history of science
laelaps | December 3, 2008Last week I wrote about the brief life and death of John Daniel, the "civilized gorilla." I wanted to know more about him, chiefly whether I could still see him at the AMNH or not, so I sent a query to the museum. Here's the information I got back;
Gorilla gorilla gorilla
From: Barnum and Bailey
Gender: Male
Museum #: 54084
Mounted on exhibit, 3rd floor Primates Hall
He's still there (or, rather, his skin is), behind glass in the gorilla-poop-colored display in the Hall of Primates. In about two weeks I'll be heading into the city, to see the Japanese macaques at the Central Park Zoo in…
laelaps | December 1, 2008
During the past week I've been tracking down information about various performing primates and famous apes like "Consul" and John Daniel, but as I did so something kept bothering me. Didn't the Bronx Zoo, sometime early in the 20th century, display a person from Africa in the Monkey House?
Although my recollection was a little fuzzy, it turns out that a man named Ota Benga (a pygmy from Congo) was kept at the Bronx Zoo in 1907. Publicly heralded as a "missing link," he was kept in a cage with other primates, and visitors flocked to see him.
Ota had been brought to America by S.P. Verner, and…
laelaps | November 29, 2008
It wasn't so long ago that, if the price was right, you could buy an ape. Plucked from Africa and sent to Europe and America, apes often changed hands several times for large sums of money before expiring after only a few weeks, months, or years. Writing of the attempts of the Bronx Zoo to keep gorillas at the dawn of the 20th century, for instance, William Hornaday doubted whether it would ever be possible to successfully house gorillas for more than a few weeks. When you got news of a gorilla arriving at the zoo, you made haste to see it.
Only some of the apes were housed in zoos, however…
laelaps | November 26, 2008
"Fighting the Mammoth," from The Rise of Man.
In efforts to understand evolution, identification of transitional forms has been extremely important. Presently the fossil record offers ample evidence of how one type of organism was modified into something distinct, but has not always been so. In the past, development seemed like it might provide clues as to what the ancestors of particular organisms looked like via the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" argument.
Simply put, the concept envisions that during development organisms "replay" their evolution. This was particularly tied to…
clock | November 25, 2008For instance, the Earth going around the Sun instead of vice versa. Or Copernicus starting the Scientific Revolution which eventually brought about the technology - DNA fingerprinting - that could be used to positively identify Copernicus' remains.
laelaps | November 25, 2008
When I last visited Sea World in Orlando, Florida, I saw the Shamu show. It didn't matter that the original Shamu died in 1971; she was so iconic that the biggest of orcas at each theme park is still presented under her name. (The individual I saw was actually called Tilikum.)
This kind of symbolic naming is nothing new. It has been going on with performing animals for over 100 years. One example was Consul, a performing chimpanzee (or, rather, a series of performing chimpanzees). As I have written about previously, the public was very interested in gorillas, cavemen, and "missing links"…
laelaps | November 24, 2008
149 years ago today, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was released to the public. It was instantly sold out. For a "secret" formulation of a mechanism by which evolution could occur, there certainly was a lot of excitement about it, even if On the Origin was not a book Darwin had intended on publishing.
Please do not misunderstand; Darwin had long been working on a volume about evolution by natural selection. It was going to be called, simply enough, Natural Selection, but A.R. Wallace forced Darwin's hand. 150 years ago this past summer, an essay on…
clock | November 23, 2008This is in March and close enough - Wilmington, NC - for me to go:
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 graduate study opportunities, network, enhance their resumes, and enrich the body of knowledge…
clock | November 21, 2008Check out the new NHM's interactive Voyage of the Beagle:
[Hat-tip, of course, to Karen]
laelaps | November 21, 2008
"The Lion of the Season," from Mr. Punch's Victorian Era.
As Charles Darwin was readying to release his treatise on evolution by natural selection (which was turned into an abstract rushed into press in 1859), Richard Owen was trying to separate humans from other primates. In 1857 he proposed that we belonged to our own distinct subclass, and it was peculiar structures in our brains that made all the difference.
That our species were more cognitively developed than apes was clear, but did our supposed superiority stem from something anatomical, unique to us alone? Owen thought so, the…
laelaps | November 18, 2008
For nearly 150 years, various critics and authorities have been predicting the death-knell of "Darwinism." It is a crumbling ideological edifice, they say, and it will soon collapse. Just as predictions about Armageddon have turned out to be invariably wrong, so too has the wailing and whining of many of Darwin's critics, but there was a time when evolution by natural selection was being eclipsed.
As I have said before, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection served to stir debate rather than resolve how evolution occurred once and for all. It was widely appreciated as a…
laelaps | November 17, 2008
"The Young Monkey," from Funny People, or the True Origin of Species
When I refer to a book with the phrase Origin of Species in the title, it is generally understood that I am talking about the volume by Charles Darwin, published in 1859, that was so important that we are still avidly discussing it almost 150 years after it was published. Like any popular hit, however, there were other tomes that tried to capitalize on the fame of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Earlier this year I mentioned one such title; a print version of some of T.H. Huxley's popular lectures…
clock | November 15, 2008The Giant's Shoulders #5 - The Magic (Blog) Circle! - is now up on PodBlack Cat blog! Enjoy the best recent blogging on the History of Science.
laelaps | November 14, 2008
For over 300 years, our species has recognized the similarities between ourselves and other primates, particularly apes. For most of that time scholars in the West have attempted to keep our species cordoned off from our relatives, either through the static hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being or the possession of particular traits (from a hippocampus minor in the brain to a soul). Evolutionary theory, however, required researchers to look for similarities instead of stark differences. Which apes were our closest relatives?
It has only been recently that the two living species of…
clock | November 14, 2008Go here (requires a 5-second process of signing up for FriendFeed, a move you will not regret, if you want to comment instead of just reading) and participate in liveblogging as the Beagle Project crew visits the opening of the Darwin exhibition.
laelaps | November 12, 2008
A particularly interesting line of fundamentalist Christian argument against evolution is that of "devilution." There was more of a tendency for life (particularly humanity) to degenerate rather than progress upwards. Where the argument originated among creationists, I have yet to discover, but during the beginning of the 20th century some considered it more reasonable that apes were degenerate humans than humans derived apes. This is not to say that they actually believed this, but that they directly tied evolution to causing "backsliding" and moral decay, a more vivid version of the "If we…
laelaps | November 11, 2008
Lately I have been a bit fixated on the arguments over evolution & creationism in America during the beginning of the 20th century (see here and here). As a result of further digging, I came across a few more resources that raise some interesting questions.
First is a short article from the Theological Monthly published in 1922. Entitled "Is Darwinism Still Popular?" the piece attacked scientists and members of the media who ridiculed folks like William Jennings Bryan for their belief in creationism. Much of it would sound awfully familiar to anyone acquainted with the present creation…
laelaps | November 10, 2008
The skulls of Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal compared, from Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man.
Our species is nothing if not vain. The natural world is saturated with wonders, yet the phenomena of most concern are those directly relating to us. Even in the long public argument over evolution, where the ancestry of whales and birds is often quarreled over, our own ancestry is the real reason for the contention. What makes evolution so threatening to some is that it applies to every organism and does not allow us to draw a line in the sand between us and the rest of life on this planet. We are…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2008It turns out that the session on electronic scholarship I mentioned didn't really get into the defining characteristics of electronic scholarship, nor how it might differ from "digital media". (Part of this had to do with trying to fit spiels from nine speakers into a 75 minute session while still allowing time for discussion. You do the math.)
Anyway, one of the panelists, Stephen Greenberg, is from the National Library of Medicine, and he gave us a peek at some digital materials that warm my old-timey, hide-bound heart. Specifically, I am ga-ga for the Turning The Pages project.
Take…