history of science
clock | March 3, 2008Ah, the quirky world of science! Archy gives us a tour of history of how various objects in the Solar System got named, and the intrigue and politics around it.
clock | February 28, 2008150 years ago Alfred Russel Wallace sent a letter to Charles Darwin, describing natural selection.
55 years ago, Watson and Crick announced the structure of DNA.
laelaps | February 22, 2008
John Martin's 1838 depiction of an Iguanodon attacked by a Megalosaurus.[source]
The other day I received a review copy of Ralph O'Connor's fantastic book The Earth on Show, and it has quickly become one of my most favorite tomes. (I know I'm a bit behind on reviews; I hope to get some done this weekend.) Reading it has definitely sparked plenty of thoughts about dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures as monsters, a post on which I'm working on presently (I'm away from my library at the moment, though, so I won't be able to dig into my bookshelves until later today). Descriptions of…
laelaps | February 21, 2008
Nebraska Man as restored in the Illustrated London News.
As I made my way around the lab table during my last human osteology practical, examining the yellowed and cracked teeth in the hopes that I'd be able to tell an upper molar from a lower one, I came across a particularly strange tooth. I had been told by the professor that 3rd molars ("wisdom teeth") can be strange and don't always conform to the rules that makes identifying other molars comparatively easy, but this specimen was simply bizarre. The arrangement of cusps and folds on the crown of the tooth didn't correspond to any of…
laelaps | February 19, 2008This morning I was browsing YouTube in an attempt to find some nutty creationist argument no one had seen yet, but instead I came across a few cable TV "debates" between creationists and defenders of evolution. They were painful to watch; the creationists proffered the same nonsense and the various skeptics/scientists often talked right past them and did not do a very good job at refuting the "freedom of inquiry" spin creationists love to use. This clip is a case in point;
Ouch. I don't have warm feelings for Anderson Cooper, either, as asking vague, "objective" questions that create such…
laelaps | February 17, 2008
The American mastodon (Mammut americanum), illustrated in one of Cuvier's memoirs.
I've had a bit of a rough weekend, but I did read something last night that brought a smile to my face. I was reading Paul Semonin's American Monster and I came across an unintentionally amusing quote from Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of Jefferson's letters to Willson Peale. The subject of the letter was what the name of the animal previously known as the "American incognitum," "Ohio animal," or mammoth should be called, Peale being unsure about a new moniker even though Georges Cuvier had shown the…
clock | February 17, 2008Yes and No. But the article is not from the 'Onion', it's from the Hot Medical News. It's about an onion, in a strange place....
clock | February 12, 2008As a part of the Darwin Day celebration the North Carolina Botanical Garden has organized a series of events for today, culminating in the lecture "Darwin the Botanist" by Dr.William Kimler, a Darwinian scholar and the professor of History (of Science) at NCSU:
Most people do not think of Charles Darwin as a botanist. He is famously connected to the animals of the Galapagos Islands, and to the subjects of animal and human evolution and behavior. But Darwin's famous curiosity did extend to plants. In fact, among his numerous publications are a book on carnivorous plants and one on orchid…
clock | February 11, 2008
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
- Charles R. Darwin, the closing paragraph of the Origin Of Species, 1st edition, 1859.
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clock | February 9, 2008Karen is excited this morning, reading the enormous Guardian edition full of good Darwiny goodness, chockful of articles by Dawkins and many others, as well as extracts from Darwin's works.
The only part I find a little too narrow is The best Darwinian sites on the web which mentions only a small handfull of such sites, e.g., Darwin Online, Darwin Correspondence Project, Darwin Day Celebration, AboutDarwin.com and Darwin Today (the last one yet to launch next month). I know, I know, these are the biggest and bestest, but there are so many others that I feel are snubbed by being left out -…
clock | January 26, 2008Olivia Judson wrote a blog post on her NYTimes blog that has many people rattled. Why? Because she used the term "Hopeful Monster" and this term makes many biologists go berserk, foaming at the mouth. And they will not, with their eye-sight fogged by rage, notice her disclaimer:
Note, however, that few modern biologists use the term. Instead, most people speak of large morphological changes due to mutations acting on single genes that influence embryonic development.
So, was Olivia Judson right or wrong in her article? Both. Essentially she is correct, but she picked some bad examples,…
clock | January 22, 2008From Sage Ross, via John Lynch come exciting news about a new Open Access Journal - Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science
Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. The journal aims to establish a platform for interdisciplinary discussion and debate about issues that concern the community of scholars in HPS and related fields.
Apart from selecting peer reviewed articles, the journal encourages a direct dialogue…
retrospectacle | January 3, 2008
What looks like a bevy of medieval torture tools is actually a early 19th century set of German neurosurgical tools. I think I would be terrified if a doctor walked into my room and opened that innocuous-looking velvet-lined case to reveal all those gleaming edges and tongs and probes, all meant for the purpose of carving the human brain.
It contain 17 compartments which accommodate a full set of instruments made from unplated polished steel, brass and horn. They are signed by Zitier, Heine and Sandill and it is likely that the boxed set was made specifically to accommodate these…
clock | December 17, 2007George Folkerts was one of those naturalists of the 'old school', interested in everything and excited about learning and sharing the knowledge throughout his life. He died on Friday, suddenly and unexpectedly, at the end of a typically busy day at Auburn University.
Anne-Marie was his student, one of thousands who had the privilege to learn from and with Folkerts, and one of those who now has to carry on his work. She wrote about him in two very touching posts: Huge loss on many levels and Classifying grief.
clock | December 15, 2007
Michael Barton has graduated! He got his degree in History of Science and will try to pursue a graduate degree in the same field. Hey, check out NC State as an option...
jstemwedel | December 4, 2007Following up on the earlier discussion here and at Chad's about the "fundamental difference" between chemistry and physics, I wanted to have a look at a historical moment that might provide some insight into the mood along the border between the two fields. It strikes me that the boundaries between chemistry and physics, as between any two fields which train their tools on some of the same parts of the world, are not fixed for all time but may shift in either direction. But this means that there are sometimes boundary disputes.
One locus of the dispute about boundaries is the chemical…
clock | December 2, 2007One of the greatest biologists of the 20th century, Seymour Benzer died last Friday. In his obituary post John Dennehy focuses on the bacteriophage work that led to deciphering of the genetic "alphabet", and so does Carl Zimmer.
Readers of my blog probably know the name more in the connection with the discovery of the first clock mutants in Drosophila, by Ron Konopka in Benzer's lab. You can read the paper itself (pdf) and watch a video in which Benzer explains it.
clock | November 24, 2007Or, Happy Evolution Day! It's time for a party!
It is easy to look up blog coverage - if you search for "Origin of Species" you mostly get good stuff, if you search for "Origin of the Species" you get creationist clap-trap as they cannot even copy and paste correctly (hence they are better known these days as cdesign proponentsists).
Pondering Pikaia and The Beagle Project Blog were first out of the gate this morning with wonderful posts.
Here is a recent book review of the Origin by someone who knows some biology and another one by someone who does not - both are quite nice and eye-opening.…
laelaps | November 3, 2007After many false starts I've actually started to write my "treatise" on evolution, some of the pages I've been turning out being in note form (I want to get the ideas down and then fill in the exact details later when I can pick up the proper reference books from the shelf) while others resemble actual passages and are in a near-finished form. My work isn't going to be a chronological overview of the history of life like many other books, but will instead take a more personal approach reflecting how I've come to understand evolution and how it proceeds. Differing rates of change, convergence…