history of science
laelaps | November 4, 2009
A simplified, silhouette version of the "March of Progress."
The "March of Progress", the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as representing evolution, but the tragedy of this is that it conveys a view of life that does not resemble our present understanding of life's history. Stephen Jay Gould addressed this two decades ago in his book Wonderful Life, in which he wrote;
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the…
bioephemera | October 29, 2009
From the wonderful blog Letters of Note: in 1957, schoolboy Denis Cox generously shared his rocket blueprints with "A Top Scientist" at Australia's Woomera Weapons Research Establishment.
The important stuff (Rolls Royce jet engines, "Air Torpeados") is all there, although Denis explicitly gave the Top Scientists his permission to "put in other details" themselves, no doubt due to the lack of space for more detailed blueprints on his lined notebook paper ("I have discovered a truly marvelous proof, which this margin is too narrow to contain. . . ") Denis says modestly, "I thought it would…
sb admin | October 28, 2009
Oliver Morton wrote a delightful book all about photosynthesis called Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet, which I reviewed earlier this year for Search Magazine (R.I.P.) under the title "A Song for the Heartless". One of my favorite passages in the book beautifully explains the difference between art and science:
Discoveries feel determined. They are there to be made, and if one person doesn't, another will. This doesn't lessen the achievement; indeed it can give it spice. The thought that 'this is the way the world is--and I am the first to see it as such' is an intoxicating…
laelaps | October 28, 2009
Skeletons of the early horse-relative Eohippus (left) and modern Equus (right). From Animals of the Past by Lucas.
During the early 20th century many biologists were considering a variety of mechanisms other than natural selection as the primary cause of evolutionary change. The trouble was that many of those researchers were often vague when it came to the details of how such alternative processes might work. Such was the case with paleontologist Frederic Augustus Lucas, who apparently preferred to think of evolution as variations stimulated by the environment building upon themselves…
laelaps | October 27, 2009
An American mastodon, Mammut americanum, from F.A. Lucas' Animals Before Man in North America.
Throughout high school and college I was taught the same thing about the history of science. Young earth creationists had a stranglehold on explanations for life's origins until the fateful year of 1859 when Charles Darwin convinced all but the most ardent fundamentalists that evolution by means of natural selection was a reality. It is a neat and tidy story, a tale in which one book changes the world forever, and it is completely wrong.
As I started to dig deeper into the history of science I…
clock | October 23, 2009At Duke University John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute:
Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
In collaboration with the Office of the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Duke's University Institutes, the FHI is pleased to present a 2-day symposium marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origins of Species. The core idea of the symposium is to mark these dual anniversaries by discussing Darwin's work (its impacts, legacies, etc) from a range of disciplinary perspectives crossing the sciences, humanities, arts…
laelaps | October 20, 2009[Note: Once again I have found myself with too many writing projects and too little time. Expect something substantial to appear here tomorrow, but for now enjoy an old tale about the "Nevada Giant."]
The role petrified bones and footprints have played in the origin of myths and legends has been recognized since the 19th century, but it has only been recently that the connection between fossils and mythology has been appreciated as a subject worthy of careful scrutiny. (See The First Fossil Hunters, Fossil Legends of the First Americans, and American Monster). It should be kept in mind,…
laelaps | October 15, 2009
My new favorite illustration from the technical literature; a baseball player compared to the glyptodont Doedicurus clavicaudatus. From the Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper.
In the introduction to his most famous work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin began by writing;
WHEN on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me…
laelaps | October 12, 2009
I love flipping through old paleontology textbooks. Many times the text and images inside them have been reproduced from other sources or bear a close resemblance to similar titles published at about the same time, but every now and then I find something really unusual. Such was the case while I was skimming through H.F. Cleland's 1916 Geology: Physical and Historical.
While looking for out-of-date ideas on the origin of the first tetrapods I came across a very strange restoration of Dimetrodon (illustration to the left). Dimetrodon was a spenacodontid synapsid, an odd creature that, despite…
laelaps | October 9, 2009
Chucking stones at baboons; the first hominin passtime? From The Making of Man.
For the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, the fossilized bones scattered among the caves of South Africa were testimonies to the murderous nature of early humans. The recovered skulls of baboons and our australopithecine relatives often looked as if they had been bashed in, and Dart believed the bones, teeth, and horns of slain game animals were the weapons hominins used to slaughter their prey. (He gave this sort of tool use the cumbersome name "osteodontokeratic culture.") Our origins had not been peaceful;…
laelaps | October 7, 2009
I have often been teased for my habit of carrying a science book wherever I go. ("That's such a Brian thing," an acquaintance once remarked.) If I am going to be waiting for someone or have a few minutes to spare here or there I like to have something to read to fill up the time. It's either that or fiddle around with Tetris on my cell phone. Some people have told me that this manifestation of bibliophilia makes me seem antisocial,* but I cannot break the habit. I have been toting around science stuff wherever I go from a very young age.
*[My favorite instance was when I was told to "Make…
jstemwedel | October 6, 2009Thursday, October 8, at 8 pm, the Firebird Ensemble will be performing The Origin Cycle, eight selections from Charles Darwin's work Origin of Species set to music. The performance will be at Stanford University's Campbell Recital Hall, and tickets are free, but you'll want to reserve your seats online ahead of the performance.
Here's a bit of information on The Origin Cycle:
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species is not only one of the most important scientific works of all time, but one of the most beautifully written. In The Origin Cycle, eight contemporary composers set fragments of Darwin'…
laelaps | October 6, 2009When I wrote about the public unveiling of Ardipithecus ramidus (or "Ardi" to the public) last week I contrasted the description of the hominin with the bombastic rollout given to the lemur-like fossil primate "Ida" (Darwinius masillae) this past May. In the latter case it was clear that a media production company rushed the scientific process and overhyped the conclusions presented to the public, but now there are questions about the relationship between the scientists who described "Ardi" and the Discovery Channel.
This coming Sunday the Discovery Channel will air a special called "…
laelaps | October 5, 2009Last month everyone was all a-twitter about the big screen Charles Darwin biopic, Creation. The film, based upon the biography Annie's Box, was released in England with great fanfare, but whether it would come to the United States was another question altogether. A U.S. distributor was hard to come by, and speculation was rife about why this was so. Was the popularity of creationism in America making distributors wary, or did they just think that the film was too boring?
Fortunately for us Darwin fans on the other side of the Atlantic the film finally landed a distributor and should debut…
rskloot | October 3, 2009
Lots of excitement here at Culture Dish: The final cover for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has arrived (see left). And ... <drum roll> ... the the book's first pre-publication review has hit the press: In the issue coming out this Monday, Publishers Weekly gives The Immortal Life a starred review, calling it, "a remarkable debut ... a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society's most vulnerable people." (wOOt!) Full review here and here:
"Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with
this multilayered story…
laelaps | September 28, 2009
As some of you may recall, last week I posted a list of new and forthcoming books written by science bloggers. I tried to include all the authors and titles I could think of, but there was one book that I intentionally left off the list; my own.
I am now proud to announce that my first book, Written in Stone, will be released by Bellevue Literary Press in the fall of 2010. In it I tell the stories of some of the most magnificent evolutionary transitions in the vertebrate fossil record, such as the evolution of birds from feathered theropod dinosaurs and whales from land-dwelling ancestors,…
laelaps | September 25, 2009
During my studies of the history of paleontology I have often stumbled upon the work of the same scientists over and over again. The 19th century anatomists Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley, especially, worked on a variety of fossil vertebrates and were critical to the establishment of paleontology as an evolutionary science, yet there are other influential researchers who have not retained the same level of notoriety. The Scottish paleontologist Robert Broom, an immigrant to South Africa who belonged to the generation of scientists after Owen and Huxley, was among these lesser-known…
laelaps | September 24, 2009
Scotland did not have much to offer 19-year-old Andrew Geddes Bain. Both his parents had died when he was a child, and even though he was educated his job prospects were few. When his uncle, Lieutenant Colonel William Geddes, left for South Africa in 1816 young Andrew decided to go with him to the British empire's southern frontier.
Once he arrived there, Bain found work where he could. He worked as a saddler, an explorer, an ivory trader, a soldier, and a road-builder, but in 1837 Bain read a book that would inspire him to look a little bit closer at the rugged landscape around him. That…
laelaps | September 16, 2009Considering the fossils of the Cambrian, the oldest fossil-bearing rocks known during his time, Charles Darwin wrote the following in the 6th edition of On the Origin of Species;
... it cannot be doubted that all the Cambrian and Silurian trilobites are descended from some on crustacean, which must have lived long before the Cambrian age, and which probably differed greatly from any known animal. ...
... if the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the…
jstemwedel | September 9, 2009In my philosophy of science class yesterday, we talked about Semmelweis and his efforts to figure out how to cut the rates of childbed fever in Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s. Before we dug into the details, I mentioned that Semmelweis is a historical figure who easily makes the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning. (At the very least, Semmelweis is discussed in no fewer than three of the readings, by three separate authors, assigned for the course.)
But this raises the question: what else belongs on the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning?
Given…