history of science
laelaps | July 3, 2009
On the 31st of May, 1984, the late evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith appraised the field of paleontology in the journal Nature. The report was a critical summary of a series of lectures Stephen Jay Gould had given at Cambridge, and Gould considered it "the kindest and most supportive critical commentary I have ever received." Smith wrote;
The attitude of population geneticists to any palaeontologist rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell him to go away and find another fossil, and not to bother the grownups.
In the last ten years, however, this…
bioephemera | June 30, 2009Last Friday, in my post on Nature's comprehensive coverage of science journalism, I mentioned the recent Nature Biotechnology conference paper on science communications co-authored by scibling Matt Nisbet. I also said I'd come back to one of the points in it that bothers me.
As I said yesterday, most of the material in this paper (the issues of media fragmentation, framing problems, incidental exposure, etc.) has been expressed elsewhere. I agree with the majority of it, and it's nice to see it all in one place. But I have to take exception to a small piece of the paper - an example that I've…
laelaps | June 30, 2009A few months ago I had the opportunity to sit down with a professional paleontologist and pick his brain about a few things. One of the questions that I most wanted to ask was about the changing nature of paleobiology. Molecular biology, genetics, evo-devo, and other disciplines appeared to have an increasing presence in discussions of ancient life, and I asked the paleontologist if students of paleontology should strive to receive training in these fields to further expand the scope of paleontology.
I could hardly have been more disappointed by the answer. The gist of his response was that…
ddobbs | June 25, 2009Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables:
Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers.
Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…
laelaps | June 25, 2009
Richard Owen's restoration of Glyptodon. From Brinkman (2009).
Perhaps one of the primary reasons that there is so much to say about Charles Darwin is that he left us so much material to scrutinize. Outside of his famous printed works there are numerous notebooks and a staggering amount of personal correspondence which are constantly being parsed for insights into how he formulated his evolutionary ideas. Indeed, there is still scholarly debate about when Darwin embraced the idea of evolution and what observations spurred him to that intellectual turning point, and a new paper by Paul…
bioephemera | June 25, 2009Nature has gone science journalism crazy, with no less than six new articles on the subject! My favorite is "Science Journalism: Toppling the Priesthood," by Toby Murcott, who argues that coverage of peer review is a necessary component of truly investigative, accurate science journalism.
I don't agree with everything Murcott says, but he makes some really good points:
Journalism is often described as history's first draft. Much contemporary science journalism, however, can be seen as a second, or even a third draft. Unlike reporters covering other fields of public life, science journalists…
laelaps | June 24, 2009
Since the early 20th century, at least, young earth creationists have attempted to blame Charles Darwin for genocide, world wars, and whatever political movements seemed most threatening at one time or another (i.e. communism). What Darwin is faulted with changes with the times, but most recently young earth creationists have focused on hot topics from Darwin's own era: racism and slavery. From the Answers in Genesis tract Darwin's Plantation to the upcoming (and unethically produced) documentary The Voyage That Shook the World, creationists claim that Darwin's evolutionary vision undermined…
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
I'm here in DC at the Newseum for the State of Innovation Summit, a collaboration between SEED and the Council on Competitiveness. The crowd is pretty awesome - right now Adam Bly, SEED's CEO, is sitting a few rows from me with E.O. Wilson. Earlier, Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, talked about a conversation he'd had recently with Steven Chu about using the Smithsonian's resources to enhance public understanding of climate change. As he spoke, the intense sunshine of a summer day in DC played across the Smithsonian castle turrets directly behind him (the seventh floor…
bioephemera | June 18, 2009
Joanna of Morbid Anatomy is on a quest to locate private collections of medical oddities. She's already sussed out fourteen such hidden wunderkammern and photographed their treasures, but she wants to find more:
"Who are these private collectors, and what sort of treasures do they possess? How might their methods of displaying collections differ from institutional approaches? Are we reaching a historical moment similar to the pre-museum era of private cabinets, in which the most interesting artifacts are now in private rather than public hands?"
It's a really interesting question.…
laelaps | June 17, 2009
The "common cuttle-fish." From Mysteries of the Ocean.
About three decades before On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection would forever change biological science, the aspiring young naturalists Pierre-Stanislas Meyranx and Laurencet submitted a paper on mollusks to France's prestigious Academie des Sciences. For weeks they waited for a patron from within the scientific elite to recognize their work, but no response came. Ultimately they decided to take the more direct route of having the paper examined by a commission, and in 1830 the naturalists Pierre-Andre Latreille and…
bioephemera | June 12, 2009
Turns out DC has, or once did have, a hidden subterranean labyrinth - and you thought it was just a plot device from last fall's South Park election special! Even better, it was dug by a lepidopterist. Take that, you engineers!
ONE of the oddest hobbies in the world is that of Dr. H. G. Dyar, international authority on moths and butterflies of the Smithsonian Institution, who has found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home.
The New York Times revealed its 50 most looked-up words, and Nieman Journalism Lab had commentary:
"All of the 25-cent…
laelaps | June 11, 2009The Telegraph has just released the trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation of the book Annie's Box, which focuses on Charles Darwin's personal struggle with science and religion. It is called Creation;
What do you think?
[Hat-tip to Michael Barton for sending this along.]
laelaps | June 9, 2009
A restoration of the skull of Thylacoleo. From The Ancient Life History of the Earth.
Without a doubt, the extinct marsupial predator Thylacoleo was one of the strangest carnivorous mammals ever to have evolved. This predator from ancient Australia did not have piercing canines but instead bit into prey with large, forward facing incisors, and it sheared flesh from its kills with huge, cleaver-like premolars. Even though it evolved from herbivorous ancestors, we now know that Thylacoleo was most certainly a carnivore.
The preferred diet of Thylacoleo has not always been so clear-cut,…
clock | June 5, 2009Victor Bruce, a lecturer emeritus in biology at Princeton who conducted advanced studies for more than 25 years on the built-in cycles governing natural rhythms like the sleep-wake cycle, has died. He was 88.
Bruce, who despite a background in engineering became drawn to biological studies, died Friday, May 29, at his home in Princeton after a short struggle with cancer.
"He was an A-1 scientist who did some really neat work," said John Bonner, Princeton's George M. Moffett Professor Emeritus of Biology. "He was a wonderful colleague."
Bruce joined the Department of Biological Sciences in…
laelaps | June 1, 2009In the summer of 1833 Charles Darwin was exploring the South American landscape when he came across the army of the Argentine general Juan Manuel de Rosas. Though Darwin admired the commander's horsemanship and leadership, the general was engaged in the bloody extermination of native people from southern Argentina. As Darwin recounted in the Voyage of the Beagle;
General Rosas's plan is to kill all stragglers, and having driven the remainder to a common point, in the summer, with the assistance of the Chilenos, to attack them in a body. This operation is to be repeated for three successive…
bioephemera | May 30, 2009
I finally got around to reading my backed-up RSS feeds, and had the chance to peruse these, well, demented 1970s biology textbook illustrations uncovered by Crooked Timber. I mean, what? No - what??! Crooked Timber calls it a "Groovy Prog Rock Wannabe Biology Text." I don't know what to say, except that I went to Artomatic yesterday, which had something like a thousand artists, and this psychedelica is far trippier than anything I saw there. Whoa, man.
For the record, if I had, as a child, learned to associate biology with angry disembodied leopard heads flying towards me on Frisbees of fire…
clock | May 30, 2009
Today is the 130th anniversary of the birth of Milutin Milankovic, a Serbian geophysicist best known for Milankovitch cycles that describe periodicities in Earth's climate.
Vedran Vucic is in Dalj (near Vukovar, Croatia), Milankovic's birthplace, today for the birthday celebrations. He says that the house in which Milankovic grew up has been renovated for the occasion. I am assuming it has been turned into a museum. As I will go to Serbia again this summer, perhaps Vedran and I can take a trip to Dalj, where a group of science popularizers are interested in hearing about Open Access…
laelaps | May 28, 2009
Saartje Baartman, drawn from a wax cast made in Paris. From The Human Race.
On December 31, 1816 Saartje Baartman died in Paris. She had been ill for three days, perhaps stricken with smallpox, before she and her unborn child expired. Better known as the "Hottentot Venus", Baartman was a tragic celebrity in Europe. She was a dark-skinned member of the Khoikhoi tribe of South Africa*, and she had buttocks so large that they mesmerized Europeans. Despite her intelligence and talent with languages she was treated as a sideshow attraction, considered to be the antithesis of the European…
laelaps | May 27, 2009
The "Hesperopithecus" tooth discovered by Harold Cook.
I could see it coming from a mile away. As soon as I heard all the hype surrounding "Ida", the exceptionally preserved specimen of Darwinius announced last week, I knew creationists would soon be citing our old friends "Archeoraptor", "Piltdown Man", and "Nebraska Man" as reasons not to trust evolutionary scientists. Each was a public embarrassment to scientists, that is true, but there is no reason to sweep these mistakes under the rug. Each can tell us something valuable about the way science works and how scientists interact with…
laelaps | May 26, 2009
The skull of a tarsier, from The Descent of Primates.
At the turn of the 20th century evolutionary biologists faced a significant problem. In 1859 Charles Darwin had expounded the mechanism of evolution, and Eugene Dubois' discovery of "Pithecanthropus" (known as Homo erectus today) illustrated that humans had evolved over time, but the broad outline of human evolution was almost entirely a mystery. There was no doubt that we had evolved from some ancient group of primates, but one of the most frustratingly difficult to resolve questions was what our earliest primate ancestors were like.…