history of science
clock | June 30, 2008On this day 150 years ago essays by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles R. Darwin were read at the meeting of the Linnean Society in London. This was the first time in history that the idea of natural selection was presented to the world.
George Beccaloni and Wesley R. Elsberry wrote excellent pieces commemorating the anniversary.
clock | June 30, 2008Something happened in Siberia 100 years ago - exactly, on this day. I always found the event very intriguing. If you want to learn everything one needs and wants to know about the event, written in a way that will make you excited - go and read Archy's latest masterpiece (hmmm, anthology-worthy?).
laelaps | June 30, 2008[Note:] I realized I posted this entry very recently, only three months prior to today, but since it is the anniversary of the Oxford debate/lectures I thought it would be fitting to throw this entry up again (with a few minor edits). I have also included two caricatures of Huxley (top) and Wilberforce (bottom) to add to the aesthetics of this piece. I hope you enjoy it
Sometimes textbook cardboard refuses to disintegrate. According to scientific lore on this day in 1860 T.H. Huxley singlehandedly slew Samuel "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce during a debate at Oxford in the sweltering heat, causing a…
laelaps | June 24, 2008The American Museum of Natural History Research Library has recently put up a website ("Picturing the Museum") containing hundreds of black & white photos of museum exhibits, dioramas, and behind the scenes prep. It is a treasure trove of photographic information; I just wish I could have seen some of these exhibits first hand! The behind the scenes photos are some of the most interesting, though, like this photo of the cleaning of an elephant skin;
American Museum of Natural History Library http://images.library.amnh.org Image # 280023
Here are a few links to some other favorites,…
laelaps | June 24, 2008In an essay called "The Reception of the 'Origin of Species'" printed in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (and reprinted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley), "Darwin's Bulldog" T.H. Huxley described the intellectual shock of understanding Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection;
As I have already said, I imagine that most of those of my contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter, were very much in my own state of mind -- inclined to say to both Mosaists and Evolutionists, "a plague on both your houses!" and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and…
clock | June 21, 2008Are you writing your history-of-science posts yet? Let's make the inaugural edition of The Giants' Shoulders big and good!
laelaps | June 20, 2008
As I was skimming through Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), a book that injects a fair amount of Lamarckian evolution into a children's moral fable (the character Mother Carey "make[s] creatures make themselves."), I came across a section that made me grin.
During the course of the story the protagonist Tom is told that he needs to go see the Gairfowl, an old Great auk bird of high breeding (the Great auk just having become extinct in 1852. Thanks to Allen for the correction about the meaning of "Gairfowl."). I do not know what Kingsley thought of the evolution of birds (T.H.…
laelaps | June 20, 2008During my first visits to the American Museum of Natural History in New York the only thing that impressed me more than the skeletons of the dinosaurs was the sculpture of the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), posed in a dive above the Hall of Ocean Life. I had seen pictures of blue whales in books and eagle-eye views of them in documentaries, but the sheer size of the cetacean astounded me (especially because I was still so small!). No trip to the museum is complete without at least peeking into the recently refurbished Milstein Hall of Ocean Life to see the whale, but what most people don…
clock | June 19, 2008As making historical papers OA is something I am very interested in, I am watching with great interest, as Jonathan Eisen attempts to make all of his father's scientific publications freely available. I think we will learn a lot from his experience about copyright, fuzzy laws, attitudes of different publishers, etc., and can use that knowledge to help more old papers see the light of day online for everyone to see, read and use.
jstemwedel | June 19, 2008In a follow-up to her review of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women scientists speak out by Emily Monosson, Alison George decided to investigate how many women who won Nobels also did the motherhood thing:
I started at the first Nobel prize awarded to a woman: Marie Curie, in 1903. To my surprise, she had 2 children (as well as 2 Nobel prizes). Her daughter, Irene, only managed one prize in 1935, but also produced two offspring. And so it went on. Gerty Cori (Nobel prize for in physiology or medicine 1947, 1 kid), Maria Geoppert-Mayer (Nobel prize for physics in 1963, 2 kids)…
laelaps | June 18, 2008
An illustration of Koch's reconstructed "Missourium."
On January 12, 1839, an interesting article appeared in the pages of pages of the Philadelphia paper the Presbyterian. Written by Albert Koch (although it appeared in the paper as unsigned), the article made the bold claim that the remains of a mammoth had been discovered along with stone tools in Gasconade country, Missouri, proving that Native Americans had lived alongside the extinct animals. Looking at vestiges of the ancient hunt, Koch proposed that the mammoth had sunk into mud or some other trap and keeled over at which point the…
clock | June 16, 2008In the wake of great success of the Classic Science Papers Challenge, gg of Skulls in the Stars and I have decided to turn this into a regular monthly blog carnival.
Thus, gg has set up a carnival homepage and issued the call for posts and hosts.
You can read more about the carnival - named "The Giants' Shoulders" - on the About page. In brief, once a month, the carnival will alight on one of the participating blogs. What kinds of blog posts are eligible?
Classic Papers - your blog post should describe what is in a paper that is considered to be a classical paper, or explanation why you…
laelaps | June 9, 2008In a very interesting post about agamids and chameleons at Tetrapod Zoology, my fellow ScienceBlogger Darren states the following;
One of the greatest fallacies held about evolutionary theory is that fossils are essential in demonstrating the existence of change (don't believe me? Look at 'creation science' books like Duane Gish's Evolution: the Challenge of the Fossil Record and Evolution: the Fossils Say No!). Of course fossils do indeed show how characters were accrued and modified over time, and it's that 'time' aspect of the data that they shed crucial information on. But we most…
laelaps | June 6, 2008I have no idea where it came from (I assume it was made by PBS), but I just happened to stumble across this program all about Stephen Jay Gould called "This View of Life."
Watching the documentary is a bit strange because I never knew the young, gangly Gould. The first time I ever saw him on television (although I had no idea who he was), he was a stouter man talking about paleontology in a European museum, Palaeotherium being associated with the memory although I can't really recall how. In any case, it's definitely interesting to watch this program now, and I do appreciate the brief…
laelaps | June 5, 2008
The skull of Machairodus, from Owen's A History of British Fossil Mammals, and Birds.
Digging through the seemingly endless mass of 19th century paleontological literature that I have collected via Google Books, I happened across a very interesting quote from Richard Owen in his 1846 textbook A History of British Fossil Mammals, and Birds. Earlier in the week, while researching William Buckland's relationship to the bewitching "Red Lady" during the 1820's, I was struck by some of the rhetorical techniques used by Buckland to diminish the importance of the skeleton. Among them was the…
laelaps | June 4, 2008Even though I said that I had more pertinent material to read than discourses about the perceived clash of science & Christian theology, I contradicted myself by picking up John Hedley Brooke's Science and Religion last night. As I have become increasingly aware during the course of my reading, the present climate of argument around science & religion carries a tone of conflict and warfare that has been maintained for over 100 years the more. It is fashionable to invoke such imagery, religion slowly crumbling under the weight of science, but a historical perspective reveals…
laelaps | June 2, 2008Of all the concepts of nature I have so far encountered in my research on the history of evolution as an idea, few (if any) are as virulent as the Great Chain of Being. Although Stephen Jay Gould claimed that White's 1799 book An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables represents the last gasp of the Great Chain of Being the idea was not simply discarded or forgotten. While the concept ultimately failed to make sense in terms of the ordering of nature it found a refuge in evolutionary theory, particularly in considerations of how humans are related to…
clock | June 1, 2008More and more societies are compiling their 'classical' papers.
Here is another one.
And here I wrote, among else:
"In discussions of Open Access, we always focus on brand new papers and how to make them freely available for readers around the world as well as for people who want to mine and reanalyse the data using robots. But we almost never discuss the need to make the old stuff available. Yet we often lament that nobody reads or cites anything older than five years. Spending several years reading everything published in the field in the 20th century up until about 1995 (as well as some…
clock | May 29, 2008I was wondering what to do about the Classic Papers Chellenge. The deadline is May 31st, and I am so busy (not to mention visiting my dentist twice week which incapacitates me for the day, pretty much), so I decided to go back to the very beginning because I already wrote about it before and could just cannibalize my old posts: this one about the history of chronobiology with an emphasis on Darwin's work, and this one about Linnaeus' floral clock and the science that came before and immediately after it.
In the old days, when people communed with nature more closely, the fact that plants and…
clock | May 27, 2008The deadline for the Classic Papers Chellenge is looming - the end of May. Submit it to Skulls in the Stars and have it collected here. As I mentioned before, I'd like to see this turn into a monthly blog carnival. It would have some kind of criteria developed, but perhaps those should be flexible. Let's say that a "classic paper" is one that gave birth to a new discipline (or subdiscipline), or rewrote the textbooks, and overturned a long-held pernicious dogma of some kind. And let's say it is more than 30 years old, though this may be waived in cases of really young disciplines.
As I…