history of science
clock | May 23, 2008You have only a week left to submit your entries for the Blog about a classic science paper challenge. The links to early bird posts are already being collected and I hope there will be more soon. If you intend to write about a paper in the field of psychology, SciCurious discovered an awesome website where you can find all the classic articles in the history of psychology. Just yesterday, I saw the website where there will be such a repository of historical papers (and other materials: photos, anecdotes, etc.) in the Chronobiology field. This will be built over the next few months. I'll…
laelaps | May 23, 2008In the process of doing some research yesterday I came across some old books that are available for free download via Google Books. I know not everyone shares my particular affinity for yellowing 19th century science books, but if you do you might want to check out some of these titles;
Georges Cuvier - Essay on the Theory of the Earth (English translation)
William Buckland - Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology
William Buckland - Reliquiae Diluvianae
W.J. Broderip - Zoological Recreations
Robert Chambers - Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, With a…
laelaps | May 21, 2008I've been using the phrase "textbook cardboard" a lot lately. I first picked it up after reading Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, but the concept had been made clear to me even before Gould provided me with something to call it. All too often scientific legends are passed down as fact (i.e. Richard Owen was a creationist, Cuvier rejected uniformitarianism, Huxley debated Wilberforce at Oxford), and a recently published paper in PLoS follows this trend in invoking the example of the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial."
The paper (Berkman et al. 2008) produces a picture of John Scopes, the…
laelaps | May 20, 2008[Note: I've received all the papers but one, which I may be able to get directly from the author. Many thanks to everyone who sent in papers; hopefully I'll soon be able to share some good news about the end to which I'm using these resources.]
Many thanks to everyone who sent me the Ichnos paper this past weekend; I will be blogging about dinosaurs and dermestid beetles soon enough. At the moment, though, I have a somewhat bigger project that I'm working on (but that must remain under wraps for the moment) involving T.H. Huxley and his thoughts on the relationship between birds and dinosaurs…
laelaps | May 17, 2008
Blake Stacey has a review of The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing that is, simply put, and unalloyed pleasure to read. Indeed, it's so good that I have only two alternatives; try to improve my own reviews or commission Blake to start writing more of them!
Michael has the scoop about a Royal Society podcast about the "true Darwin." Even during his own time Darwin's views were sometimes twisted or misrepresented, and it is certainly important to ask the question "Which Charles Darwin are we talking about?" Have a listen, and then why not pick up On the Origin of Species or The Descent of…
laelaps | May 13, 2008Our understanding of dinosaurs today is a far cry from the massive, crocodile-like beasts envisioned by Richard Owen and William Buckland, but the way in which ideas about dinosaurs held by earlier paleontologists are presented has been troubling me lately. In many documentaries it is fashionable to say that dinosaurs were traditionally viewed as big lizards, making them slow, dumb, and cold-blooded animals, but the more I have read about the early days of paleontology the more I've come to doubt that such generalizations can really be maintained.
I should probably preface my remarks by…
laelaps | May 12, 2008
Standing in front of a small tank of mudskippers in the special "Water" exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, I heard a gentleman next to me comment to his friend "You know, if evolution is true, it's really amazing how many different kinds of animal there are." I have to admit that the first thought to pop into my mind was "If?" but after my twinge of arrogance passed I had to agree; it really is fantastic that evolution has produced such diverse forms of life.
Present diversity is only half of the evolutionary equation, though. Without an understanding of common descent we…
laelaps | May 8, 2008The articulated skeleton of Gorgosaurus (AMNH 5428) found in the Belly River Formation near the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada. From Matthew & Brown 1923.In 1913, an American Museum of Natural History expedition led by Barnum Brown (with P.C. Kaisen and George Sternberg as assistants) searched the Cretaceous Belly River Formation in Alberta, Canada for dinosaurs. Although there had been an expedition to the same area the year before, the 1913 trip yielded "more exhibition material," including the articulated skeleton of Gorgosaurus*. When it arrived in New York it was prepared by Kaisen…
clock | May 7, 2008The challenge from skullsinthestars is up - pick up a very old, classic science paper and write a blog post about it. Put it in a proper historical, theoretical, methodological and philosophical context. You can always go back to blogging about the latest research or latest creationist idiocy tomorrow.
laelaps | May 7, 2008Mr. Bergh to the RescueTHE DEFRAUDED GORILLA: "That Man wants to claim my Pedigree. He says he is one of my Descendants."MR. BERGH: "Now, Mr. Darwin, how could you insult him so?"This cartoon was published in Harper's Weekly in 1871, the year Darwin's The Descent of Man was first published. The "Mr. Bergh" being referred to is Henry Bergh, who founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866. As for the gorilla, the great ape prominently featured in political cartoons and satire as the public was fascinated with them, and some naturalists placed them closer to…
laelaps | May 5, 2008
With all my running around this weekend I completely forgot that yesterday was the 183rd anniversary of T.H. Huxley's birth. Unfortunately, however, Huxley is generally regarded as "Darwin's Bulldog" and little else, his other accomplishments and role in the formation of professional science often overshadowed by a debate that never actually happened. While Huxley certainly did use his "beak and claws" to defend evolution, his view of how and when evolution occurred would seem unfamiliar to us today. His career has become something of a historical footnote, his support of evolution widely…
laelaps | April 21, 2008
During the 17th and 18th centuries, when taxonomy was being sorted out and suffering from growing pains, the term "nondescript" was a useful placeholder for any creature that was known but not yet described. This fairly straightforward use of the term was used less and less often as more of the natural world was cataloged until it was more of an admission of ignorance than anything else. This doesn't mean that it went away, however. Giving the name "nondescript" to potentially unidentifiable fossil fragments or to things that seemingly bent the rules of nature became more popular in the 19th…
clock | April 13, 2008
Since everyone is posting about spiders this week, I though I'd republish a sweet old post of mine, which ran on April 19, 2006 under the title "Happy Bicycle Day!" I hope you like this little post as much as I enjoyed writing it:
This week's theme for the Tar Heel Tavern is bicycle. I was wondering what to write about. Perhaps about crazy bicycle rides I had as a kid. Or a fun riff on "fish needing a bicycle". Then, I was saved! Because, today is the Bicycle Day! That's just great, because I can go on a scientific tangent with a local flavor.
If you do not know what Bicycle Day is,…
laelaps | April 2, 2008Illustration, either through text or pictures, has always been important to explaining sciences like paleontology and evolution. In terms of pictoral illustration, books like Niles Eldredge's Fossils and Jean Baptiste de Panafieu's marvelous Evolution are stunning books that are as pleasing to look at as to read. Before glossy, lavishly-illustrated books were able to be produced, though, writers often had to construct evolutionary or paleontological "epics" to help draw the reader in to a better understanding of the topic at hand.
The construction of "Just-so" stories is abhorred, but the…
clock | March 31, 2008
Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (31 March 1811 - 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. With his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner. Bunsen also worked on emission spectroscopy of heated elements, and with Gustav Kirchhoff he discovered the elements caesium and rubidium. Bunsen developed several gas-analytical methods, he was a pioneer in photochemistry, and he did early work in the field of organoarsenic chemistry.
laelaps | March 29, 2008Sometimes textbook cardboard refuses to disintegrate. According to scientific lore, T.H. Huxley singlehandedly slew Samuel "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce during a debate at Oxford in the sweltering heat of an 1860 summer, causing a woman to faint and sending Robert Fitzroy, (former captain of the HMS Beagle when it took Charles Darwin around the world) into a frenzy, stalking the aisles and shouting "The book! The book!" while holding a bible aloft. It's a nice story, but like many such tales, it's probably not true.
Although the legend of Huxley's great victory over Wilberforce continues to this…
laelaps | March 26, 2008The mount of Brontotherium on display at the AMNH. Notice the healed rib.During the field season of 1892, J.L. Wortman found the front half of an absolutely monstrous mammal. Entombed in the South Dakota sediment was the exquisitely preserved front half of a Titanotherium (now called Brontotherium, as far as I've been able to tell), an odd-toed ungulate that looked something like a rhino despite its closer affinity to horses. Much to the disappointment of Wortman and his assistant O.A. Peterson, however, the hips, hind limbs, and tail of the creature seemed to be eroded away, and a dedicated…
laelaps | March 20, 2008According to tradition, Richard Owen is the great "villain" of Victorian biology; brilliant, arrogant, and jealous, the "British Cuvier" was the greatest threat to On the Origin of Species. In turn, his arch-nemesis was T.H. Huxley, a heroic young scientist who zealously defended Darwin and successfully made a fool of the creationist Owen. So goes the common treatment, anyway, and like most other quick-and-dirty historical synopses the popular caricatures of both Owen and Huxley present a rather jaundiced view of each figure and their importance to science. Much like Charles Lyell…
clock | March 17, 2008Yuri's Night is in 25 days, commemorating the date, April 12, 1961, when the first human, Yuri Gagarin went out in space. There are 12-hour long overnight parties all over the world and you can probably find one near you.
If everything goes as planned, I will be in Cambridge, UK on that day and the nearest party is in London. Perhaps a bunch of Plossians, SciBlings, Nature Networkers, other science bloggers, non-science bloggers and friends will be interested in going as a big group?