeds yesterday brought me the latest in a series of posts in which ZapperZ waxes peevish about the book…
clock | December 5, 2008Everyone who's ever taken a Neuroscience class in college remembers the strange case of H.M.
H.M. suffered from epilepsy. Back in 1953, his brain was operated on - some large chunks (the hippocampi) were removed. Epilepsy was gone. So was his memory.
He could remember his life before surgery, but could not form any new memories. More specifically, he could not remember any new events ('declarative memory'), things that happened to him. Whatever he experienced years, months, weeks, days, hours, even minutes before, was forever lost. Every moment was a fresh moment. Every day a new…
laelaps | December 5, 2008In conversations about the sad state of science literacy in America, Sputnik usually comes up. (It's not at Godwin's Law status yet, but it's close.) The argument is that we either are in a "Sputnik moment" that researchers can use to make the case for greater investment in science, or that we need such an event to reinforce the importance of science in this country.
The problem is, as David Goldston pointed out in this week's issue of Nature, that the story isn't so simple. America was not a scientific backwater at the time of the launch of Sputnik, and (as is often the case with events said…