History
oracknows | January 11, 2010Being a Doctor Who fan and all, I've often wondered what it would be like to be able to travel through time and visit times and places in history that I'm most interested in. For instance, being a World War II buff, I'd certainly want to be able to check out what every day life was like here in the U.S. during World War II. Given my affinity for psychedelic music and that I was only four years old during most of the Summer of Love, I'd think it cool to check out Haight-Ashbury, although I suspect my reaction to the reality of it would be similar to that of George Harrison when he checked it…
emjohnson | January 11, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
In Quentin Skinner's celebrated history The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he writes that:
If the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice.
In Part II of this series I highlighted how a common objection to the political theory of social Darwinism is that it was a misapplication of Darwin's science to already existing ideas. A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the…
oracknows | January 9, 2010So many adherents to "alternative" medicine detest modern medicine, which they see as not being "natural." In contrast, herbalism, homeopathy, acupuncture, various forms of "energy healing," are touted as being highly in tune with nature. They're right about one thing. Throughout the vast majority of human history, humans have relied on unscientific treatments for illness that were indeed much more "in tune" with nature (mainly because they didn't have the knowledge to do much else). Indeed, it's only been in the last 100 to 150 years that science advanced to the point where real advancements…
emjohnson | January 8, 2010Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852 and suggested that Darwin use it himself after he read On the Origin of Species in 1859. However, Darwin was resistant because he thought it could be misinterpreted. According to historian Thomas Leonard, Spencer then appealed to Alfred Russell Wallace to pressure Darwin to accept the term. Darwin eventually agreed and it appeared in the fifth edition of Origin in 1869.
emjohnson | January 8, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
English sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852.As I pointed out in Deconstructing Social Darwinism, Part I scholars have begun to seriously challenge the usefulness of the term as a political theory. For example, Gregory Claeys calls the political framework of social Darwinism "a misnomer," Paul Crook states that the ground on which it rests is "decidedly shaky," Robert Bannister calls it a "myth," Donald C. Bellomy refers to it as "heavily polemical, reserved for ideas with which a writer disagreed," Thomas C.…
emjohnson | January 5, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
Social Darwinism is one of those concepts that everyone knows what it is but few can define. I myself have sometimes reflexively used the concept without fully knowing the history of the term or its use as a political theory. In this series it is my goal to raise some questions about the usefulness of social Darwinism and the way it has been applied. This is a history that is full of contradictions (as history often is) and I encourage people to both challenge and offer suggestions as I develop these ideas.
It is first important to point out that Darwin…
emjohnson | January 5, 2010 Recruitment poster calling for defense of the "Soviet Motherland." Woman holds a document that translates roughly to "military oath."My grandmother sends me a lot of chain e-mails. Many of them are of the right-wing Evangelical Christian variety that have been resent so many times that I have to scroll down several pages just to get through the history of everyone it's been sent to. I've received a video about how Muslims are out-breeding Europeans and how this will be the death of Christianity. Another celebrated the anti-Muslim Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders who claims "there is…
milhayser | January 4, 2010
Galileo transformed Western knowledge, but the Catholic Church vehemently opposed his "heretical" heliocentric observations. Inspired by author Thomas Dixon, ScienceBloggers debate whether the Church's beef with Galileo was motivated by political power or by the competing principles of science and religion. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse writes that while the conflict was "played out in the political arena," it was actually ideological in nature since it pitted the Pope's "privileged relationship with God" against science's popular means to knowledge. On The Questionable Authority,…
oracknows | January 2, 2010Given my long known weak spot for Downfall parodies (even though they are an Internet fad whose time has come and probably already gone), how on earth did I miss this?
PodBlack Cat shows me that, believe it or not, Hitler was a chiropractor. He's been asked to talk about the use of chiropractic for infant colic (you know, the same thing that Simon Singh got in trouble in the U.K. for criticizing), but there is a most unfortunate (and hilarious) complication:
Best line: "Christ, there is more evidence that Elvis is still alive!" Well, maybe not. There are lots of good lines, and I had a hard…
aardvarchaeology | December 28, 2009The blog entry I had been thinking about and repeatedly forgetting about came back to me. Turns out those story beginnings never went far because I had been thinking about situations where I probably wouldn't survive for long. I've had this scary scenario playing in my head, while awake, for quite some time.
First, imagine that you're dropped into a foreign city with only the clothes you wear. No wallet, no hand bag, no money, no cell phone, no identification. Pretty scary, huh? But still, most of us would get out of the situation fairly easily. We would find the embassy of our country of…
emjohnson | December 14, 2009"Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express the opinion that if there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater domain over nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that domain are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of want with its concomitant physical and moral…
emjohnson | December 13, 2009Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, was so great an admirer of the English philosopher Herbert Spencer that he named his first-born son Herbert Spencer Wallace on June 22, 1867. Ironically, Wallace later became a socialist, a view that was diametrically opposed to Spencer's right-wing libertarian views.
Source: David Stack, The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism, 1859-1914 (Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 2003), 47.
bioephemera | December 11, 2009The National Library of Medicine's "Turning the Pages" gallery lets you turn the virtual pages of classic science/medicine manuscripts. Check out Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de Arte Distillandi de Compositis (1512):
Note that the NLM's copy is hand-colored; uncolored copies also exist, such as this copy at ECHO. Comparison with the images of the ECHO copy show that NLM has elided the boring, text-only pages from their animation.
I'm not usually a big fan of animations that try to replicate the tactile experience of books, but given that you aren't usually allowed to touch manuscripts of…
oracknows | December 7, 2009
...the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, thus finally sucking the United States into the conflagration that had been raging for two years in Europe and even longer in Asia.
Stories like this one from the AP remind us that the generation who fought and died to defeat Nazi-ism and Japan's imperialism is very old and won't be with us much longer. Ed Johann, the subject of the story, was a 17-year-old apprentice seaman on that fateful Sunday morning. He is going back for the first time since the attack because at age 86 he may not have many more chances:
For years, Johann said he wouldn't go to…
oracknows | December 5, 2009My benevolent overlords at Seed Media Group yesterday announced (to me at least) a surprise new initiative. But, then, I'm always one of the last to find out about these things. In any case, it would appear that we're teaming up with National Geographic to share blog content and various other initiatives. The press release describes what's going on:
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIGITAL MEDIA AND SCIENCEBLOGS.COM FORM STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP
WASHINGTON / NEW YORK (Dec. 3, 2009)--National Geographic Digital Media (NGDM) and ScienceBlogs.com today announced that they have formed a strategic partnership…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2009[More blog entries about archaeology, history, uppsala, Sweden; arkeologi, historia, idéhistoria, Uppsala.]
Magnus Alkarp defended his PhD thesis in Uppsala on 21 November. I just read the book, and my opinion is that Alkarp definitely deserves his PhD. In fact, I believe that he probably deserves two such degrees: one in the history of ideas for the present book, and one in archaeology for his as yet unpublished gazetteer of archaeological features and known interventions into the earth at Old Uppsala. But his book was accepted as a PhD thesis by the Department of Archaeology in Uppsala,…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2009
Names are one of the things that separate historical and archaeological thinking from each other. History is full of people of whom little is known beyond their names and perhaps a royal or ecclesiastical title, yet still they are considered to be historical personages. Meanwhile, a dead person found in a nameless prehistoric grave can never attain the same historical stature regardless of the objects preserved with the body and the scientific data extracted from the bones.
This fixation with names was once a characteristic of art historians as well. One of the differences between Medieval…
revere | December 1, 2009What else is there to say? Lyndon Johnson may have done a powerful amount of good for civil rights but his legacy went down the Vietnam toilet. He was a big fool who listened to the wrong people, people who told him to push on. Barack Obama seems to be another Big Fool:
Pete Seeger, singing on CBS television, 1968. Afghanistan, 41 years later. Stuck in Afghani quicksand:
But every time I read the papers, that old feeling comes on,
We're waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The…
pharyngula | November 30, 2009The Royal Society of London is releasing free pdfs of some of its best-known papers — and we're talking real classics. Check out their timeline which lets you scan for papers in chronological order; the oldest are a pair for 1666-1667 by Robert Boyle and Robert Hook(e), which will horrify modern audiences: they describe experiments in blood transfusions and examinations of the lungs in dogs. I would not have wanted to be a dog in 17th century London, that's for sure.
One that is particularly interesting is this account of a new technique in preventative medicine from 1736: "An Account of…
oracknows | November 30, 2009A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, "crank magnetism," describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety (for instance, HIV/AIDS denialists, will be attracted to another form of crankery (for instance, anti-vaccinationism or the 9/11 Truth movement) because, as Mark put it, cranks and pseudoscientists see themselves as iconoclasts, brave mavericks opposed…