history of science
laelaps | September 12, 2008I've been on about the history of science quite a bit lately (see here, here, and here), and as I've aired my gripes one point in particular keeps coming up again and again.
For various reasons the development of science (particularly those connected with evolution) in Victorian times has been extensively studied. There is still work to be done, but generally speaking there is an immense body of literature on science during the 19th century. This is particularly the case with geology & paleontology, associated sciences that came into their own during the 1800's and were important to the…
clock | September 12, 2008From SCONC:
Thursday, Sept. 25
11:30 a.m - 1 p.m
(Free lunch if you're early)
Lecture: "Shaking Up Computer History: Finding the Women of ENIAC"
Historian, computer programmer, telecommunications lawyer, and film producer Kathy Kleiman will speak about the women who programmed the first all-electronic programmable computer, ENIAC, over sixty years ago. Sponsored by Duke University's Office of the Provost, Office of Information Technology, Women in Science and Engineering, and RENCI.
Bryan Center, Von Canon A/B/C, Duke
laelaps | September 12, 2008... that scientists are not historians, as John Wilkins points out. (Blake has also written a good post on this topic.) It is easy (and even preferable) to clearly distinguish the good guys from the bad guys, and sweeping generalizations about old ideas are often included to give clout to modern notions.
I found this out first hand while researching T.H. Huxley's work on the connection between birds and reptiles. From popular books to technical papers, many scientists (including some of the most prominent names working on feathered dinosaurs) have said that Huxley first proposed that birds…
laelaps | September 10, 2008For over 120 years, the origin of whales vexed paleontologists. They were among the strangest of all mammals, creatures completely adapted to the sea with more in common with us than any fish (although at the beginning of the 19th century "common sense" said otherwise), and it was difficult to imagine how they evolved. If Charles Darwin was right and all life had evolved, different evolutionary paths diverging through time, then whales must have had some sort of traceable ancestry.
The discovery of fossil whales like Basilosaurus and Squalodon illustrated that the evolution of whales may have…
laelaps | September 9, 2008"... for in all the boundless realm of philosophy and science no thought has brought with it so much pain, or in the end has led to such a full measure of the joy which comes of intellectual effort and activity as that doctrine of Organic Evolution which will ever be associated, first and foremost, with the name of Charles Robert Darwin." - Edward Poulton, "Fifty Years of Darwinism" (1908)
Edward Poulton and T.C. Chamberlin may have been impressed by evolution by natural selection during the centenary celebration of Charles Darwin's (portrait on the lower right) birth in 1908, but…
clock | September 1, 2008A century ago, yet nothing has changed: William James, March 1903:
..............Human nature is once for all so childish that every reality becomes a sham somewhere, and in the minds of Presidents and Trustees the Ph.D. degree is in point of fact already looked upon as a mere advertising resource, a manner of throwing dust in the Public's eyes. "No instructor who is not a Doctor" has become a maxim in the smaller institutions which represent demand; and in each of the larger ones which represent supply, the same belief in decorated scholarship expresses itself in two antagonistic passions,…
clock | September 1, 2008Heart of Darwin:
Even the founding father of evolutionary theory was not born a gloomy old man. I began to wonder if it might be possible to walk Darwin's London and get a sense of him as a young man caught up in the fray. The landmarks of his life turned out to be all around.
laelaps | September 1, 2008When do you think that the following passage was first published?
John Doe guesses that evolution is true, but he rather wishes it were not. ... John Doe suspects from head-lines in his newspaper that evolution is a debatable theory, that it is being overthrown every six months, and that it may be discarded before long.
Those of you who saw the list of the new items I picked up yesterday probably guessed correctly; that the quote came from the 1925 popular book Evolution for John Doe by Henshaw Ward. Although written in 1925 it still (unfortunately) relevant, particularly when newspapers that…
laelaps | August 31, 2008
When I wrote my essay on violent interactions between prehistoric monsters in art, I thought I had touched on something intriguing. I penned a proposal for a more focused article on the topic and sent it out to magazines purported to feature articles at the intersection of science and culture. The response I got was almost uniformly the same. Not only were the magazines not interested in dinosaurs, but illustrations of dinosaurs were not art. As M.J.T. Mitchell explained in his interesting (yet deeply flawed) The Last Dinosaur Book, illustrations of prehistoric animals are often seen as "…
laelaps | August 28, 2008If there is any author associated with the book title On the Origin of Species it is most certainly Charles Darwin, yet Darwin was not the only person to pen a book beginning with those words. The full title of Darwin's first edition was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, but about two decades later another On the Origin of Species would be published bearing Thomas Henry Huxley's name. With the full title On the Origin of Species: Or, the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature, the book was a compilation…
laelaps | August 27, 2008
The famous fold-out plate that accompanied Pre-Adamite Man. Not the "dividing line" between ancient life and modern humans formed by the glaciers.
There is more to understanding the history of science than memorizing the dates when seminal books were published or knowing the names of the founders of particular disciplines. Science must be understood in context, and given the present public arguments about evolution it can be profitable to look back and see how science was being popularized circa 1859. While there were some books by scientists that were accessible to the public, many non-…
laelaps | August 27, 2008There's going to be a lot of talk about Darwin in the coming year. It's practically impossible to talk about evolution without tipping our hat to him in some way, but as Carl Zimmer recently pointed out during a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution (which he was kind enough to post) what we know about evolution does not begin and end with Darwin. The point is familiar but it still deserves reiteration, particularly since many efforts to communicate evolutionary science to the public fixate on Darwin and Darwin alone. As Carl himself said;
Darwin deserves celebrating, but that doesn't mean we…
laelaps | August 15, 2008Olivia Judson has a short column in the opinion section of the New York Times about the importance of teaching evolution in public schools. Like Judson, I am frustrated that evolution is often taught as a distinct biological phenomena at the end of the year, hardly presented as the concept that makes sense of the rest of biology (as Theodosius Dobzhansky once said). Rather than being a powerful idea that connects what is being taught it is often treated as little more than a footnote, if it is mentioned at all. Just because a school isn't mired in a creationist controversy doesn't mean that…
laelaps | August 14, 2008I never quite know what to say when people call me a scientist. I take it as a compliment, certainly, but I'm usually unsure as to whether I can apply the word to myself or not. Is a scientist defined by their journey through the academic meat grinder? By expert knowledge? By skeptical thought? The popular imagery of scientists is often of a socially-inept nerd or of a mad scientist, both archetypes representing scientists as being so detached from the public that they almost literally don't speak the same language. As I've said before I find this characterization unfortunate, but in order to…
laelaps | August 8, 2008Was Charles Darwin a genius? He certainly was extremely bright, but if we are to call him a genius on the basis of coming up with the theory of evolution by natural selection then we must recognize the genius of A.R. Wallace (and perhaps William Wells, Patrick Matthew, and Edward Blyth), as well. Although the idea of natural selection has developed independently several times in the past it was Darwin and Wallace who grasped the power of the theory as a driver for evolution, but even then it is Darwin who is the focal point of so many discussions about "transmutation." While there are…
clock | August 7, 2008...but if you do, I hope it was enjoyable! And edifying, of course. Kind of science that is amenable to experimentation at home.
clock | August 6, 2008Not on US television (Channel 4 in the UK only):
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
[Via]
laelaps | August 6, 2008Popularizers of science are faced with a daunting problem when it comes to communicating their enthusiasm for nature; their audience doesn't speak the same language. I don't mean this to say that scientists are inherently poor communicators or all deliver jargon-packed lectures that extinguish interest. Rather, many people don't have a grasp of the basic "alphabet" of science, and it is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that what you or I might consider a "basic" fact is something that is not so easily grasped to someone who hasn't heard it before. This is made all the more difficult when…
laelaps | August 4, 2008If I believed what my high school teachers taught me, from them I received the distilled wisdom of the ages. The knowledge was compartmentalized and packaged; there was no need for history in science class, at least outside of snarky little asides like how foolish Lamarck must have been to think evolution involved the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Everything involved the bare minimum, disparate notions offered up for consumption and near-immediate regurgitation, but very little understanding. There was no context, no narrative, and no sense.
There is very little I remember from my…
clock | August 4, 2008My SciBling John Lynch recently published a very interesting paper, on a topic close to my heart: Does Science Education Need the History of Science? by Graeme Gooday, John M. Lynch, Kenneth G. Wilson, and Constance K. Barsky. Isis, 2008, 99:322-330
This is a part of a broader focus issue of Isis on the topic of History of Science. I got the paper two weeks ago, but only now found some time to sit down and read it. And I was not disappointed! Fortunately for all of us, the entire paper is available online for free (yeah!), so you can read it in its entirety.
While using the fight against…