AmericanScience: A Team Blog

CFP: George Perkins Marsh Conference

2012-02-06T11:11:00.002-05:00

For your consideration---
A conference celebrating (physical geographer and other things) George Perkins Marsh: An American for all Seasons -- proposals due 15 March 2012

The College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of
Technology is pleased to announce a conference
celebrating the achievements and insights of George Perkins Marsh
(1801-1882), environmentalist, diplomat, philosopher, and scholar, to be
held on our campus 04 May 2012. Our campus-wide commitment to the
development of innovative thinking in a culture of collaboration makes
Stevens an ideal venue for sharing ideas about Marsh – a luminary figure
whose life and works connect scholar-teachers across disciplines and
cultures. Authors are invited to submit papers on any aspect of Marsh’s
many achievements or the impact of his work. A selection of papers will
be published in a volume of conference proceedings.

Please submit inquiries and papers (maximum 4,000 words) or abstracts
(250-500 words) to Lisa Dolling <ldolling@stevens.edu> and Robin
Hammerman <rhammerm@stevens.edu>.

Deadline for submissions: 15 March 2012.

------------------------

Many thanks,

Andy Russell
Assistant Professor, College of Arts & Letters
Stevens Institute of Technology
Castle Point on Hudson
Hoboken, New Jersey 07030
http://www.stevens.edu/cal/

What is the best (first) book on HOS in America right now?

2012-02-04T12:08:00.000-05:00

Know the answer? Let us know! FHSA wants to recognize a great work. Here's the official call:

The Forum for the History of Science in America has begun gathering books for its 2012 Publication Prize.

Here are the eligibility criteria:
- any book published in the English language with a publication year 2009, 2010 or 2011,
- authored by a Scholar(s) for whom this consititutes a "first book",
- on a topic in American science ("American" loosely defined to include the western hemisphere, "science" conservatively defined to exclude books focusing on either the "clinical and social history of medicine" or the "history of technology").
Authors are encouraged to self-nominate.

Please submit titles and publisher information to David Spanagel [spanagel@wpi.edu] between now and June 30, 2012. Examination copies of each nominated book must be delivered to the three (3) prize committee members by July 31, 2012 for that book to receive full consideration.

Science & US Intellectual History

2012-02-03T12:00:00.003-05:00

The Society for US Intellectual History (S-USIH, or "sushi") runs both a blog and an annual conference in New York City. The theme of last year's – at which I presented – was "Narratives," and they've just announced that next fall's will be "Communities of Discourse."

According to the CFP, proposals are due 1 June and the event itself will be 1-2 November 2012. Besides the obvious attraction of Manhattan, they've got a great keynote speaker (David Hollinger) lined up – and at least the potential for interesting dialogue with history of science.

Why "potential"? Well, it was my impression last year that the focus skews strongly to twentieth-century political thought. Whether true or not of the field overall, it left the interface with the history of science mainly in the form of the social sciences relevant to that history of political ideas.

But it strikes me that there are way more ways to skin this cat, and that those who work on everything from dinosaur bones to the bomb could add to the conversation in a lot of ways – from new actors and institutions to new theoretical insights about "communities of discourse."

I talk too much about the need to get historians of science and intellectual historians thinking together, but this year's USIH conference seems like a good opportunity to collapse these two "communities of discourse" in a new way. Let's make science a bigger part of the program.

Reflecting on History of Science, Feb 3 in Philadelphia

2012-01-28T16:40:00.005-05:00

I'm reposting an announcement for an interesting upcoming event hosted by the Philadelphia Center for the History of Science (PACHS). If any of our readers are in attendance, I hope that you will continue the discussion here at AmericanScience.

--

What Matters About the History of Science and What do we Do About it?
Feb 3, 2012, 4-5:30, Followed by a social hour and light dinner. The American Philosophical Society’s Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut St.

Join three distinguished scholars for an evening of big questions: What do historians want audiences to understand about the history of science, technology and medicine? What do historians want students to take away from classes, audiences from events, readers from books? What answers to these questions does the community of historians share in common? How do—or should—historians promote what matters about history of science?

Nathaniel Comfort is Associate Professor in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University specializing in history of biology; history of recent science; and oral history and interviewing. In addition to his academic publications, he writes newspaper and magazine articles for wider audiences.

Matthew Jones is James R. Barker Associate Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University working on history of early modern science, technology and philosophy. He is also chair of Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum, a program that aims to prepare students to become active and informed citizens by introducing them to issues concerning the communities that people construct and the values that inform and define such communities.

M. Susan Lindee is Professor of the History and Sociology of Science and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania where she works on the history of genetics, gender and science, science and popular culture, and science and war. She was a journalist for ten years before entering academia.

If you are in the area and plan to attend, RSVP by clicking through to the PACHS website here.

History of Medicine, For Human Dignity

2012-01-28T15:37:00.000-05:00

An announcement for this conference on the history/memory of the Tuskegee experiments caught my eye in part because it aims higher than do most (and reflects on its use of history more explicitly than is usual). For instance:

Our purpose will not be to engender shame or guilt. Rather we will maturely enter into the realities of the past so as to re-imagine a deeper sense of human care in ourselves today, and thereby build a future never again marred by a holocaust of any kind. This conference will be a rich moment in time to prevent the worst by promoting the best of who we are and what we can do to protect the dignity and respect that is fundamental to being human.

I cannot tell from the agenda (pdf), however, the true degree to which it will be historical in nature. At any rate, offered for your consideration.

Diagnosing the diseases of the past, today

2012-01-27T12:29:00.000-05:00

Historians of science and medicine debate whether it is possible to re-diagnose diseases manifested in the past with modern terms. But what about "diseases of the past" that come back today.

Note this 'graf from a Chicago Tribune article on vaccination and the resurfacing of now uncommon diseases:

Bonwit said medical schools must do a better job of teaching young doctors the history of medicine, which is largely the history of disease and death, he said. Archival footage of children with measles or whooping cough, for instance, should be teaching tools to help students identify diseases and understand their severity, he said.

Via Hope Leman. See below.

Funding Database

2012-01-27T12:25:00.001-05:00

If you don't already know about ScanGrants, perhaps you should. It is "a public service listing of grants and other funding types to support health research, programs and scholarship" supported by Samaritan Health Services and maintained by Hope Leman, MLIS (who is also an invaluable and prolific contributor to H-Med-Sci-Tech).

Here are the listings for "history of science" grants.

Now that's a dune, Dr. Cowles!

2012-01-20T11:37:00.000-05:00

The Library of Congress now hosts a fascinating set of photographs taken by University of Chicago ecologists (and their students), most prominently Henry C. Cowles (no relation to our dear Hank).

On a personal note, I love the images of Lake Michigan dunes. As an undergraduate at Michigan State, I did my best to escape every year to explore these enormous white-sand oddities and feel a bit of wonder.

I did not realize at the time that those same dunes had inspired Cowles' theory of ecological succession, beginning with his 1898 dissertation "The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan."

In that seminal work, Cowles explained:

"Ecology, therefore, is a study in dynamics. For its most ready application, plants should be found whose tissues and organs are actually changing at the present time in response to varying conditions. Plant formations should be found which are rapidly passing into other types by reason of a changing environment." (3-4)

While I saw the dunes as a wonder-filled getaway, Cowles saw a natural laboratory: "These requirements are met par excellence in a region of sand dunes. Perhaps no topographic form is more unstable than a dune." (4)

The LOC site has some useful background pieces on Cowles and the other ecologists involved. There are also many more photos worth perusing. I enjoy the group shots especially, for what they show about "the field" as a place that is certainly serious, but also quite fun.

Via.

No dessert unless you eat your US history...

2012-01-20T11:04:00.003-05:00

I love this insight from scientist and blogger Ian Hopkinson (SomeBeans) on some salutary side-effects of well-done history of science:

"In the same way that Poirier’s biography of Lavoisier introduced me to the French Revolution, this book on Franklin has introduced me to the American War of Independence. It’s like sneaking vegetables into a child by hiding them in something they like."

Yummy.
Via.

Print Culture and Online Publishing

2012-01-18T10:13:00.001-05:00

The Wikipedia Homepage on Jan. 18th, 2012

Today is a big day for the internet! Visit the English-language version of Wikipedia and instead of the familiar start page, you'll see the ominous image above with a message prompting you to "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge." By denying its Anglo-American users access to the site, Wikipedia is protesting two anti-piracy laws making their way through the United States Congress that it and many other internet content providers (especially social networking sites and blog hosts) claim are overly restrictive. These and other issues surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are both important and complex. You can read more about them in today's Washington Post. (If you have a subscription, you can also check out a story in today's New York Times.)

But what caught my attention was another story in the Times, about a website called ResearchGate designed to encourage scientists to collaborate, share ideas and data, and publish their results. Check it out. This is just the newest installment of many similar efforts to make the web into a platform that encourages scientists to collaborate and share results, intended to bypass traditional academic institutions like conferences and peer reviewed journals. Others include arXiv.org and PLoS.

Supporters of online platforms such as these claim the traditional system of peer reviewed journals is too slow, too expensive, too cumbersome, too entrenched, and too strongly tied to an outdated medium (print) to be of any real service anymore.

Often, but certainly not always, peer reviewed journals are for-profit companies with shareholders and a bottom line. Thus, the New York Times quotes Scott Aaronson from MIT as saying that he refuses to submit papers or conduct peer review for commercial journals because "“I got tired of giving free labor [to] these very rich for-profit companies.” Personally, this reminded me of the fact that Harvard requires its graduate students to submit their dissertations to ProQuest for digitization and online publication, which the latter does at a profit. However, we are also expected to revise and publish our dissertations as a book within a few years of having graduated (assuming you want to go the academic career route). Of course, most serious presses won't invest human and financial resources into something that's already available online for free.

There are at least two questions worth thinking about here. One is historical whereas the other is more historiographical. First, the modern peer reviewed journal has a history going back to the 19th if not the 17th century (depending on whom you ask and how you choose to interpret the words "modern" and "journal"). It seems reasonable to suspect this history would have something to add to the current discussion about the place of publication in the modern scientific enterprise if not our intellectual culture more broadly. I can think of at least two historians whose work is relevant to these issues in some way or another. One is Adrian Johns who recently published a big book on Piracy. Another is Alex Csiszar, who is now writing a book about origins of the modern scientific journal as the primary vehicle to document, disseminate, and legitimize scientific results. You can see a précis of his argument here.

Second, here is an admittedly speculative historiographical question: what would happen if we got rid of the peer reviewed academic journal entirely? What would be lost and what would be gained? One things seems obvious: much would be gained indeed! The results of our research would be free. University libraries and independent scholars would no longer have to invest scarce resources so we can access each other's work. It would also reduce the delay between writing and publication considerably.

But what would be lost? Good copy-editing and layout perhaps. (Although I'm not so sure. Historians really ought to be able to write reasonably well. After all, writing is what we do. And it's not asking too much that we also learn to use software like InDesign or LaTeX.) Anything else?

One thing I've heard people say is that the academy would become even more of an insider's game. That's an interesting argument, one that's worth thinking about. Roughly, the reasoning goes as follows: Most good journals practice blind peer reviews. This means that anyone can submit, and the quality of their work will more or less speak for itself. That's the assumption anyway. A further assumption is that if you manage to place your work into a highly regarded journal, it will be widely noticed and read.

The alternative, an online database like arXiv.org, does not have a mechanism to dampen what we might describe as the academy's epistemic stratification. People will only read what comes to their attention, meaning that they'll end up reading the work of the people they already know, either in person or from what they've previously read. Despite all the talk of how the internet flattens social hierarchies and promotes egalitarianism, it may actually do the opposite.

I pretty much buy this argument, but only about half way. It seems plausible to me that most people primarily seek out the work of people they already know, except I think this is what most of us already do anyway, in print or online. I for one rarely if ever pick up Isis, the BJHS, the JHB, or any other academic journal just to see what catches my eye. Rather, I usually read something because I saw the author give an interesting talk, because it was recommended to me by a friend, because I came across it in a footnote, or because I found it through a search engine.

Happy Birthday, William James

2012-01-11T21:30:00.001-05:00

Today marks what would've been the one-hundred-and-seventieth birthday of one of the most well-regarded and enigmatic figures in American science: William James. (And, while he's a central figure in my work, my admiration doesn't even approach that of one of my colleagues: William James Dromgold Bouk turns two this March.)

James is a towering figure in American intellectual history – and he's gotten lots of attention in the ensuing century as a result. Lately, it's been picking up. The last few years marked a series of centenaries, including those of some of his best-known works: most significantly, The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902 and Pragmatism in 1907.

But it's more than anniversaries that have raised James's profile. From Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club (which won the Pulitzer in 2002) to Robert Richardson's Bancroft-winning biography (2006) to the privileged place given him by Jim Kloppenberg in Reading Obama, James is on bookshelves outside of the academy in a big way.

Why?
One explanation is that these books (and especially Menand's) are especially well-written and wide-reaching – whatever the reason their authors chose James, it's their skills that have put him back on the map. Another is structural and somewhat cynical: these things tend to cycle, and it's James's turn due to shifts in the market for books and ideas.

There's a third reason (and more, besides), and it came to mind when I saw what Merriam-Webster had chosen as their "Word of the Year" for 2011: pragmatic. Granted, that's small-p pragmatism (M-W defines it as "practical as opposed to idealistic"), which historians of Pragmatism are careful to differentiate from its big-P relative.

But what interested me was the way the news media picked it up: it was taken to be a sign of the times. In a year of continued economic hardship crowned with this summer's debt ceiling debacle, pragmatism was a quality prized (and missing) both at home and in Washington. Searches peaked in the summer and again with the failure of the super committee.

Whatever "Word of the Year" means, can we link "pragmatism's" prominence to James's? Unclear. As so often happens, the word he went so far to popularize a hundred years ago quickly ran away from its champion. Still, there's something thrilling for a historian reading James's account of who we are, what we know, and how we know it.

In an age when (as a senior scholar recently told me) it's more frowned upon to name your theoretical debts than it is not to, it's surprising how much like James's account of the self sounds like the cultural-historical model of individual agency. As "theory" waned, pragmatism clambered in on the sly to structure our historical assumptions.

Cetacean Scientists in the US

2012-01-09T14:20:00.001-05:00

Paul Greenberg recently reviewed D. Graham Burnett's The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century in the New York Times. Greenberg traces the arc, as told by Burnett, of the cetacean scientist from standing knee-deep in whale innards at the turn of the century to being newly enlightened by whale-ish complexity in the interwar years to fighting alongside other frustrated technocrats at the dawn of an age of international conservation to expanding the human and Cete mind in groovy ways amidst a backdrop of Cold War science. He comes away fascinated by the experience, but also wonders if the reading public wouldn't benefit from something less that 793 pages, with footnotes for the footnotes (almost) ---or actually, he wonders if the public wouldn't benefit from more: a shortened version to accompany the encyclopedic one.

Read the review. You'll encounter the characters who most capture Greenberg's imagination: A. Remington Kellogg (the Prince of Whales) and John C. Lilly, both of whom are American scientists worth extended consideration.

(There's a similar, but not so extensive, review at the Wall Street Journal.)
(Also, I haven't seen the text yet, but it sounds like it has footnotes and not merely endnotes. I *love* footnotes. Am I alone here?)

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T14:02:00.002-05:00

Let's make it a good one.

Teaching Farmers to Be Men

2011-12-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

It may be apocryphal, but Liberty Hyde Bailey (one of my heros) once explained that he did not teach "men to be farmers" in his horticulture courses at Michigan Agricultural College in the 1880s; he taught "farmers to be men."

That quote came to mind when I read over this profile of Benjamin Cohen's approach to teaching Engineering Studies at Lafayette: "Cohen sees a bright future for the engineering studies program. He and his colleagues are looking to enhance what he calls the 'hard skills' like political philosophy, historical context, cultural familiarity, communication, and environmental knowledge to help students become leaders of creative innovation and design. These skills can encourage a better awareness of what Byatt meant by a world 'full of life and light.'"

Cohen recently published Notes from the Ground, on early American ag science and is now at work on a book recounting the history of food adulteration and purity.

Looking at Science

2011-12-17T12:21:00.000-05:00

I don't spend much time thinking about science and images, but I know I should spend more. Two pieces of evidence.

1) This collection of atlases: "Places and Spaces: Mapping Science" --- I suppose these are the sort of things that Daston and Galison analyzed in Objectivity, but with a bit more reflexivity (since many seem to be science studies-oriented; also, that rhymed). Unfortunately, the Web version doesn't allow for close up looks of intriguing maps like this and this.

2) A recent CFP from the University of Rochester for "Image, Truth, and Distortion," a grad conference:
"The term “image” is broadly construed: images from any time period and of every variety from political cartoons to frescoes to digital photography, as well as literary, biographical, metaphorical or mental images, are acceptable subjects of investigation. Ideal submissions should explore the ways in which images have been used throughout history to reflect, refract, or even reinvent truth in regards to people, events, ideas, movements, cultures, or time periods, as well as how these images have been embraced or contested."

Those of you who work more with images, maybe you can figure out something to do with these digitized exhibit guides from the gilded age. They seem useful, and yet...

Save the Date for the 47th Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology

2011-12-12T10:12:00.007-05:00

The 47th Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology will be held at the University of Pennsylvania, beginning with an opening reception and plenary the evening of Friday April 20th, followed by the presentation of papers, a faculty panel, and a dinner on Saturday April 21st.

Events will primarily take place in Claudia Cohen Hall, located at 249 South 36th Street, between Spruce Street and Locust Walk, on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia.

Abstracts (200 words) of papers submitted for presentation are due by Wednesday February 1st, 2012 at 5pm, and can be emailed to Andy Hogan at: ahog@sas.upenn.edu . Decisions on submitted abstracts will be made as soon as possible, and the chosen presenters will be informed on or about March 1st.

Some travel support is available for graduate student presenters.

Hope to see you there!

Science and The New Inquiry

2011-12-11T16:00:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago, a piece in the NYT Style Section called "New York's Literary Cubs" was making the rounds. It profiled The New Inquiry ("a scrappy online journal and roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts"), whose founders were after "a kind of literary salon reminiscent of the Lost Generation of the 1920s."

The story went viral thanks in large part to Gawker, who used it as evidence for "Why You Should Never Be Profiled by The New York Times Style Section." Their argument? While "[f]or hundreds of years, unbearable young people have tried to hang out with other unbearable young people," these young people were capitalized upon by the Times.

I'll leave their (fun) "Two Audience" theory of the Style Section (hint: the writing is purposefully annoying) to them. Instead, I want to explore the gap between "literary salons" ("Moveable Feast-type stuff") and the earlier philosophical clubs I'd been reading about for a chapter on pragmatism and psychology.

Why do pretentious, well-educated young people ("Fueled by B.Y.O.B. bourbon, impressive degrees and the angst that comes with being young and unmoored") take up literature and literary theory ("Edmund Wilson and poststructuralism") so much more than philosophy or – and here's the real question – science?

A plausible answer lies somewhere between C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures" and Mark Greif's "What Was the Hipster?" Snow's "literary intellectuals" became just "intellectuals"; at some point, the "literary" was redundant. It's hard to imagine the cubs reading classics from the history of science, much less recent research. Why?

Why, that is, would readings be limited to the literary, when Menand's "The Metaphysical Club" reveals a range from German poetry to British logic to Darwinian biology? One senses this latter landscape wasn't consciously rejected by today's literary cubs; it seems to have been beyond the pale. Again, why only literature?

We might credit Snow. Whether or not he was right (here's an overview), his essay did help catalyze the antipathy it purportedly described. John Brockman's "Third Culture" (which I discussed here) asks us to buy "scientific intellectuals" as a maverick sub-culture; with no science on the New Inquiry reading list, we just might.

This brings us, briefly, to the hipster. Greif hinges his analysis on hipsters' emphasis on "forms of knowledge that they possessed before anyone else," on "a priori knowledge as a means of social dominance." There's something about this element of performance that feels somehow distant from the philosophical clubs of the 1800s.

The New Inquiry meetings center on "a group reading in which each person selects a three-minute reading on the predetermined topic." The impression one gets from the story is of a disconnected series – a conversational commonplace – in which erudition is performed more through selection than exposition.

What is it, then? It's show and tell. Two attendees are embarrassed to have chosen the same author; there's a "predetermined topic," but there isn't an argument in sight. Don't get me wrong: the famous clashes of The Metaphysical Club don't explain their openness to scientific thought – the differences are more complex than that.

But there's something that puts Kanye and Camus in bounds and leaves Kant and combinatorics out. Is it fashion–or fear? As another article on cultural malaise put it, "people are comforted by a world that at least still looks the way it did in the past." Will intellectuals always pine for 1920s Paris? Will science ever be hip?

Mergers & Bailouts in American History

2011-12-08T09:38:00.002-05:00

Elizabeth Warren

As some of you know, I am very interested in the various occupy movements that, until recently, were going on all over the country. (Occupy Boston remains in place, as does, by the way, Occupy Harvard.) I sympathize with the general feeling of frustration, and I think it's worth trying to figure out how to express some of those sentiments in a more rigorous way.

Elizabeth Warren, who is currently running for Senate in Massachusetts, must be one of the smartest people in politics. I recently watched a clip of an interview she did with Charlie Rose in which she makes a very compelling argument that's worth thinking about in historical perspective.

Warren basically says that although she agrees the 2008/09 bailout of several large banks, AIG, as well as GM and Chrysler were necessary, it was not executed the right way. The question she poses is this: was the bailout designed to preserve particular institutions, or to preserve the US Economy? "What we did when we rescued these banks," she says, "is that we left the shareholders in tact, we left the top management in tact, we paid their debt in full. We came in and supported the enterprise as it is." This is no way to encourage reform, because it carries serious risks of moral hazard. Bailouts of this kind encourage reckless behavior. Investment banks and others in the financial services industry have reason to believe they can profit if a risky investment pay off whereas they will be bailed out if it does not.

(I like to think of it in statistical terms. Risky decisions are ones with a high variance in payoffs. What bailouts like TARP do is to cut off the negative tail of that distribution, thus biasing the payoff matrix such that it becomes economically rational to take more risks.)

I think Warren is basically on point here. The question I want to ask is why no penalties were imposed on the shareholders of these banks, insurance companies, and auto manufacturers? In the video, Warren herself chalks it up to the "worldview" of those who engineered the bailout. I suspect this is probably true, at least in part. But I'd like to suggest another narrative, one with a more longue durée and structural emphasis.

In the mid to late 19th century, nearly all businesses in the United States were operated by people with a substantial ownership stake in their firm. The major exception here were the railroads, which was arguably 19th century's great speculative enterprise. (It is worth pointing out that the railroad bubble burst several times, and was largely sustained through Government intervention.) But in most other sectors of the economy, there was no great divide between ownership and management.

This all began to change during the great merger movement of the 1890s and early 1900s. As large sectors of the American economy coalesced into a very small number of huge corporate firms, the divide between ownership and management grew increasingly pronounced. The reasons for this are complex, but part of the story is that firms coming out of the merger movement were huge, multiunit, vertically integrated corporations. Their function was so complex that a whole army of salaried managers were needed to coordinate all of their diverse activities efficiently.

A second reason was that as many smaller firms merged into a few very large firms, the role of ownership was transferred from a few people to large corporate boards. Essentially, ownership had become diluted over a large enough group of people that none of them had a majority stake in the whole enterprise anymore. In addition, many major stockholders had interests in a number of different companies at one and the same time. This reduced the incentive for ownership to take the time needed to manage and oversee the day to day operation of its firms.

What's the upshot of all this?

I'm wondering if this growing separation between ownership and management might have something to do with the decision not to punish shareholders for the risks taken by management.

My sense is that in today's world, the historical trend I've been describing has only intensified. Now, rather than a growing number of capitalists having an ownership stake in big firms, a large proportion of the American people do. It's no longer just entrepreneurs who invest in the stock market. Nearly everyone does. If you have a 401K, for example, or belong to a mutual fund, you might well own shares of a company that had to be bailed out in 2008/09. Hence, one reason not to punish shareholders for the reckless behavior of management might be that doing so would essentially entail punishing ourselves.

Of course, as Elizabeth Warren points out, this is bad news for the economy as a whole. If shareholders are not punished when risky investments turn sour, risk-taking is incentivized. Management is rewarded with bonuses and higher salaries for generating high returns on investments. If risk-taking does not come at potential cost, the incentive is to make risky investments and hope for the best.

Of course, what's really ironic here is that in the end we ARE punishing ourselves either way. Ordinary Americans who own stock through their 401K are also the ones whose taxes paid for the bailouts. So the net gain for the vast majority of people who invest in the stock market must have been close to zero. Top management, who also did not have to pay a price for their reckless behavior, however, benefited a great deal. As did the proverbial 1 per cent.

Pre-science/Prescience and the History of the Future

2011-12-06T11:34:00.005-05:00

Just a quick post to direct our readers' attention to this week's themed issue of the New York Times "Science Times" on "The Future of Computing." There are some cool interactive features and a series of interesting profiles on computing visionaries. Given recent posts on scientists and cinema and science and literature, I wanted to highlight this interview with SF author Neal Stephenson. I must confess to not being a huge fan of his prose, but I have recently developed significant academic interest in how science fiction colonizes the future.

A big part of history of science as a discipline involves paying attention to how people have envisioned the future and how that vision was received. Why not start bringing more attention to science fiction into that endeavor? There's a reason that the word for having knowledge of things before they happen is "prescience."

Someone who is giving this a lot of attention is Patrick McCray. He'll be speaking on the subject of "Visioneering" at UPenn's Department of History and Sociology of Science colloquium this coming Monday.

Anyone out there got some thoughts on the history of the future?

Asbestos, and Pesticides, and Web-links, Oh My!

2011-12-05T10:11:00.001-05:00

I've recently happened upon a couple different attempts to recreate the history of two sci-enviro-tech villains of the late twentieth century. Each, I think has its merits for passive amusement or even as a teaching tool---although I've yet to try either out with students.

First, consider the history of Asbestos, Quebec, as told through the eyes of the world's largest Asbestos mine, in graphical form. With pleasant drawings and nice-enough background theme, this graphic novel emphasizes the rise and fall of an industrial town, with plenty of pathos, and approaching the right sort of ambivalence about the fire-proofing material (I'm reminded of Don Worster's mantra from Rivers of Empire: "How in the remaking of nature, do we remake ourselves?"---How in the eradication of fire, do we poison ourselves?) There's also an affiliated documentary about the town of Asbestos from the Network in Canadian History and Environment.

DDT gets a similarly inventive treatment, but with much more science, thanks to the University of Minnesota's "SHIPS" resource center. Among the simulation modules (targeted at high school science students, but fun for all, if you ask me), is one focused on the 1963 Advisory Committee on Pesticides, a panel brought into the world by President Kennedy in response to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. My favorite part: you can pick a person who testified to the committee to play act (I think I smell a new party game here). I'd go as George Wallace personally (not that George Wallace)---I long ago wrote an undergrad thesis about his DDT work at Michigan State. But LaMont Cole looks pretty good too (I'd never read his "Impending Emergence of Ecological Thought" essay from 1964. It's available on the site.)

Historians and their Index Numbers

2011-11-28T08:53:00.001-05:00

John Steele Gordon argues---over on Bloomberg's recently revamped "echoes" blog---that historians of the US stock market in the mid-twentieth century has been misled by that market's most prominent index. The handiwork of a publisher (Dow) and a statistician (Jones), the Dow-Jones Industrials evolved from a series of focused indexes into a single number meant to represent the entire NY exchange, and by proxy the American economy.

But for all the power and influence this number has had, Gordon shows how dependent it is on basic assumptions. Swap out AT&T for IBM in the Depression years and the market recovery comes years before we have generally thought.

For our purposes, the Dow, its development, and public understandings of stock indexes strike me as topics awaiting a historian of science's analysis. I would read that book.

--
If you haven't seen the new "echoes" blog---edited by Stephen Mihm, the UGA historian of capitalism in the US, it's worth a peek.

Also, as long as we're talking about American science and index numbers, here's a shout-out to Tom Stapleford's recent history of the Consumer Price Index, which also happens to be a fascinating history of American statistics generally.

Do we still need harvest festivals?

2011-11-22T12:11:00.001-05:00

Loyal AmericanScience reader Anna Zeide wonders about Thanksgiving in a post-can world over at the Food Studies section of Grist. Check it out.

For those of you who teach some environmental history or history of technology alongside history of science, I can vouch for "The Miracle of the Can" as a great tool to generate discussion right around Thanksgiving. Seasons be damned!

For more Thanksgiving scholarly fun, see Neil Prendergast's recent Environmental History article on "Raising the Thanksgiving Turkey."

Talking Turkey the Somewhat-Old-Fashioned Way...

And a final tid-bit, from the department of applied science: Butterball University!

Beyond Presentism vs. Historicism in the History of Anthropology

2011-11-21T20:52:00.000-05:00

This weekend I participated in the Stocking Symposium at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting in Montreal. Named to honor George Stocking – widely credited with legitimating anthropology as subfield of historical study – the Symposium was begun in 2006 to provide a forum for historical perspectives at the AAA.

The panel featured about a dozen papers, many of which focused on the contributions of individual theorists like Franz Boas, his student Zora Neale Hurston, and even Irving Goffman (long claimed by sociology). Discussant, Ira Bashkow, an anthropologist at University of Virginia, responded to the relatively favorable portrayal of these subjects with some pointed reflections on the state of the field. He revisited Stocking’s important 1965 essay, "On the limits of 'presentism' and 'historicism' in the historiography of the behavioral sciences." In that piece, Stocking was interested in importing more rigor into the methodology of the history of human science. Rather than taking sides, he critically evaluated both stances.

Bashkow noted that the reflexive turn in anthropology that took root in the decades after the publication of this essay has led to histories that have often tended to castigate the architects of the field. In view of the somewhat celebratory tone in which 2011 Stocking Symposium panelists depicted their subjects, Bashkow mused that this might mark a new phase in the history of anthropology. In a moment when the human sciences are under attack, what would it mean for historians of those fields to draw on the past to strengthen their claims to knowledge in the present? Stocking, he suggested, would want to see the history of anthropology push beyond the dyad of "presentism vs. historicism."

To be sure, Bashkow was not asking for hagiography, saying that the founders of the field are "Not idols to revere, but neither are they gods to smash." However, he argued, if anthropology is to persist as a viable field, it needs to attend more carefully to its own social reproduction. Anthropologists and their historians need to consider how to engage constructively with the past in ways that maintain a space for social sciences and humanities, both within and beyond the academy.

I'm not an anthropologist – nor a strict presentist – but as someone who cares about what the history of science can contribute to civic life, I think Bashkow's perspective is worth taking seriously.

AmericanScience in Literature: Pynchon

2011-11-21T12:00:00.001-05:00

What's the place of science (specifically, American science) in literature (specifically, American literature)? While literary scholars have written more about this than have historians, I think more dialogue's in order between historians of science and New Historicists.

As a way in, I'll start where lots of others do – with Thomas Pynchon.
He's a special case for reasons of both content and style. First: it's a commonplace to note the omnipresence of references to (and meditations on) science, technology, and their aftermath in his work. Second: Pynchon's well-known obsession with dialectics (order vs. entropy, free will vs. determinism, technology vs. nature, &c.) bleeds into his prose in the form of endless appositions, yoyo-ing run-ons, and the interplay of colloquial dialogue and technical digressions.

Both points matter for understanding the place of science in Pynchon's novels because they help us see that it's more than just one side of a binary (science vs. art, science vs. nature) – a misprision that often results from equating science with technology (bombs!) in the discussion of either's place in literary works. For Pynchon, science is more capacious. As Louis Menand put it in a review of Against the Day: "Science is either a method of disenchantment and control or it is a window onto possible worlds: it all depends on the application."

Pynchon's science opens up an older, wild potential – for both good and evil – that somehow feels more muted today. Menand, further on, calls Against the Day “a kind of inventory of the possibilities inherent in a particular moment in the history of the imagination," and concludes by suggesting that we read it like "a work of science fiction written in 1900." Literature's of its own time, to be sure, but historians might profit from the way it reframes the time in which it's set: 1890s Chicago, or, in the case of Mason & Dixon, the eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic.

In that novel (I won't even touch on the well-known cases in V, Gravity's Rainbow, or The Crying of Lot 49), we get a different science for a different age, though the same sense that it's wider than can be captured in the binary of The Two Cultures. Pynchon's project is the same as his surveyors': a path through chaos requires both saw and sextant, art and science, body and brain. As in Against the Day, science here is more than a referent. When L.E. Sissman called him "a mathematician of prose," he did justice to Pynchon's science as both a method and its results.

Understanding the place of science in literature means tracing its historical dimensions – what it meant for both author and characters. But it also means attending to literary matters – to style and composition – and it's this, I think, that's scared off many historians. Literary scholars note historians' flat-footedness on this turf – "Wider culture? Let's look at a novel!" – and they're right that, even though cultural history (of science) has a lot in common with literary scholarship (in the form of New Historicism), there's a lot of work left to be done at their boundary.

American science and the budget crisis

2011-11-20T07:36:00.000-05:00

Last week's issue of Science included a number of short articles on the effects of the budget crisis on science funding in the United States. Most emphasized the challenges that budget cuts present for administrators at NSF, NASA, NIH, and other science agencies who must determine the priorities for research funding. As I read the essays, I wondered about the contributions that taking a longer perspective on American science funding or the agencies involved might provide to these debates.

For example, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes about a dilemma facing NASA administrators, in particular those who manage the agency's astronomy and planetary science initiatives. They reportedly must choose between supporting big-budget, high profile programs and the many smaller programs that gather little media attention. Bhattacharjee quotes one administrator who sees smaller programs as more important, in that they "maintain and train our next generation of scientists," while another argues that the flagship programs and other high-profile projects are essential because they not only fund many researchers but sustain interest and momentum in aerospace research as a whole.

I suspect that this is a debate that has been ongoing for a long time (those out there who are more familiar with NASA history can tell me), visible not only now but also at other points in the agency's past when funding dollars have seemed short. What would a look back at tradeoffs made in previous decades tell us about the effects of supporting flagships over small programs -- or even about the rhetorical power of claims to maintaining and training scientists versus inspiring interest in aerospace science, both within the agency and among a broader public?

Or, to take another example, a piece by David Malakoff pointed out that the association of oceans and atmosphere in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is causing problems for ocean scientists, whose research budgets are pinched by the expensive satellite-based research programs associated with weather and climate monitoring.

NOAA was formed in 1970 by bringing together a number of existing environment-related agencies. This makes me wonder whether the current division of interests was not always a problem in an agency, which though formed to foster "a better understanding of the total environment," was cobbled together from organizations that had studied narrow aspects of that total environment. If so, it might make sense to locate the problems faced by oceanographers not in the ever-more-sophisticated and ever-more expensive satellite technologies but in the organization of the agency itself, a conclusion that points towards a more radical intervention that mere budgetary juggling.

What Science Does to the Environment

2011-11-18T08:33:00.001-05:00

I noticed a fascinating Call For Papers this morning on h-net for a conference on "Science, Space, and the Environment," sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and scheduled for thus July 17-18 at London's Science Museum.

Here's the pitch: "Although the sciences have provided critical resources in environmental debates, their own role in environmental change has been little studied. This conference will explore how the sciences have affected the physical environment."

The organizers seem to have negative impacts on the environment foremost in their minds, but there are clearly other directions one could take such an inquiry. Don Worster's Nature's Economy imagined science to have split personalities when it came to nature: the "Arcadian" strain of science produced knowledge that helped humans understand, love, and live with nature; the "imperial" strain led to domination and abuse. Forgive me a pun, but I imagine that the history of scientific agriculture would provide particularly fertile ground for thinking about the positive and negative impacts of science on our environments.

I'll post the full CFP after the break. Perhaps it will inspire one of our readers.

****
Call For Papers: Conference: Science, Space, and the Environment

Location: Smith Centre, Science Museum, London
Date: Tuesday/Wednesday July 17-18, 2012

Sponsor: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich

Organizers: Helmuth Trischler, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and
Society, Munich; Ludmilla Jordanova, King’s College London Department of
History; Simon Werrett, University of Washington Department of History/
Science Studies Network, Seattle; Science Museum, London.

Although the sciences have provided critical resources in environmental
debates, their own role in environmental change has been little studied.
This conference will explore how the sciences have affected the physical
environment. How have scientific practices and ideas impacted on nature
– for example do practices such as voyages of exploration or natural
history collecting exploit plants and animals and their environments?
Does scientific activity cause pollution, depletion of resources, or
other forms of damage to ecosystems? How are such practices to be
evaluated, and how are they related to scientific and other ideas of
nature and the environment, e.g. notions of conquest, mastery, or
interrogation. How should scientific ideas about the environment be
related to the impacts of scientific research on it? In particular
papers should address scientific activities involving the circulation of
knowledge and materials. A growing body of work in the history of
science has explored the issue of circulation, examining how physical
specimens, books, people, and materials related to science have been
made to move around the globe in the service of producing or
disseminating scientific knowledge. What has been the environmental
significance of such circulations? How has the movement of people,
plants, animals, and scientific instruments, books and personnel
affected environments, e.g. on voyages of exploration, in processes of
establishing colonial scientific institutions, or in undertaking
imperial cartography or surveying? Papers which aim at fostering current
theoretical debates on how to link the conceptual approaches of history
of science, environmental history, and spatial history are particularly
welcome.

Please send a detailed abstract of 500 words and a short CV, no later
than December 31, 2011, to Simon Werrett werrett@u.washington.edu.
Successful applicants will be notified by January 31, 2012. Applications
and papers must be written in English. Travel and accommodation costs
will be reimbursed by the organizers. The conference will be based on
discussion of pre-circulated contributions. These should be between
6,000 and 8,000 words including footnotes, and must be submitted by May
10, 2012. Selected contributions will be considered for a publication
following the meeting.

For further information on organizational issues please contact Simon
Werrett (werrett@u.washington.edu)

The Rachel Carson Center is a joint initiative of LMU Munich and the
Deutsches Museum and is generously supported by the German Federal
Ministry for Education and Research.

4S/HSS/SHOT Recap #2

2011-11-16T11:37:00.001-05:00

I very much agreed with Hank's recent post about this year's HSS, so I thought I'd add my two cents. In particular, I wanted to say something about the "Making Mathematics: Models, Machines, and Materialities" panel. It was excellent; indeed, one of the best at this year's HSS!

Although the presentations were quite diverse, the panel had a remarkably tight and coherent theme. Chris Phillips delved into the history of the chalkboard as a ubiquitous tool in American mathematical pedagogy. David Roberts talked about the late 19th century enthusiasm for "linkages," that is, mechanical instruments that transformed circular motion into a perfectly straight line. Stephanie Dick explored the architecture of a mid 20th century geometry theorem proving machine developed at IBM. And Alma Steingart discussed the role of visualization in topology.

In her talk, Steingart argued that although Stephen Smale had conclusively shown that a sphere can be turned inside out in the 1950s, a large contingent of the mathematical community was not satisfied until a coherent visual account of the transformation had been supplied. This lead to a number of attempts to model the process using everything from chicken wire to advanced computer graphics imaging techniques.

Beyond its coherence, what made this panel so good was the fact that it explicitly engaged in an ongoing conversation about the importance of inscription techniques in mathematical theorizing. In some way or another, all of the talks helped cement the claim that diagrams, three dimensional models, and images are far from mere heuristics. Rather, they are often a constitutive element of theorizing as mathematical practice.

In this regard, I was especially intrigued by Stephenie Dick's paper, which centered on a geometry theorem proving machine developed at IBM in the 1960s. What made it so exciting is that she added an ontological component to the usual epistemic claims about the role of diagrams in mathematical theorizing.

The program that Herbert Gelernter and his colleagues at IBM developed to generate geometric proofs was modeled on human cognition. In particular, Galertner explicitly tried to make the program mimic the geometric intuitions and proof generating strategies of a high school student. (Indeed, he seems to have had students at the Brooklyn Technical Hight School in Fort Greene in mind.) Among other things this included working backwards from a desired conclusion to the assumptions, rather than the other way around. Most interesting, though, is that it also involved drawing figures, shapes, and diagrams.

For each proof, Gelertner and his colleagues supplied the computer with a visual diagram. This was in addition to a modest set of commonly known results in Euclidean geometry and the usual logical transformation rules that allow you to transform one syntactic expression into another. One way I understood the role of the diagram in Stephanie's talk is to think of it as a model -- as something for a syntactic expressions to be true of. Working backwards from the conclusion, the computer was thus able to eliminate certain fruitless paths to the assumptions by ascertaining whether they violated the supplied diagram.

What's so interesting about this? To my (admittedly limited) understanding, Stephanie was trying to go beyond just pointing out that here again diagrams and inscriptions played an important role in doing theoretical work. She also raised another, perhaps deeper question: what is it to be a diagram for a computer?

One way to understand the importance of diagrams for humans is that they offer us another way of thinking. Whereas equations help us think analytically, diagrams help us to think synthetically (or perhaps spatially, which may amount to much of the same thing). But computers are only capable of analysis. They are syntactic manipulation engines -- transforming one string of digits into another. A provocative way to read Stephanie's talk is thus to ask whether Gelertner was trying to give the computer a way to do something beyond merely manipulating strings of digits by supplying it with a diagram. The question of course is what this was. If the traditional syntactic symbol shuffling that computers engage in can be said to correspond to analytical thinking, then what does the computer do with a diagram? What is it to be a diagram for a computer?

Because Raccoon Intelligence Really Is a Problem

2011-11-15T14:04:00.001-05:00

...for science!

At the recent meeting of the Forum for the History of Science in America at HSS, David Spanagel awarded Michael Pettit of York University with the Forum's article prize for this year.

Pettit's article, "The Problem of Raccoon Intelligence in Behaviorist America" appeared in the British Journal for the History of Science in September 2010. You can read the article here.

We'll publish the award citation and feature a conversation with Pettit. But for now: enjoy the article!

4S/HSS/SHOT Recap #1

2011-11-09T14:00:00.001-05:00

As announced in a recent post, the whole sick crew spent last weekend in Cleveland at the jointly-located 4S, HSS, and SHOT meetings. Dividing our time differently between the three hotels (and various local watering holes), we each got our own snapshot of the state of the field(-s) today.

To my mind, two themes characterized some of the best panels: (1) the material culture of theories and (2) the structural power of metaphors. I hope a co-blogger will touch on the former as featured at "Making Mathematics," a panel widely lauded as one of the weekend's best.

For my part, I'll describe the latter theme as it emerged in a Sunday panel on "Bodies, Colonies, and Stem Cells." Each of the three papers – by Ben Hurlbut, Hallam Stevens (the organizer), and our very own Lukas Rieppel – dealt with the link between social and scientific categories.

That's a sloppy way to label a subtle conversation, but I think the panelists (along with their commentator, Andy Yang) would agree that the slipperiness of distinctions between science and society was at play in many of the examples they raised, ranging from cell theory to South Park).

Take, as an example, George Bush's famous 2001 allusion to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in describing the production of human embryonic stem cells for research research, which Hallam quoted in his talk. Once raised, the image of the "human hatchery" is hard to kill.

Ditto, in a different way, the cell-state metaphor Lukas discussed. August Wiesmann tacitly imported that intercellular framing for his intracellular theory – with the result that, though seemingly unintentional, his language was as political as that of his rival, Herbert Spencer.

Here's proof of the power of metaphor and allusion – of language – in scientific thought. This should come as no surprise, but the smart ways these papers elucidated this familiar theme suggests its renewed vitality at the heart of a paradigm aimed at practice and material culture.

Dr. Cynthia Beall and the Science of Human Adaptability

2011-11-02T10:58:00.000-04:00

This Friday, Nov. 4 at 12pm, those attending the FHSA distinguished scientist lecture will have the privilege of hearing from and talking with Case Western's Dr. Cynthia Beall. Gina Rumore, an FHSA stalwart, got in touch with Beall and offers the following introduction to her work. Enjoy:

Cynthia Beall and nomad friends: Phala, Tibet, altitude 4500m,2005,

Dr. Cynthia Beall of Case Western University will deliver this year’s FHSA Distinguished Scientist Lecture at the History of Science Society’s annual meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. Beall, a physical anthropologist, studies how humans adapt, physiologically, to living at high altitudes. She conducts her research on populations in the South American Andes, the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas, and the Simien Plateau of Ethiopia. She is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Over the past forty years, Beall’s research has challenged some of the most fundamental ideas about human adaptation—including her breakthrough discovery that Tibetan and Andean highlanders have adapted physiologically quite differently to living at high altitude. She is, indeed, a distinguished American scientist, and her talk on the history of high altitude studies and physical anthropology promises to be of interest to a diverse audience of historians of science. There is truly a little something for everyone in her story.

In 1970, Beall began her graduate education at Pennsylvania State under Dr. Paul Baker, who is credited as the founder of human adaptability studies. Focused on addressing questions of how natural selection acts on humans, Beall never really considered the challenges of being a female graduate student in an all-male program. “My dissertation advisor, and I didn’t know this until I got there,” Beall recalls, “it turns out was famous for not liking to take female graduate students. Or infamous I should say. And I remember someone telling me this and asking, ‘why?’ I was so out of it, right, that it never occurred to me that of all of the things someone would worry about they would worry about that. After my first field experience I found out that the male graduate students had had a betting pool as to whether or not I would survive the season. I don’t know who won it. I hope they all lost their shirts. It never occurred to me that it would be a problem.” Beall not only survived that first field season in Peru, but she would go on to become the most successful of Baker’s students, revolutionizing the field of high altitude population studies along the way.

Beall completed her doctorate in 1976 and immediately began to study, with her partner and colleague Melvyn Goldstein, the adaptations of populations living on the Tibetan Plateau of Nepal and, beginning in the early 1980s, of Tibet as well. “[T]here was no possibility of working [in Tibet] until the open door policy of the early 80s,” Beall explains, “and that, I should also say, was a policy of the Dalai Lama too. They used to either turn people away or kill them.” Access to these populations fundamentally altered the views of anthropologists and physiologists on how humans have adapted to live at high altitude. “Well the first change occurred in studying Tibetans in Nepal and finding that they didn’t have the same biological patterns as Andean highlanders,” according to Beall. “However, in Nepal, the people who we had access to at the time lived, what you might call, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, and so it was possible for them in the course of an annual cycle or even in the course of a day to move up and down a lot in altitude. So there was always in the back of people’s minds the idea that the reason for the apparent Tibetan Indian difference was a pattern in the difference of exposure to high altitude. So in going to Tibet, where it’s a huge plateau, and you are talking about people living in the midst of the plateau, they never go to low altitude. So that was a very nice study design to address that one particular concern.” The natives of the Tibetan Plateau had adapted, physiologically, quite differently to living at high altitude than the Andean natives of Bolivia and Peru.

Humans living at high altitude face the deadly threat of high-altitude hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, resulting from the lower air pressure at high altitudes making it harder for sufficient oxygen molecules to enter the blood stream. Earlier studies of the Andean populations living at high altitudes revealed that individuals in these populations generally had elevated hemoglobin concentrations, and this came to be the accepted means of high-altitude adaptation. But when anthropologists began studying the populations of the Tibetan Plateau in the 1970s and 1980s, they discovered that these populations did not adapt in the same way. Beall’s work over the past four decades has addressed this question of how these two populations, as well as a third, Ethiopian highlanders, have evolved different physiological mechanisms to solve the same biological problem – the need to draw sufficient oxygen into the blood stream from thin air.

Just as access to new populations has shifted anthropologists’ perspectives on how humans adapt to high altitude, changes in science and technology over the past four decades have also radically reshaped the questions physical anthropologists can ask and what data they collect and how. “[When we first started out in the field,” Beall recalls, “it was things like height and weight, chest depth, everything super low tech … and then it became possible slowly to have portable generators, so you could have some electricity. So then you could expand a little bit what you could measure. My favorite device was invented in the early-to-mid 80s, called the pulse oximeter that measures the amount of oxygen that hemoglobin is carrying. And that’s a little portable box that changed the field radically, because before to get that measurement you had to take an arterial blood sample. And that’s quite invasive. Sometimes you can’t even get permission to that here in the U.S. Then blood samples became smaller, people developed new techniques for measuring things in saliva and in urine, and in exhaled breath ... So all of that has changed what we can measure. Now in the more rural areas people are starting to put in micro-hydro and they have their own electricity or they have solar panels and they have their own electricity. And then we moved to genetics, and again there have been changes: at first you needed blood, and now you only need saliva. People are happy to spit.” Technological changes have also allowed anthropologists to begin to tackle a tough question with genetic data: what genes are responsible for adaptability to living at high altitude (meaning what allows humans from low altitude to acclimate) and what specific genes show adaptation driven by natural selection?

Despite the many changes in science and technology over the past forty years, Beall is careful to point out that much of the basic work of physical anthropology remains the same: “You need pedigrees. So you need to know who is related to whom. You need to know what people do for a living. You need to know what they eat. What their exercise patterns are… a lot of the social context, and you still have to get that by sitting down and talking with people and living in the village. And that has absolutely not changed and that is crucial. There are some classic examples where basically we were misled by data being collected from the wrong people or without thinking about important confounding social factors. So the things that I have been talking about have been technical changes that have allowed us to be able to measure human biology better. The things that have remained the same are old-fashioned techniques. We are doing ethnography and observing people and talking with them.” As a physical anthropologist, Beall spends months at a time living among the high-altitude populations with whom she works. And, fortunately, she has a knack both for learning languages—she is fluent in Spanish and speaks conversational Tibetan (she did note that she does not yet speak Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia)—and she seems to be immune to altitude sickness.

Beyond, or perhaps in conjunction with, their research, Beall and Goldstein (a social anthropologist) have also worked hard to give back to the communities in which they conduct their research. One of their largest efforts has been establishing a sheep bank in the nomadic area of the Tibetan Plateau. “[W]e thought, what is it that nomads can do to get rich?” Beall recalls. “Everyone else in China is starting businesses and things like that, and what can the nomads do? Well, the only thing they can do is raise more animals, and so what we did is we got funding so that we could buy 250 fertile female sheep of the highest quality one year. And we talked to the community and the community helped decide which five families should get this loan of animals, and the idea was that they would be able to keep any babies that were born in subsequent years, keep the milk, the meat, the wool. Well, we hoped that they wouldn’t keep the meat. We did not want them to kill any animals. So remove the meat from that list. Then in the fourth year they were to pay back half of the animals and in the fifth year pay back the second half. Then we did the same thing in year two; we got another 250 animals, and in year three we got another 250 and now its been working for about seven years and the idea is that as they pay back their animals, then the community has a bank. It has these animals to loan out to other families. And it’s been working beautifully. They took 100% seriously control. They watch, they monitor. If Joe Schmoe looks like he has a gambling problem, and he’s about to sell his animals and eat them, they go and take them back.”

Listening to Beall tell of her work in Tibet, it is hard to miss the passion for the people, the environment and the science that motivates her research. Beall’s career touches on and highlights so many issues in the history of science in America: really cool, cutting-edge science; the role of gender in science; the challenges of working in the field and working on human subjects—a natural experiment, as she calls it; and technology and how it has changed and been changed by scientists and their research questions. She will, without a doubt, add immeasurably to the History of Science Society program this November. Her talk will take place on Friday, November 4, following the noon business meeting for the Forum for the History of Science in America.

Gina Rumore is a lecturer in the Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation, titled “A Natural Laboratory, A National Monument: Carving out a Place for Science in Glacier Bay, Alaska, 1879-1959,” won the 2010 Rachel Carson Prize for the Best Dissertation in Environmental History. Rumore has served as Secretary-Treasurer of FHSA since 2006.

"Science Conservatively Defined"

2011-10-31T15:00:00.002-04:00

Reflecting on how we came to name ourselves "AmericanScience" as HSS approaches, I noticed an interesting thing under our "About the FHSA" tab. The submission criteria for the Forum's Publication Prize are that the work be "on a topic in American Science ('American' loosely defined to include the western hemisphere, 'science' conservatively defined to exclude articles focusing on either the 'clinical and social history of medicine' or the 'history of technology')."

"American loosely defined," "science conservatively defined." On the one hand, these criteria are easy to understand (and justify). The looseness of the former accommodates work on Central and South America that has no other group identity in HSS; the rigidness of the latter prevents encroachment from those working on topics (medicine, technology) with their own associations, annual meetings, and opportunities for prizes elsewhere. Definitions reflect their institutions.

On the other hand, though, there's a sense in which this balance of loose and conservative definitions mirrors a wider phenomenon in the field. In the wake of the most dogmatic years of the "transnational turn" – during which one could pick a project for the very sake of its being transnational – there's still a strong emphasis (at least at Princeton) on dissolving national boundaries as one tracks ideas and practices across them. "Why only in X?" is a common query.

Not so for defining the ideas and practices themselves. In many respects, there is still a pressure to focus on figures and texts that are either part of an ill-defined canon or – more commonly – represent the origins, past lives, or paths-not-taken of acknowledged fields of scientific inquiry today. You can write about mesmerism or pseudo-science precisely because of their relationship to "science." Often, it's this relationship that constitutes the elevator pitch for one's project.

What does that leave out, for American science? It can be complicated to identify as a historian of science (as opposed to a US cultural/intellectual historian) if one's topic is the extra-scientific lives of scientific ideas – their origin in, and influence upon, wider American culture. When I proposed to write a dissertation on methodological debates amongst psychologist, philosophers, and scientists, an elder statesman of the field asked a telling question: "Where's the science?"

That perspective seems to be on the decline, but the other structuring factor here is ... the job market. Programs in the history of science still tend to imagine needs in – and conduct job searches for – the "life" and "physical sciences." This fact shapes how new graduate students conceive dissertation topics. Science, defined "conservatively" according to the need to get a job, thus helps maintain an identity barrier between American history and the history of science.

AmericanScience Goes to Cleveland

2011-10-29T13:36:00.004-04:00

AmericanScience will be all over the place at the jointly-held annual meetings of HSS/SHOT/4S in Cleveland next week. We're looking forward to meeting and talking with our readers! Let us know your ideas for topics, guest posts, interview suggestions, and general feedback. Here's where to find us:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4

HSS: 9:00 – 11:45 AM

Blossom (4th Floor)

"Costs and Benefits: Life Scientists and the Assessment of Wartime Technologies, from 1945 to the Vietnam War"

Chair and Commentator: Karen Rader, Virginia Commonwealth University

1. Environmental Consciousness in the Cold War: Radioecologists, Nuclear Technology, and the Atomic Age, *Rachel Rothschild, Yale University
2. Quickening Nature’s Pulse: Mutation Plant Breeding at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oregon State University
3. The Atomic Farmer in his Gamma Garden: Agricultural Research at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1948-1955, Helen Curry, Yale University
4. The Area Should Be Treated as a Laboratory: Scientists, Controversy, and the Vietnam War, Sarah Bridger, California Polytechnic State University

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5

4S: 8:30am - 10:00am

Crowne Plaza, Grand Ballroom - West

"Science and Commercial Culture: Competition, Cooperation and Assimilation"

Chair: Lukas Rieppel (Harvard University)

1. Publish When You Cannot Patent: Counterintuitive Relations Between
Early Modern Science and Commerce. Mario Biagioli (University of California, Davis)
2. Academies in the Press: The Structural Transformation of the Scientific Public. Alex Csiszar (Harvard University)
3. Vertical Integration and the Market for Vertebrate Fossils, 1890-1910. Lukas Rieppel (Harvard University)
4. Purity vs. Property? Entrepreneurship, War and Technoscience's Changing Identity. Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds), Stathis Arapostathis (University of Leeds)

Discussant: Bruno Strasser (Yale University)

HSS: 9:00-11:45 am

Holden (4th Floor)

"Floating Labs: Mobile Scientific Spaces and the Reconfiguration of Practice "

Chair and Commentator: Helen Rozwadowski, University of Connecticut, Avery Point

1. Scientists Under Pressure: The Scientific Practices of a Cold War Underwater Laboratory, Nellwyn Thomas, University of Pennsylvania
2. Ship as Instrument: The R/V Alpha Helix and Human Biological Research, 1966-1977, Joanna Radin, University of Pennsylvania
3. The Tale of Bathybius: Of Sea, Ships, and Urschleim, *Emma Zuroski, Cornell University
4. The Oceanic Feeling in Human Biology: The Voyage of the Zaca, 1934-35, Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney

HSS: 1:30-3:30 pm

Severance (4th Floor)

"Knowing Society"

Chair: Dan Bouk, Colgate University

1. Early Modern Social Analysis: Nicolas de Nicolay on the Ottoman Empire, Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego
2. Lamarckism and the Constitution of Sociology, Snait B. Gissis, Tel-Aviv University
3. Observation in the Social Field in Mid-20th Century America, Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics and University of Amsterdam
4. Habitats of Organized Science: Louis Guttman and the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, Tal Arbel, Harvard University

SHOT: 2:00-3:30 pm

Marriott Salon C

"Hot & Cold: Manipulating & Disciplining Bodies with Technologies of Temperature"

Chair and Commentator: Jonathan Rees, Colorado State University

1. Joanna Radin*, "Shock of the Cold: Freezers and the Preservation of Bodily Extracts", University of Pennsylvania
2. Lisa Onaga, "A Silkworm for All Seasons," Cornell University
3. Deanna Day, "The 'Heart's Knowledge' of 'Walking Biological Computers:' How Domestic Thermometry Created a New Hybrid Subjectivity," University of Pennsylvania

HSS: 4:00-6:00 pm

Halle (4th Floor)

"Pragmatism and the History of Science: James, Dewey, and Mead"

Chair and Commentator: Francesca Bordogna, University of Notre Dame

1. The Wealth of Notions: The Evolutionary Epistemology of William James, *Henry M. Cowles, Princeton University

2. Dewey before James: Evolution and the Organic, 1875-1889, Trevor Pearce, University of Wisconsin, Madison

3. Reading What Was Spoken: Classroom Notes in our Understanding of George Herbert Mead, Daniel R. Huebner, University of Chicago

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6

HSS: 10am - noon

Van Aken (4th Floor)

"Bodies, Colonies, and Stem Cells"

Chair: *Hallam Stevens, Harvard University
Commentator: Andrew Yang, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

1. Weismann's Authoritarian Cell State, Lukas Rieppel, Harvard University
2. Stem Cells and the Colonial Metaphor,*Hallam Stevens, Harvard University
3. Biological Kinds and Moral Categories in American Regulation of Human Embryo Research, Ben Hurlbut, Arizona State University

Race and Violence in Occupied Oakland

2011-10-26T10:42:00.001-04:00

Oakland Police Arresting a Protestor, from the NY Times website.

According to the NY Times and the Oakland Tribune, about 1,000 protesters clashed with Oakland police on Tuesday night. The catalyst appears to have been a decision to clear members of “Occupy Oakland” from Frank Ogawa Plaza, where they had been camped out for some time. What’s remarkable about this story is the level of violence that appears to have been involved. The NY Times piece includes a number of graphic videos and photos of injuries that protestors sustained at the hands of riot police.

This post is not about science, but there is a historical component to the story. I was immediately struck watching these videos by how differently things played out in Oakland (and, also, Atlanta) than they have in New York, where the city has allowed members of “Occupy Wall Street” to remain in Zuccotti Park. The New York Times makes an interesting point, which I’ll quote here:

“At a late-night news conference, the city’s acting police chief, Howard Jordan, said officers needed to use tear gas after protesters threw rocks and bottles at them. The city has seen multiple clashes between protesters and the police in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant III, a young, unarmed young black man, by a white transit officer.”

This suggests that one reason the police in Oakland have reacted so much more aggressively to protestors than those in New York is that Oakland is plagued by a higher level of racial tension. This is very much in accordance with my own experience.

I’ve spent time living in Brooklyn on several occasions over the past few years, as I was doing research for my dissertation at the American Museum of Natural History. Last summer, I lived in the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood, near the border with Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. These are historically African American neighborhoods that are currently undergoing gentrification. I was really amazed at how remarkably little racial tension I experienced there. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a place that is so diverse and meaningfully integrated (which isn’t to say that none of the residents are angry about gentrification). According to my brother, who lives in Oakland, my experience in New York represents a pretty stark contrast to the Bay Area.

I grew up just south of Chicago, and attended public school there. During my senior year, I wrote a research paper on the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots, which exploded into extreme violence when riot police attempted to flush protesters out of their camps in Grant Park every evening. Doing this research, I learned that other cities across America also had large groups of protest take over city parks. However, Chicago experienced by far the worst violence. As far as I could tell, the reason was that Chicago police were incredibly aggressive in the way they confronted protestors, using tear gas, clubs, and mace. In contrast, other cities, including New York, responded to similar occupations by providing protestors with public washrooms, a source of running water, etc.

Going through newspaper accounts from the late 1960s, the racial dimension of these events immediately became clear. Chicago experienced a high level of racial tension during the 1960s, which often manifested itself as street violence. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a significant portion of city’s African American population took to the streets. In response to unrest emanating from the city’s black neighborhoods, Mayor Richard M. Daley called in the Illinois National Guard, instituted a curfew, and reportedly gave orders "to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand . . . and . . . to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city.” When large numbers of people descended upon the city to protest the Democratic National Convention later that summer, Daley insisted on enforcing the curfew in city parks and, predictably, violence exploded.

History, we are learning once again, always seems doomed to repeat itself.

The Buzz on Google NGram Viewer

2011-10-22T17:09:00.009-04:00

'Tis the season for conference presentations. A time when people are compelled to make grand statements and mobilize snappy visuals to back them up. In this short post I'm hoping to spark some conversation about one such resource: the Google Ngram Viewer.

For the uninitiated, the Ngram Viewer works like this: through a relatively simple user interface, you plug in one or more terms. With the click of a button, a graph pops up that tracks the frequency with which they appear in a wide range of books since 1800. C'mon, try it -- everyone's doing it. I mean, who doesn't crave quick answers to the question of 'zombies' versus 'vampires?':

But like sugar and caffeine -- two of my addictions -- the buzz wears off quickly, often leaving me more disoriented than before I imbibed.

In all seriousness, this is a tool that invites as many questions as it answers, especially when tracking concepts across different languages and cultures (although you can search in a range of other modern languages). I won't even get into the bigger issues of sampling and statistical modelling, but welcome comments on these aspects, as well.

Take an example from a recent workshop I attended on "Endangerment and it Consequences." It was exciting to be in a room with scholars from around the world, working in different cultural contexts across several centuries. However, this raised the inevitable question of terminology. In the final wrap-up, the Ngram viewer provided a provocative means of reinforcing our shared sense that "endangerment" was a timely topic; that the two days of attention had been worthwhile:

But, of course, this graphic could not tell us what the word meant or even how it has come to assume such currency. And it made it easy to forget that the ideas expressed by the English word "endangerment" might be expressed differently in other languages (or even within English, itself).

You get the point. For me, the initial buzz of "wow!" quickly gave way to a lull of "so what?" But a week later, I'm coming around to realizing that instruments like the Ngram Viewer present problems of knowledge as worthy of inquiry as concepts like "endangerment." This, I imagine, is an issue that those of you in the digital humanities are particularly well-situated to consider.

So, what I really want to know is: Have you used the Ngram Viewer in conjunction with your scholarly activities, teaching included? How? What do they tell you? What are the risks?

Moon Trees

2011-10-10T10:59:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, Joanna joked that I should write a guest post on a subject she and I both find intriguing: moon trees. Even though I find myself joining AmericanScience as a regular contributor instead of a guest, and should probably begin a little more seriously, I find the topic too fun to pass on a chance to talk about it.

“Moon tree” usually refers to a tree grown from one of several hundred seeds that orbited the moon during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. These were subsequently cultivated by the Forest Service and distributed across the country as seedlings. Many were planted in public spaces in celebration of the country’s bicentennial in 1976.

In one attempt to ascribe some meaning to these ceremonial "Bicentennial Moon Tree" plantings, President Ford connected them to American achievements, past and present: “This tree … is a living symbol of our spectacular human and scientific achievements. It is a fitting tribute to our national space program… May this young tree renew our deep-rooted faith in the ideals of our Founding Fathers."

Sponsored in part by the Forest Service, the tree plantings were also meant to “mark the contributions forests have made to our way of life.” So when the first planting of a bicentennial moon tree took place in Philadelphia’s Washington Square Park, both Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa and Woodsy the Owl presided.

Space flight. Founding ideals. Forest stewardship. That's a lot to ask of just one tree.

Having just heard a talk by Neil Maher of Rutgers/NJIT, whose work on the environmental history of the space race connects this history to many currents of American culture and politics in the 1960s and 70s, I know not to be too surprised by the mishmash of ideas represented in the bicentennial moon trees. Most obvious here is the entanglement of space exploration and environmentalism, i.e., the idea of “Honoring Earth’s Green World of Trees” with a plant that had come so near the barren, lifeless surface of the moon.

As I see it, the interesting aspect is less the potentially confusing symbolism and more that individual trees are rather transient tributes to these weighty subjects. As living symbols, they will by their very nature someday be dying symbols. The moon tree in Washington Square was taken down just a couple of weeks ago, apparently after nearly three years of being pretty much just a barren, lifeless trunk. Honoring Earth’s Green World of Trees, indeed.

So it seems like this idea went awry somewhere, right? Wrong. Wrong because “moon tree” now increasing applies to clones of the trees, or trees grown from seeds of the original trees. In 2009 NASA celebrated Earth Day by planting a second-generation moon tree at the National Arboretum. The Philadelphia tree has just been replaced with its own clone, a sapling sycamore. Apparently a few years ago you could even buy your own moon tree, derived from one of the original moon sycamores, direct from the American Forest’s Historic Trees program.

Which is why the moon trees are actually pretty brilliant: as living entities reproducible at minimal cost there is, theoretically, an infinite supply. Not only can the living symbol of the moon tree be made immortal, in a way, but it can also be widely distributed. We don't even have to go back to the moon!

NASA made a call for information about the location and condition of the bicentennial moon trees, old and new, just this year. The amount of publicity it has generated demonstrates that people are still pretty interested in these space-age artifacts. And, unlike moon rocks (which can get you into big trouble) or pieces of spacecraft (except when they fall from the sky), I bet it’s pretty easy to gather your own space-race memento from some of the moon trees.

In short, these organic monuments are a successful if unconventional reminder of an intensely technological accomplishment, and perhaps also of the Founding Fathers and the need to prevent forest fires. But it's not really because they call to mind a specific event in the history of spaceflight. It's because they feed on – and quite literally multiply through – the imaginative appeal of space exploration and popular interest in its material artifacts.

It kind of makes you rethink plaques and concrete slabs, doesn't it?

Carlo Ginzburg on the Historian's Craft

2011-10-04T09:03:00.000-04:00

This week, the father of the modern microhistory and one of the godparents of modern cultural history in general spoke at the Institute for Advanced Study on the relationship between observers, actors, and language in the historian's craft.

Carlo Ginzburg will be familiar to most for his epoch-making 1976 study The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, which explains just what its title promises and is required reading in most history methods courses.

Connections to AmericanScience aren't immediately obvious, but the talk (a) dealt with some of the theoretical issues we've touched on before and (b) cast new light on how history borrowed from (sacked?) its cousin anthropology a half-century ago.

The title of his talk was "Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft Today," and it began by noting what is both a blessing and a curse for history: that it is conducted in everyday language, in a vocabulary often shared with its actors.

Proceeding, as so many talks on the topic do, from Marc Bloch's posthumous Méthodologie Historique, Ginzburg highlighted Bloch's well-known debt to Durkheim's notion of conscience collective and its conscious correlate, "collective representation."

The conscience collective – the social psychology underlying society – determines both social and individual action, and is expressed everywhere – in language, in rituals, in institutions – as "collective representations," to which historians have access.

Enter anthropology. Actually, enter linguistics. Ginzburg reached back to Kenneth Pike and his midcentury coining of the terms "etic" and "emic," which map onto the issue of recovering the conscience collective in ways that should interest historians.

Both terms refer to observers' accounts: as Ginzburg put it, an "etic" account is a comparative one, the language of which isn't specific to any one culture, while an "emic" account either comes from or is familiar to (he was a bit unclear) a specific culture.

So far, this was familiar to many in the audience. What Ginzburg did that was new – at least to me – was to recast this dichotomy in terms of the questions historians ask of the past, and the answers they derive from texts as they pursue those questions.

Basically, historians can't escape their own times – they think in their own language and their perspective is always that of the "outsider." Anachronism is built into their pursuits. In this sense, our questions will always be "etic," at least to some extent.

Ginzburg didn't bemoan this – in fact, he insisted that we embrace it. What he suggested was that, if our questions are "etic," we should try for "emic" responses, always derived from the specificity of whatever culture it is to which we address those questions.

In part, this is an aspect of history's (or anthropology's) confused identity vis-a-vis objectivity and the scientific method. Ginzburg cited Bloch's reading of Claude Bernard, suggesting comparative history as a social-scientific offshoot of the experimental ideal.

It was a brilliant lecture. It provided a way to parse (and then parry) the charge of "anachronism" in history. It wasn't airtight – what is? – but Ginzburg's recasting of "etic" and "emic" as question and answer was lively take on the methods of cultural history.

There's a tension here – too anachronistic a question will be impossible to answer – but it can be a productive one. Accepting and posing "etic" questions, combined with a call for "emic" answers, is, for Ginzburg, the hermeneutic heart of the historian's craft.

Gould's fundamental miscalculation

2011-10-02T10:12:00.000-04:00

I missed the boat with this post. It should have come in June. If normal blogosphere time standards prevailed, I would remain silent. But I have faith that we in the scholarly blogging community are perfectly happy to contemplate even that which is months old. So what happened last June?

Alas, poor Yorick!

Jason E. Lewis of Stanford's Anthropology Department (now Rutgers) and 5 colleagues from prominent institutions around the country published a refutation in PLoS Biology of Steven Jay Gould's famed Samuel George Morton indictment. The paper takes aim most directly at Gould's 1978 Science article (full text available, behind pay-wall), which made the case that "unconscious finagling" was the norm in science, in even such apparently objective activities as counting and measuring. It saves some space to refute Gould's broader version of this story as it appears in The Mismeasure of Man, a book I know much better and unabashedly love. Lewis et. al.'s cogent and convincing reassessment of Gould's study demands our attention, not only because it focuses on Gould (a FHSA fellow traveler, if not a member---I don't know if he ever belonged) and touches on a prominent figure in the history of science in America, but also for what it can tell us about the landscape of "science studies."

In the summer of 1977, Steven Jay Gould began working through Samuel George Morton's two monumental works of physical anthropology: Crania Americana and Crania Aegyptiaca. Both volumes teemed with measurements of skulls accumulated by Morton and his world-wide network of collectors and were illustrated in a truly lavish form with beautiful cranial illustrations (see an example above). Morton included in his works an extensive accounting of his measurements, alongside his conclusions, which used cranial capacity to lend greater weight to a five-part racial taxonomy and hierarchy. Morton adopted the racial categories of the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, breaking his skulls into the broad categories of American, Caucasian, Ethiopian, Malay, and Mongolian. Measuring the skulls in his collection (which reached unprecedented proportions, especially in the vastness of its "American" contents), Morton demonstrated a different average cranial capacity for each class of skulls measured and concluded that "race" rather than climate or circumstance led to these physical differences. His findings further supported a racial ordering that placed Caucasians on top, Americans in the middle, and Ethiopians on the bottom.

Gould took advantage of Morton's commitment to objective principles and took a second look at all the data that Morton so assiduously collected and then published. Gould argued, in the end, that not only Morton's conclusions were faulty, but that his measurements and analysis were as well. Morton, according to Gould's recalculations, came to his averages by choosing (unconciously) subsamples to include or exclude in a manner that supported his case and by ignoring variables (like the sex or stature of a skull's original owner) that might otherwise explain differences in cranial capacity. Gould also took advantage of a sort of natural experiment in Morton's data to look at the place of bias in measurement. Morton measured one set of skulls twice: first with mustard seeds and later with lead shot. Seeds, as Morton himself realized, produced less reliable numbers---varying from measure to measure---than did shot. Morton, who cared about his methods, settled on shot for his final measures. When Gould looked at the seed measures and the shot measures, he found that the average seed measures were lower than the average shot measures for those who Morton considered lower in the hierarchy. Gould saw here evidence of how bias could work if scientists were not so careful as Morton to choose the best methods of measuring.

Gould also went a step further and played with Morton's data a bit. By thinking about the variables that Morton ignored (like sex) and adopting a different stance toward subsamples, Gould found that Morton's hierarchy dissolved into essential equality. (Well, it persisted, but the gaps became vanishingly small.)

Lewis et. al. set out to remeasure Morton's skulls (thereby going a step further than Gould) and again reconstruct Morton's numbers. They conclude: 1) Morton's skull measurements were quite accurate; 2) his subsampling had fewer problems than the new methods that Gould introduced; and 3) his seed vs. shot measures only demonstrated bias on the levels of the mean, but were far more variable from skull to skull. The first conclusion ought not be surprising. Even Gould accepted Morton's shot measurements as essentially reliable. The second and third are surprising and important. You can judge for yourselves, but I am convinced by the authors' arguments and their data. Gould made some crucial errors in his subsampling analysis and, as the authors show, the charges of finagling he leveled against Morton did not always make sense. I am particularly sad to see the death of the seed-to-shot natural experiment, but I accept the authors' claims that the sort of bias Gould proposed should show itself more consistently from skull to skull--not just at the level of the mean. If Morton patted the seed a bit tighter in his Caucasian skulls and looser in American skulls, he would have done that to some degree for all (or even most) Caucasian and American skulls.

The authors seem most concerned with refuting Gould's conclusion that scientists inevitably finagle. They pay little attention to the bigger picture that Gould presents in Mismeasure, beyond a sentence wherein they admit that they themselves no longer believe scientific evidence supports the idea that racial categories explain much of anything. They adopt a strict stance toward their data and criticize Gould for making so many suppositions. They refuse, for instance, to consider the idea that sex might have played a role in Morton's skull averages, because they have no objective way of sexing Morton's skulls. In the end, they reject Gould's revised and equalized cranial capacities as barely founded speculation. I think their objective purity might be getting the better of them here. They don't prove Gould wrong. They prove we cannot prove him right, and therefore reject the entire enterprise.

Lewis et. al. want us to reconsider Morton as a hero of objective science. They laud his methods and his commitment to publishing all his data. In fairness, Gould offered similar praise. In his Science piece, he called on his colleagues to "cultivate, as Morton did, the habit of presenting candidly all our information and procedure, so that others can assess what we, in our blindness, cannot." (505) But Lewis et. al. go a step farther. Morton, it seems, did no (or very little) wrong. When measurement errors appear, they belong to his untrustworthy assistant---although the authors have no way of knowing this to be true, beyond Morton's claim that he had a bad assistant. (I can't believe they would let Gould get away with a similar assumption.) In contrast, Gould, they argue, offers a "stronger example of bias influencing results."(5) I am not quite sure what to make of the clear moral distinctions being drawn between Morton and Gould. The paper is clearly dedicated to proving that bias can be limited by proper scientific methods. Such a claim would seem to make the scientist behind the measurements less important. Yet Lewis et. al. behave as if proving Morton to have the right values and to be a particularly competent measurer is very important. The proper scientific method, it seems, requires a certain kind of scientific self. The man and his values still matter. And yet...

The authors clearly relish refuting Gould's critique. The Morton case study, they write "has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct" and lent credibility to the idea that scientists are inevitably affected in all aspects of their work by their "cultural contexts." The authors note, with what reads to me like a sneer, that the cultural groundedness of science has "achieved substantial popularity in 'science studies.'"(5) Their article ends with a ringing confirmation of the scientific method: "The Morton case, rather than illustrating the ubiquity of bias, instead shows the ability of science to escape the bounds and blinders of cultural contexts."(6)

Here I part paths with Lewis et. al.

They convinced me that Gould made two kinds of miscalculations. The first set of miscalculations involved his analysis of Morton's data--this was what Lewis et. al. wanted me to notice. The second miscalculation was more fundamental: Gould used Morton to speak to the ways that scientists' humanity and cultural bounds can interfere with their measurements. That was never the best case to make. As these authors show and Gould suggested, appropriate methods can limit the ways in which the observer can interfere in a measurement. Objectivity can be approached asymptotically if you design the investigation right.

But what is the cost of objectivity? In Lewis et. al.'s case, giving priority to objectivity meant discounting the plausible assumptions that Gould used to refute racial orderings. It also meant privileging Morton's accurate measurements of cranial capacity, without any justification for why anyone should care to measure such a thing. Lewis et. al. defended Morton's measurements, but in doing so they end up overlooking a much more important set of "bounds and blinders of cultural contexts." Gould made a version of the same error. By focusing on the scientist measuring, we miss all of the intellectual baggage carried by the choice of measurements in the first place.

Two historians of science--operating near to "science studies," if not in it--point us in a better direction for thinking about Morton (and objectivity) than either Gould or Lewis. These studies point in the direction where "science studies" has been going and they make clear that culture still matters.

First, consider John Carson's "Minding Matter/Mattering Mind: Knowledge and the Subject in Nineteenth-Century Psychology." (1999) For Carson, what matters about Morton is the assumption that measuring cranial capacities mattered--that it could speak to questions of racial or species difference and ultimately allow for assessing minds. As Carson puts it, "Morton's research helped to codify a pattern of investigation that would flourish until the end of the century....the analyzing and ordering of races or groups, achieved through an investigative strategy centered around the fashioning of anonymity and its translation into numerical quantities that could be easily arrayed into linear hierarchies and aligned with mental attributes."(358) By stripping away the particularity of the skulls and defining them only by their internal capacity, Morton made it possible to group, average, and rank skulls and thereby tied those skulls to racial distinctions and orderings.

Ann Fabian, in her wonderful new book The Skull Collectors, pays even more attention to what gets lost when skulls become numbers in a table. In a few fascinating cases where the evidence allows her to do so, Fabian painstakingly traces Morton's skulls (and those held by his successors) back to their original possessors. In one such case, she considers a skull collected by the US Exploring Expedition. In fact, the Ex. Ex. collected a person: Veidovi, a Fijian elite taken captive in retaliation for an earlier assault on American traders. I cannot do Fabian's story justice here. But she concludes the chapter on his skull with a characteristic worry. If we take Veidovi only as a skull that fits into Morton's taxonomic scheme, he comes across in black and white as a racially pure Fijian. Yet the rest of Fabian's story suggests that racial purity had little to do with early nineteenth century Fiji: a cosmopolitan place caught up in an earlier globalized era. Throughout her book, Fabian rejects simple characterizations of Morton as a racist. She fears rightly that such characterizations have prevented scholars from interrogating Morton's collections and collecting practices more carefully and thus ignored the wealth of fascinating cultural assumptions underlying Morton's entire enterprise. Lewis et. al. assure us that they no longer accept scientific racism and then feel free to move on to vindicating Morton's measurements as culture-free. But Fabian demonstrates that Morton's skulls, his questions, and his methods cannot be extricated from their historical time and place.

[Note: At least one of Lewis' gang found Fabian's book and was not pleased. See the review-of-sorts by David DeGusta (apparently Lewis' former mentor; also it seems that Lewis and Fabian are neighbors at Rutgers). I have to remain uncommitted on DeGusta's biggest contention--that Morton never really cared about establishing a hierarchy and did not think bigger brains were better in general--until I can re-read Morton more carefully. But I don't buy DeGusta's contention that Crania Americana posed no aid to slavery's proponents or that Morton's idea of replacing Blumenbach's "races" with "families" evidenced a concern for "diversity." In both cases, DeGusta undervalues the power of a polygenist position. Morton's families would have increased the number of separately created human races/species. But any evidence that some humans were created apart from other humans gave slavery's proponents all they wanted: proof of a fundamental difference that could justify fundamentally different treatment.
Clearly, DeGusta is concerned that Fabian wants to destroy the basis for his discipline (physical anthropology), which explains why he wants historians to think more critically about the invasions of privacy they regularly practice. I accept that physical anthropology has value. A few historians have joined forces with anthropologists to give historical voice to people who have no historical records (for instance). The medical analysis of old bones offers particularly valuable opportunities here. I also accept DeGusta's call for historical self-critique.
Yet I don't think Fabian is so dangerous to DeGusta as he fears. And I also think Fabian has much more to offer the anthropologists than they currently accept.]

Science & Religion in America

2011-09-26T09:20:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, I co-organized Princeton's American Studies Graduate Conference. Our topic was "Science and Religion in America," and we had twelve papers, four panels, two keynote addresses, and one great Cheselden print:

Our chronology ranged over three centuries, and participants' disciplinary identities spanned history, religion, anthropology, political science, and integrated science studies programs at a variety of American institutions.

As you might be able to guess, given this range of interests and the broad nature of the theme itself, there was lots in the air over our day and half together – too much for one blog post (even if that blog post's written by me).

Rather than try to tie everything together, what I'll do here is just point out two of the major themes that emerged over the course of the conversation, and highlight a thematic arc connecting the two keynote addresses.

Authority – in many ways the ur-theme of the study of the relationship between science and religion – kept coming up throughout the conference, from historical appeals to authority to the use of authoritative rhetoric.

It was especially prominent in the second panel. There, the relative authority of science and religion was reframed as performance: from Scopes to spaceflight, it was less what was appealed to than how the appeal was made.

This leads me to the second theme I'll highlight: Narrative. From Anne Harrington's notion of "scripts" to the power of storytelling to change the world, narrative proved a central, though often subtle, analytical category.

Two papers on Puritans really brought this home. By fleshing out the Empiricist roots of the justification of confessional narratives as evidence in witch trials, both papers helped recast Perry Miller's take on the Puritan mind.

Finally, a word on a connection between our first keynote (by David Hollinger, on William James and twentieth-century Protestant thought) and our second (by Priscilla Wald, on normative narratives in a genomic age).

Hollinger tracked James' legacy amongst ecumenical Protestants who at first rejected, yet ultimately returned to, Jamesian abstraction, while Wald connected myths and anxieties about biotechnology and selfhood.

What helped bridge – or perhaps differentiate – the two was their orientation. While Hollinger only hinted at liberal Protestantism's future, Wald insisted on the need to change our narratives – and thereby, the world.

It was an interesting, and idealistic, end to an excellent conference. When pressed on just how much control anyone has over the myths that undergird our age, Wald simply expressed a faith that writers must have it.

For my part, I doubt there's much we can do to balance the news media's power over public opinion. If not science or religion, then we need a way to find the grounds for narrative authority today. Philosophy, anyone?

Cinematic Cultural Cartography: Scientists in Hollywood

2011-09-22T23:33:00.011-04:00

Kubrick and Clarke working on 2001

This weekend, I had the pleasure of watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey in the company of a bevy of historians of Cold War science. One of them, a specialist, as he puts it, in "the human experience in the milieu of space," pointed out the way in which Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke – the author of the book that formed the basis for the movie – worked closely with engineers at NASA to shape such visions. It seems fair to say that 2001 played an important role in stoking support for the Apollo Program that led astronaut Neil Armstrong to take his momentous “small step” on July 20, 1969.

Why I am telling you this? There could be a thousand reasons. But the one I want to highlight in this short post is about scientists as technical advisers to filmmakers. I’m particularly interested in the role that claims to technical accuracy (not to be confused with T/truth) play in mediating science and fiction.

In my research on the history of cryobiology I have been startled at how often scientists, as early as the 1930s (if not before), were asked to go on set to ensure the ‘accuracy’ of scenes involving attempts at human preservation. For example, in the late 1930s scientist Ralph Willard was credited as a consultant to the film “The Man With Nine Lives,” a medical thriller starring Boris Karloff as a mad-scientist who attempts to freeze humans alive. Willard, who is now viewed as a purveyor of pseudo-science, conducted early experiments with cold-induced hibernation. In the late 1950s, James Lovelock (yes, that James Lovelock) earned a day’s pay by serving as an on-set consultant for the play The Critical Point, which “revived” the effort to depict humans in a state of cryopreservation. Before he came up with his cybernetic Gaia hypothesis, Lovelock made important breakthroughs in the ability to keep blood and sperm functional after exposure to low temperatures. The ability to defrost and revive whole bodies remains controversial and elusive, but is an example that makes it worth asking: What’s at stake for scientists when they participate in the production of fiction? The boundary work of scientists behind the scenes of pop culture is still largely uncharted territory for students of the cultural cartography of science.

I’ll conclude with an example from the present. In the weeks following the release of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, a number of the scientists and public health officials who served as technical advisers for the film have used their involvement as a platform for raising awareness about biosecurity and epidemic preparedness. Assuring accuracy in the film both legitimates them as experts and legitimates the film as an extension of that expertise. Time will tell if anyone is taking them seriously and how.

There are many, many more examples. What scientists/films come to mind? What sort of scholarship -- work on nature films, scientists as consultants in other fields, etc -- could one draw on to go deeper into these questions?

Cases: History, Philosophy, Science

2011-09-19T17:45:00.001-04:00

I've touched on the relationship between history, philosophy, and science too many times to hyperlink (key posts: here, here, and (hesitatingly) here). It's both an important topic for the discipline and the subject of my own research, and today I'll try to bring those two things together.

My dissertation is about the scientific method. Specifically, it's about meta-scientific arguments between psychologists, philosophers, and scientists in the United States around 1900. I show why these folks felt so much was at stake in debates about methods in the sciences—and why they were right.

Part of what's interesting is that the vocational categories I just listed–psychologists, philosophers, and scientists–were only then coming into their modern forms. The result is a boon and a bother: contexts and terms blinked in and out of existence as these debates about science unfolded.

It turns out that changes in the cultural authority of science a century ago link up with the way we write and teach the history and philosophy of science today. In particular, that period's wide range of views on how science worked reveals a more capacious sense of what science is and what it's for.

This came to mind as I looked over a new textbook in the philosophy of science: Steven Gimbel's Exploring the Scientific Method. The book adopts a case-based approach in which students test philosophical views against episodes in a given "track" of the history of science (e.g. "Astronomy").

For Gimbel, as for many, philosophical ideas transcend their contexts and become part of the arsenal with which we address questions like the one central to his textbook: "What actually is the scientific method?" Answers are philosophical; history provides data against which to try them out.

This is one way to approach the issue–and, I want to emphasize, it's not a wrong one. Still, it's not the only way to use cases to tackle the question of what science is and how it works. Indeed, history reveals an alternative that stitches the history and philosophy of science together far more firmly.

That alternative first emerged in the work of Lawrence Henderson almost a century ago, and its story comprises the second chapter of an excellent book by Joel Isaac on the history of the human sciences at Harvard in the twentieth century, forthcoming next year from Harvard University Press.

Henderson adapted the case method pioneered by C.C. Langdell at Harvard Law School to instruction in the social sciences. Specifically, Henderson hoped to use cases to turn sociologists into scientists. Just as legal cases helped to make lawyers, scientific cases might help to make scientists.

Cases were part and parcel of the hybrid sort of "scientific philosophy" Henderson practiced. They were not only records of science's practices and advances, but also spurs to further practices and further advances. History, philosophy, science–all were knitted together in this approach to cases.

Though true of Henderson's cases, this was less true of a subsequent (and more famous) use of the case method at micentury Harvard: University President James Bryan Conant's Case Histories in Experimental Sciences, for which a young Thomas Kuhn famously served as an instructor.

As Isaac shows, this latter use of the case–now enshrined in the disciplinary history (and hagiography) of integrated history and philosophy of science–was more about explaining scientific progress than about inviting contributions thereto. Conant's cases were, after all, for non-scientists.

So, where does Gimbel fall? Somewhere between the two. Though history is not bound up with philosophy (and science) as it was for Henderson, Gimbel is in the business of making scholars and advancing knowledge–he just happens to be making philosophers of science, not scientific philosophers.

This distinction is important, for both my dissertation and my sense of the discipline. In an academic context still dominated by analytic philosophy, the meaning of "scientific philosophy" is puzzling in ways that it wasn't a hundred years ago. Henderson's hybridity doesn't make as much sense.

Back then, appeals made to "science" were appeals to something more diffuse–and more enlivening–than the "science" which is the object of both supplication and denigration today. In short: before Big Science, "science" was somehow bigger–and studies of it were richer as a result.

Economic vs. Scientific Value: The Case of National Parks

2011-09-08T09:12:00.000-04:00

Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona.

There is an interesting piece in today's New York Times about the expansion of Petrified Forest National Park in north-eastern Arizona. The park, which began its life as a National Monument under Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, has now been enriched with over 25,000 acres of land formerly belonging to a private ranch.

Negotiations between the Dpt. of the Interior and the owner of this land had been stalled for over a decade. The reason is that the two parties could not agree to a price. The ranch's owner, Marvin Hatch, demanded $500 per acre, which would have amounted to over $13 million in total. When the government refused, Hatch turned the land -- which is especially prized for the abundant dinosaur fossil it contains -- into a private theme park. Calling it International Petrified Forest, Hatch built a giant concrete dinosaur along I-40 to attract visitors and charge them an entrance fee.

International Petrified Forest, photo by Dean Jeffrey

Hatch has since passed away, and his sons agreed to sell the ranch-land at the reduced price of $300 per acre. In part, they appear to have been motivated by the fact that International Petrified Forest never really took off as a tourist destination. The Times goes on to describe the immense scientific value of the new acquisition, citing, among other things, the discovery of Gertie, a diminutive ancestor of the Cretaceous monster Tyrannosaurus rex.

The Times also quotes unnamed scientists as stating that the "value of the land in terms of research ... is impossible to measure." This is an interesting thing to say in an article that is primarily about how the United States Government did exactly that: negotiate a fair price for the land.

Historians of American conservation policy will recognize a further, deep irony in this story. The legislation that first made it possible for the US Executive to set certain areas aside for conservation as a National Monument was explicitly enacted to remove these sites from the free market. Originally passed in 1906, the Antiquities Act was drafted by scientists in an effort to ban commercial collectors (or "pot hunters" as they tended to be called) from the Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings in Colorado.

The Antiquities Act was designed only to protect sites of archeological and historical interest from capitalism. But it's language was extremely vague, stating the President could declare any "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments." Moreover, the act made it illegal for anyone to "appropriate, excavate, injure, or destroy any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of antiquity, situated on lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States."

A few years later, in 1909, vagueness of the Act's language -- which could be construed to include natural historical treasures in addition to archeological ones -- prompted a land agent in Utah to deny a mineral claim by Earl Douglass on behalf of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Douglass filed the claim in an attempt to secure ownership of a particularly rich dinosaur quarry, hoping to keep it from falling into the hands of private collectors or rival museums.

Earl Douglass at Dinosaur National Monument

When the Carnegie Museum's director, William J. Holland, learned that Douglass' mineral claim had been denied, he was furious. Holland had a personal hand in drafting the law, and never dreamed that it could be invoked to do anything but protect the interests of museums such as his own. He immediately got in touch with the Secretary of the Interior, and an awkward compromise was worked out in which Woodrow Wilson declared Douglass' dinosaur quarry to be a National Monument. This was not entirely satisfactory, because it meant the Carnegie Museum might have to allow rival museums like the Smithsonian to dig for dinosaurs there. But at least it would keep commercial fossil dealers off of the site.

What is the upshot of all this?

I think the history of the Antiquities Act points to the fact that sites of historic and scientific interest cannot really be removed from the market. Scientists and governments are economic players too! Legislation such as the Antiquities Act has often been used as a mechanism by which certain players assert their dominance over others in the course of an economic negotiation. William J. Holland was not offended by the notion that a monetary value might be placed on Douglass' dinosaur quarry. What bothered him was the thought that his museum might not be able to maintain control over the site.

So what do we mean when we declare a site to be immeasurable scientific or historical value? The usual way to interpret such language is that we think there is something profane about putting a cash value on historic landmarks or scientific discoveries. The point that I want to make is that this idea -- the idea that objects of scientific significance cannot be assigned a cash value -- has a particular history. Moreover, we should recognize that it serves the interests of scientists who understandably want to exercise control over those objects.

To forestall any misunderstandings, let me clarify one thing: I am not in favor of having National Parks or Monuments given over to private ownership. Far from it! I do think they represent a common heritage, and thus ought to be treated as a public good to be kept in the public domain. So I am the first to support the creation of public parks, national monuments, and so on. But just because they ought to belong to everyone does not mean they are not worth something. I think they are worth a great deal, and ought to belong to us all!

Statistical Infrastructure

2011-09-05T15:35:00.000-04:00

It has little to do with America directly, but I am fascinated by the New York Times' coverage of India's new nation-wise statistical and biometric registry: "Aadhaar"---which translates, in an Asimovian twist, to "foundation."

The project aims to assign a 12-digit ID to every Indian---that's 1.2 billion IDs---and link those IDs to names, fingerprints, and iris-scans. As Lydia Polgreen, the Times reporter, notes: "It is a project of epic proportions." It also promises to make the Indian government into the world's most important aggregator of biometric data, surpassing the US-Visit program by an order of magnitude.

Nandan M. Nilekani, the former chairman of Infosys and Aadhaar's head, explained the necessity of the system in terms that made it sound like a natural governmental activity: "What we are creating is as important as a road." It is, in other words, a kind of infrastructure: statistical infrastructure. That's a phrase I use quite a bit in my own work as I trace the ways that different systems for gathering data about individuals developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around the life insurance industry. In that story, private and public actors worked in parallel and sometimes together to improve the nation's system of vital statistical registration, to discipline doctors and nurses, and to build special biometric (of sorts) databases that could help assess each individual's risk. Yet the United States' own giant leap in gathering data (Social Security) created a national identity database only as an after-thought and had no thought of including biometric data.

That's the most intriguing thing about Aadhaar, as viewed through Polgreen's reporting. Identity sits at the center of the project. Polgreen begins with Ankaji Bhai Gangar volunteering to be IDed with hopes of getting "the first official proof that he exists." She ends with Mohammed Jalil pointing to the biometric station and saying "This will give me an identity....It will show that I am a human being, that I am alive, that I live on this planet. It will prove I am an Indian."

I'm wary of Polgreen's enthusiasm. She brushes aside concerns of "privacy watchdogs" effortlessly. She thrills at the possibililies of overcoming corruption on the local level and getting around the "crippling bureaucracy that is a legacy of [India's] socialist past." Aadhaar, we learn, will increase worker mobility and allow for greater agricultural modernization---these are both, we are made to understand, necessarily good things.

I'm all in favor of reducing corruption, improving the distribution of poor relief and welfare benefits. I think the poor ought to have access to savings, credit, cell phones, and teachers who show up to work. Who doesn't? But will a centralized, national system of identification really do that? Does bypassing local government---rather than, say, fixing it---solve that problem? I can't pretend to know, but I think there's reason to be skeptical with any theory of improving governance that tries to bypass local institutions. I do hope my fears prove entirely unfounded.

Science in America: History?

2011-08-29T18:15:00.003-04:00

Are Republicans at war—on science? The relationship between the GOP and the scientific community is in the news, and certain aspects of the coverage will be of interest to those working on the history of science in America.

Rick Perry (on the "Stump")

Rick Perry's recent entry into the race has raised a number of questions about his party's (and the American people's) relationship to science. Over the past few weeks, Perry has revealed—nay, reveled in—skepticism about both evolution and climate change.

Responding to a question from a New Hampshire child about whether or not he believed in evolution, Perry told the boy that evolution is "a theory that’s out there" that's "got some gaps in it," and that "In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution."

On climate change, Perry went even further. Asked, the previous day, to defend a claim (from his book Fed Up!) that climate science is "all one contrived phony mess" propagated by "a false prophet of a secular carbon cult" (guess who?), he went on the offensive:

"I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea..."

These positions don't make Perry an outlier in his party or the candidate pool—far from it. Take Michele Bachmann's famous 2006 assertion that "hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design."

She's been joined, in recent weeks, by candidates previously somewhat immune to this line of questioning. Video from 2007 of Ron Paul disavowing the theory has re-emerged, and Mitt Romney now has his doubts about humanity's role in climate change.

The only Republican candidate standing against this (real or performative) skepticism is Jon Huntsman, who took a pro-science stance in response to Perry's remarks, via Twitter: "I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."

Though it earned Huntsman some good press, it didn't help him in the polls. He's leagues behind the others—especially Perry, who at this point seems to be running away with the nomination, suggesting his remarks didn't cost him too much with his base.

All these developments caught the eye of Paul Krugman, who devoted his column this week to the issue. His stance is that it's all a part of a "deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right" that, in typical slightly-overdrawn language, "should terrify us."

Should it? On the one hand, our ability to address large-scale problems—financial, climatic, and otherwise—would no doubt be hampered by the ascendence of a president and a party that was, as Krugman puts it, "aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge."

On the other, something tells me that it's the politics that underlay this summer's debt-ceiling debacle (and the infamous AA+ downgrade) that we've got to worry about, not anti-scientism. For the record, the source on that is still George Packer's New Yorker piece.

So what about science (and AmericanScience), then? Well, there's the issue Ron Paul raises at the beginning of the video I linked to above: whether or not evolution is relevant, or if it's appropriate "for the presidency to be decided on a scientific matter."

In a post at The Intersection, this is parsed in a quotation from popular-science author Steven Berlin Johnson, who wrote The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (2008) and who thinks it does matter – for an interesting reason:

"[W]hen our leaders take these anti-science positions, [...] – they’re not just being anti-intellectual. They’re also being un-American. The people who founded this country were serious science geeks. We should be celebrating this fact, not running away from it."

Why is this interesting? Because it's precisely the sort of argument that appeals to the far right, and especially the Tea Party. From Ron Paul to Rick Perry, GOPers have staked their claim on Originalism and the Founders. Remember Paul Revere, "ringin' those bells"?

Michele Bachmann

So, if Franklin was pro-science, shouldn't Bachmann be? Well, that's the trick. She *is* pro-science, and so are her colleagues—as they understand it. For anyone interested in the cultural authority (and rhetoric) of science, Bachmann's justification of her views is fascinating:

"I support intelligent design," she said in June: "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don't think it's a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides."

The question is what constitutes "all science," or what counts as a "scientific issue," or, perhaps most crucially, what distinguishes "reasonable doubt" from ... something else. But check out what *isn't* up for grabs: today, science is good—we just disagree about how to do it.

Today's debates are largely conducted in a shared metascientific language—what's at issue isn't whether or not science can help determine policy (it can!), but whether we're being scientific enough, or whether politics have polluted the assumed purity of the scientific method.

Now, this isn't earth-shattering (or even that original) as a comment on contemporary politics. Still, for someone studying the rise of science's cultural authority in the United States, it's a stark sign that things people disputed a century ago are now unspoken assumptions.

Can that history of earlier debates over the authority of science tell us anything about today's troubles? Not really. In many respects we operate within the framework set by those earlier contests, and so any analogy is muddied by their genealogical relationship.

That said—and as I've suggested here before—what historians can contribute is what is precisely that sort of realization: we're trapped (or shaped) by our vocabularies, which have histories too. Taking stock of our terms can, I bet, help us see what's really at issue.

Dinosaurs and Dime Museums: Exhibiting the Past

2011-08-21T23:50:00.001-04:00

Child Looking at Brontosaurus, American Museum of Natural History, 1937.

HANK's posts (here and here) on research methods have got me thinking about the craft aspect of what we do. But I'd like to take the discussion in a slightly different direction and ask what happens if we stop assuming that we historians ought to be primarily in the business or writing texts.

In my research, I think a lot about the different effects that various media have on us as consumers of culture. For example, I have found that fully articulated, free-standing displays of mounted dinosaurs in the late 19th and early 20th century are best thought of as mixed media installations. In addition to fossilized bones, lots of other materials were required to mount a dinosaur, including shellac, gum acacia, paint, plater of Paris, and iron or steel. Moreover, mounted dinosaurs were almost always paired with other ways of representing prehistory, including three dimensional models and paintings of these animals in the flesh.

Brontosaurus displaying characteristically turn-of-the-century amphibious habits in a painting by Charles Knight, under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn.

There are a number of ways we can go about making sense of mounted dinosaurs as mixed media sculptures. I like to think about the various strengths and weaknesses of each medium. For example, paintings and three dimensional models are a good way to put life into dead bones, to use a phrase of which my historical actors were very fond. They literally helped visitors interpret the fossils on display, showing them how to visualize these animals in the flesh. At the same time, the fossils served as a reminder that these visualizations were not mere, idle speculation. They were grounded in material traces that survived from the actual past.

Mounting Brontosarus at the American Museum, 1904.

In addition to a mixed media sculpture, mounted dinosaurs were a form of publication. Many decisions (often controversial ones!) had to be made when putting a dinosaur on display. For example, when Curators from the American Museum of Natural History mounted a Brontosaurus in 1905, they took a wager that it held its legs erect under its belly, like modern elephants do. This was by no means a foregone conclusion at the time, and several paleontologists, including Oliver Perry Hay from the U.S. National Museum in Washington, D.C., and Gustav Tornier from Berlin, objected. They thought it more likely that dinosaurs held their legs sprawled out at a ninety-degree angle, like modern lizards and crocodiles.

Illustration of sauropod dinosaur Pose by Mary Mason, under the direction of Oliver Perry Hay, Proceedings of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 1910.

In the past two or three decades, we historians have become reasonably used to (and, I hope, good at) analyzing non-textual sources. But, unlike the paleontologists that I study, most of us continue to use words as the principle (if not only) way to communicate the fruits of our research. We historians write a lot of books and deliver even more lectures. But we rarely curate exhibits or make images. Why should this be the case?

I see no reason it should!

There are some encouraging signs of things moving in a new direction. Several historians of science I know of, including Peter Galison and Hanna Shell, use documentary film as a form of publication. But what other media might historians use to communicate with one another, and with a broader public?

One thing I've been especially interested to explore in my research is the relationship between elite science and popular culture. So, I have a soft spot for 19th century sites of amusement that blur the boundary between the two, especially those that throw in some humbug for good measure.

Dime museums, like PT Barnum's museum, which used to be located on Broadway and Anne Street in New York, are a particular favorite of mine. So I was super excited to visit the Spectacularium in Coney Island this weekend. This is a re-creation of a 19th century Dime Museum (of which there were several in Coney Island), that exhibits a number of period photographs, playbills, and guidebooks, in addition to some taxidermy and other exhibits. (Most of the latter were acquired when one of the last Dime Museums, on the Canadian side of the Niagra Falls, finally shuttered its doors a few years ago.)

I also discovered that Coney Island Museum still runs a sideshow. Here, you can see a snake charmer, a mesmerist, a strong man, and other remnants of the 19th century stage now usually only found in the circus.

Moreover, there is an excellent website and live gallery exhibit, the Moribund Anatomy, located near the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, for those of you into 19th century medical museums. Am I alone, or does anyone else see these as a call to arms?

Using Scrivener: A Brief Overview

2011-08-18T17:30:00.004-04:00

After last week's post on the tools of the trade, I got a lot of feedback (mostly offline). I think Lukas is right that there's probably enough helpful material in our collective experience to justify a few more posts on methods.

Most feedback centered on Scrivener, the "content-generation tool" I've switched over to for my first chapter. Some readers had already been using it and chimed in with their favorite features, others picked it up for the first time and are now using it for dissertations.

The web is full of Scrivener reviews – a "Blogs" search on Google yields a dozen in the last couple days. Most reviewers that I've seen are (aspiring) novelists, concerned with character profiles and writer's block. As historians, we share those issues and have a few of our own.

What I thought I'd do in this post is just post a few screen-shots of my own set-up in Scrivener, and use those to suggest a few of the ways it's been most helpful to me as I organize my research notes into a single place and then start to outline and write chapter sections.

As I said last time, folks should adopt methods that suit their style of thinking and the material they've got to work with. Luckily, Scrivener's got a few different "looks" (and features) that match up with different ways of thinking. These are Document, Corkboard, and Outliner.

Here's Document View, Scrivener's main look for content-generation and note-retrieval:

Scrivener: "Document" View

What you're seeing here are the three main work panes. On the left is the "Binder," where notes and drafts are stored. In the center is the "Editor," where you write or read text files. On the right is the "Inspector," which displays meta-data about the document you're working on.

When I want to take notes on a new source, I open a new text file in the appropriate folder under "Research" in the binder (organized by chapter, split into primary and secondary sources) and start typing. Format and view options are arrayed at the top of the Editor.

I've created a blank file for each chapter up at the top, under "DISSERTATION," and that's where I've been outlining and dropping thoughts on my current work. Crucially, Scrivener lets you "split" the Editor to display a notes file and a chapter draft at once. That looks like this:

Scrivener: Splitting the "Editor"

This is (mostly) how I've been using Scrivener: after I've taken a bunch of notes on a source (or imported them from an archive trip), I scan through them with my chapter draft (well, chapter outline right now) open, copy-pasting relevant notes and quotes where I think they'll fit best.

This is just one way to view things, as I said. Another, and one some people might find really helpful, is the "Corkboard" view, which basically displays whatever portion of the binder you select as index card, allowing you to visualize (and shuffle) them in a new way. Check it out:

Scrivener: "Corkboard" View

Each of those little cards represents a (hypothetical) chapter, and the text displayed on them corresponds to a "Synopsis" in which you can summarize each of your documents. The Synopsis box, shaped like an index card, is in the upper-right corner of the first ("Document") image.

One thing to keep in mind is that to take full advantage of the organizational potential of Scrivener, you've still got to be pretty scrupulous about maintaining your meta-data (so that you know which file you want to open when you see it in the Binder, for example...).

Another thing to keep in mind – and this might go without saying as well – is that things can quickly get out of control if you don't keep quotations tethered to data about their provenance, or clearly demarcate your own thoughts from those contained in the notes you've taken.

The Binder comes in two main sections to help with this: "Drafts," which I've renamed "DISSERTATION," and "Research," into which you can import PDFs and images (I'll write more about that function in a future post). But you've still got to keep track of things.

So, is Scrivener worth the $40? It has been for me. I recommend checking out the tutorials and FAQs on their website (they're really good), and snooping around the web for other takes on it. You get a free test-drive, so I'd say it's worth downloading and exploring yourself.

I hope this has at least given a more concrete sense of what Scrivener can do for a dissertator. It's best feature is that it enables you to keep your notes, your musings, and your drafts all in one place, which has already been helping me make connections for my new chapter.

HOS methods, American history questions

2011-08-16T16:23:00.000-04:00

I was struck by Hank's conclusion a few posts back:

To put it another way: instead of answering history-of-science questions with American-history answers, we're increasingly answering American-history questions with history-of-science answers. For those of us at the boundary–especially those on a market with more jobs in one than the other–this is a promising path.

Those ideas were floating in the back of my head while I was re-reading Alain Desrosieres' _The Politics of Large Numbers_.

In his first chapter, Desrosieres does for France what Hank talks about us doing for the United States. An earlier generation of social historians, he explained, had been frustrated in their attempts to construct statistical models from the data left in departmental prefects' statistical memoirs, instituted and published in post-revolutionary France up to 1830. Desrosieres' gloss: "Historians long considered them to be heteroclitic, incomplete documents, unserviceable as a source of numerical data." (40)

But Desrosieres sees an opportunity. Rather than attempt to construct statistical series---which effort was indeed doomed to fail---why not shift one's gaze to the "process of adunation," to the means by which the revolutionary state went about remaking France. "Not only does the prefects' view of their departments offer precise information on the actual departments," he wrote, "it also and above all shows how the protagonists in this venture portrayed themselves, how they perceived the diversity of France, and the possible obstacles to this political and cognitive undertaking."(41)

There's something subtle going on in the first clause of that sentence I just quoted. Desrosieres does not simply abandon social substance for cultural interpretation. He offers an "and," instead of an "or." The careful reader can learn and convey a great deal of valuable information about the people of France, as read through these elite observers, he suggests. At the same time, that reader gains new insights into the cultural transformation of the French nation, with all its fits, starts, set-backs, and inconsistencies.

Of course, HOSers have already used their unique approach to offer revisions of standard American stories---Phil Pauly's take on immigration restriction and cherry trees springs to mind from a much longer list. But Desrosieres struck me because he took an apparent limitation (the muckiness and diversity of statistical memoirs) and turned it into a decided advantage. As the old programmer's adage goes (okay, so it can't be *that* old): it not a bug, it's a feature!

Hank is right. Historians of science have developed some extraordinary techniques for wringing meaning and significance out of the dryest and barest of facts. Why not turn those techniques back to problems that pester our fellow craftsmen?

But I'm even more intrigued and challenged by the idea that in the process of wringing meaning from limited facts, we can also bring those facts back into fruitful historical conversation.

History of Science in America . . .and Zombies

2011-08-15T08:47:00.010-04:00

Inspired by the recent trend of adding the phrase “and zombies” to great works of literature, I want to use this post as an experiment in pedagogy. For a while now I’ve been thinking about the potential examine changes in 20^th century ideas about political economy, technical knowledge, and the body through the concept of the zombie. I imagine an undergraduate course in science and popular culture that draws upon shifting depictions of the undead in American life. We would think about how the figure of the zombie has been mobilized to express anxieties about technoscience and describe the loss of personhood in our late capitalist -- increasingly interconnected -- society. Here is an initial take on the trajectory of the course with a few choice selections. I’m interested to see what people think and if we can flesh this out (pun intended) together.

I. Theorizing the Zombie

Let's start with some theory:

- Marx & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”

- Sarah Lauro and Karen Embry. (2008) “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” in Boundary 2, 35(1): 86-108

- Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff. “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millenial Capitalism” South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), 779-805

- Henry A. Giroux Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. Peter Lang

- Kirk et al, “Zombies” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/zombies/

II. Voodoo Roots

Unlike the European vampire or werewolf, the zombie has its roots in West Africa and was articulated early on in circumstance of slavery in the Caribbean. Divorced from their persons, and alienated from the products of their labor, the zombies worked for voodoo masters in sugar plantations without needing food or rest. In this sense, they are an “ideal” labor force . . .

Journalist William Seabrook’s 1929 The Magic Island was one of the first books to bring the zombie concept to a broad Western audience.

The 1932 film White Zombie, depicts the undead as exploited sugar plantation laborers.

Another important glimpse into the relation between ‘voodoo’, science, and capitalism is anthropologist Wade Davis’ 1985 The Serpent and the Rainbow (also a fantastic movie staring Bill Pullman). Though it relates to a later time period, the trope of ethnobotanical prospecting is of a piece with early articulations of the zombie.

III. Atomic Zombies

The atom bomb and the postwar threat of nuclear holocaust lead to a mutation in the zombie concept in the 1960s. The relationship between technical knowledge and its byproducts posed new kinds of threats. Now, one became a zombie not through voodoo, but via contact with radioactivity. The paranoia of the Cold War period is perhaps best captured

in the 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead. In this film, zombie sickness is linked to radiation from a fallen space satellite.

Another film which, through the use of high camp, mocks secret government experiments is Astrozombies, also from 1968. In this film, it’s not radiation that creates zombies; it’s the government that seeks to build a super-human astronaut from bits of criminals whose brain can be controlled from earth.

IV. Pandemic Zombies

With the end of the Cold War came a new set of fears as well as a new paradigm of zombie transmission. Emerging infectious diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS, and Bird Flu brought forth zombie tropes which reflected a new view of apocalypse. Recent years have brought us Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie. Films like 28 Days Later depict a zombie epidemic and the bleak struggle for survival that ensues.

Zombie survival clubs have popped up around the country and even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has embraced the paradigm, issuing in May 2011, a Zombie Preparedness Guide:

http://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse/

V. Neuro Zombies

Increasingly, the zombie is being mobilized to make sense of problems of mind and personhood being raised through contemporary sciences of the brain. Zombies have been used to pose philosophical questions about the theory of mind and, most recently, to hold a critical lens to neuroscience.

Take for example, as a bridge between infectious and neurological conceptions of the zombie, the novel: The Neuropathology of Zombies, recently published by Peter Cummings, a Boston-based forensic neuropathologist.

On a similar tip, we’ve also got Harvard psychiatrist Stephen Schlozman on “Zombie Neurobiology”: http://io9.com/5286145/a-harvard-psychiatrist-explains-zombie-neurobiology

***And we’re off and running . . . Let’s hear suggestions about additional potential readings/movies/graphic novels/scientific papers, creative assignments, discussion questions, and projects!***

Tools of the Trade: How Historians Work

2011-08-09T18:30:00.001-04:00

We're a long way from the index card. Or are we?

It used to start here (or so I'm told..)

Historians work a lot of different ways, and probably always have. Right at the beginning of my dissertation, I had a series of how-to conversations with other grad students: how to take notes in the archives, how to organize research material and your own thoughts, how to start (and finish) the writing process. That kind of thing.

I got a diverse set of responses; big surprise, right? Methods reflect the people who use them. Of course it matters what kind of project and sources you've got, but even more important is how you think – how patient and organized and efficient you are (or would like to be). I learned more about my friends than about their tools.

Still, some common themes did emerge, pertaining to every stage of the process. From what to do in the beginning to how to wrap it all up at the end, there seemed to be enough overlap to justify pursuing the question further. So, in the past few weeks, I asked a dozen colleagues to summarize how they do history today.

Sifting through those summaries, I pulled out a few repeating strands – problems everyone encounters, issues presenting clear choices between tools or approaches. In what follows, I'll share some of the most useful tips I received, broken down into the historian's "3 Rs": Researching, Reasoning, and (W)Riting.

Caveat auctor: As I said before, the methods you choose depend on the project you've got as well as the kind of thinker you are. It's an important warning, since things mentioned below – from software options to archive behavior – could save some folks and derail others. This is a precis, not a prescription. Here goes:

Researching

Ah, the archive. Some people hate it, some people love it, and everyone's got their own set of tools – material and conceptual – that they carry in to make the most of it. A lot of the same things (except photography) apply to reading published and digital sources, so I'll let archival methods stand in for both here.

Taking Pictures

We're divided on photography. Some of my respondents take pictures of everything they see in the archive; others don't even take a camera with them. Keeping track of (and revisiting) photos spurs certain behaviors: some people keep a handwritten or Excel table with data – including image numbers – for each picture taken. Others simply note that they took a picture of something and then snap away. The big lessons here are (1) Have a way to relate notes to pictures and (2) Go back over photos as soon as possible after you take them. (1) can be a table or spreadsheet, or it can be part of the "filing" process – renaming image and folder names to reflect archival data. As for (2), it turns out that if you don't go back over photos ASAP, they disappear into the ether of your hard drive. Taking pictures doesn't substitute for taking notes, so you either have to do both while you've got the material in front of you, or else take notes off the photos as soon as you possibly can.

Taking Notes

Everyone takes notes, but everyone does it differently. Some people still do a lot of it by hand – from noting keywords before you take pictures to full-on transcription, handwriting advocates say they process things better that way. Others take archival notes in .doc or .rtf, taking care to differentiate their own thoughts from those of the sources. These are then organized into a folder hierarchy and, more often than I would've thought, annotated or compiled around themes, like a commonplace book. The key point seems to be developing a "tagging" system so that related notes and quotations can be brought together during the writing process for perusal and cut-and-pasting into drafts. Some accomplish this with special software, a couple examples of which I'll touch on in a minute. Whether analog or digital, however, the big move as research transitions toward writing is the conversion of primary documents into keyword-searchable text that can be arranged and re-arranged at will.

Reasoning

Reading and Re-reading

Once you're done in the archives – for the day or for the semester – the reading process really begins. Part of this is simply going over material again (and again and again), digesting it with a little remove from boxes and dust, taking synthetic notes as things occur to you. Another part, though, is the actual rearrangement of material. Those pulling from lots of collections in lots of archives often reorganize everything into, for example, a single, chronologically-ordered document. This is a great solution for long correspondence or for the (unpublished) work of a single actor to try to access thought processes. New files get written and saved (keeping the original notes separate, copied, and back-up, of course), organized either around particular content (an actor, or a debate, or a theme), or else around the writing process itself (reshuffling notes and quotations into files for particular chapters). This leads to new questions which can lead to new sources (or archives).

Software (Organization)

Certain digital tools popped up in people's summaries of their research methods, so I thought I'd touch for a minute on a few that work for people. The majority of people simply store searchable text in .doc or .rtf files, which they organize in folders on their hard-drive. A way to tweak this system is to buy (or build!) a front-end for that writing and organization, which can streamline linking between notes and help with synthetic thinking and the writing process. The most popular option for this sort of thing is Scrivener ($40), which I've taken to using myself. It organizes your notes in a hierarchical "binder" on the left, with a lot of options for cross-referencing and re-combining. An alternative organizational system is the significantly-more-expensive Filemaker Pro ($180), which is a database manager with which you create entries for specific quotations or sources that sync with Word to make citations a breeze.

Software (Bibliography)

Speaking of citations: of the options for bibliography (and note-taking), Zotero seems to be king. Endnote is still a legitimate contender – people seem to like it for its integration with the writing process – but most people seem to prefer Zotero for keeping track of published sources (primary and secondary), especially for its web integration. All of these tools (and more!) are worth a look early on, but a final piece of advice from a number of folks was that, whatever you decide, you pick early and you stick with it. That is, it seems to be worth the commitment to integrating all of your notes and citations into a single software solution (backing it up, of course) as early as possible, since once you get to writing and (God-willing) to finalizing and publishing your writing, you'll thank yourself if your notes are all recoverable, searchable, and citable without the hassle of searching across machines or online storage sites.

(W)Riting

Writing is the most individual process of the lot – the final section of everyone's summaries is where commonalities across approaches breaks down. Some people print out all of their notes to have at hand for writing; others use multiple computer or monitors to maintain separation (or visibility) of notes and writing work; others write individual sections that they cut-up and re-combine ad infinitum until a chapter is due. Of course, a lot of this (as with the rest) depends on what your project looks like. Diachronic or episodic dissertations with discrete archival caches for each chapter require one kind of approach; synchronic projects with overlapping characters and sources in each chapter demand something different. One big lesson from what I've read is that writing early and often is worth the trauma of feeling like you don't know what to say yet: even pounding out a paragraph a night related to what you read in the archive that day can prove instrumental once you transition to full-time writing.

Conclusions

So, what are the lessons from all of this? First, there seems to still be a place (for many) for good-old pen and paper methods – it requires a different kind of thinking, but many find they can visualize their material better that way. Second, we seem to be in a period of foment as far as software approaches are concerned: my respondents were divided between writing programs like Scrivener, database programs like Filemaker, and alternatives (including organizing manually into nested folders). Third, and finally, everyone emphasized in different ways the importance of going over and over and over all the material of the trade: looking at photos as soon as possible, tagging and re-tagging notes, cutting and pasting into new documents according to whatever organizational scheme suits you best. Keeping the material fresh – reading and re-reading, reasoning through repetition – is still how historians maintain momentum. No one seems to scribble on index cards and shuffle them around the floor anymore – we just do it digitally, each in our own way.

Biology and the Public (Bonus Image!)

2011-08-02T04:27:00.004-04:00

Darwin loomed large in Ischia and elsewhere.
This apparition spotted on the streets of Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Publics As Biology? (Part 3 of 3)

2011-08-02T04:02:00.010-04:00

I like how this conversation is taking shape. It might be possible to see my contribution as taking up Lukas’ second methodological point – about the ongoing negotiation of the epistemic boundaries of scientific disciplines.

One of the first sessions of our Summer School dealt with research whereby members of various human communities were asked to “donate” genetic material. We read about a multi-faceted anthropological study in Brazil that attempted to discredit particular ideas about race in the service of taking a stand regarding the State’s position on affirmative action.(1) In this particular project, high school students were asked to assess their own racial makeup and to reflect on culturally held ideas about race. Then, they submitted genetic material to be analyzed for ancestry informative markers. There is much to be said about the merits and limitations of this project (including science in the service of politics). For the purposes of this conversation, however, I want only to make one basic point: in providing the material bases for genetic research, this public – Brazilian high school students – became biological.

Human population genetic research has been taking place in America for decades and, as it has merged with parts of anthropology, has intensified with the rise of genomics. In addition to those instances when they are actively enrolled by scientists in biological research, Americans can now also purchase any number of genetic tests that offer insights into their heritage and makeup.

From the case of human population genetic research, historians of science are finding themselves reassessing what kinds of actors might be found in the lab – too often understood as a closed site of inquiry and knowledge production. However, when humans become objects and, pieces of their bodies, subjects of biological inquiry the lab takes on a new analytic significance for historians concerned with thinking about “biology and the public.” Not least of all because – following Latour – a lab can raise the world.

I’ll stop here with a “public” image that I find particularly illustrative. It is from an April 22, 2010 New York Times article that covered a lawsuit in which members of the Havasupai successfully sued Arizona State University for misuse of their genetic material.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/04/21/us/0421DNA_13.html

(1) Ricardo Ventura Santos, Peter H. Fry, Simone Monteiro, Marcos Chor Maio, Jose´ Carlos Rodrigues, Luciana Bastos-Rodrigues, and Sergio D. J. Pena. Color, Race, and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil Dialogues between Anthropology and Genetics by Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, 2009

Biology & the Public: Actor's and Analyst's Categories (Part 2 of 3)

2011-08-01T12:14:00.002-04:00

One thing I like about HANK's post is that it questions the utility of both categories -- biology & the public -- by suggesting that their application to 16th century exploration, say, is anachronistic. There was no such thing as a unified discipline of biology at the time. Moreover, the relationship between natural history and its various publics were nothing like that between biomedicine and modern citizens. So is it foolhardy to attempt a relatively longue durée history of biology and the public?

I'm not sure that it is. It is indeed tricky -- risky even -- but I think the potential payoff of such a project outweighs its considerable pitfalls.

I'll restrict myself to two points, one methodological and the other more substantive. First, a point on historical method:

I grant it is very important not to confuse actor's and analyst's categories when doing history. It would be a grave error to import our modern notions about the relationship between biology and the public into a discussion about 16th century natural history, thinking they apply in roughly the same way. However, that does not mean we cannot use modern concepts as a useful analytic jumping off point for a historically sophisticated conversation.

One way we might do so would be to trace a constellation of modern categories backwards in time, watching them coalesce into older concepts, disciplines, and ways of life. Having done so, in our case it it would then be important to realize that early modern natural history has a number of descendants besides contemporary biology. (Including popular institutions like zoos, acquaria, nature documentaries, etc.) Moreover, as we trace the path of natural history to modern biology forwards in time again, it's equally important to take note of the many cultural and intellectual influences that creep in laterally, as it were. (One obvious source would be medicine, but there are many others.)

Historical genealogy is difficult, to be sure, but that does not mean we should shy away from it at the get go!

The second point I want to make is more substantive. Tracing the historical relationship between biology (or science more generally) and the public is extremely important. One reason is precisely because in so doing we learn how difficult it is to make this distinction before the late 18th or early 19th century. However, we also learn that issues of community membership are always being negotiated along some register or another. Moreover, I do think we can say that an important shift took place around the turn of the 19th century. As disciplines like biology coalesced into coherent and powerful social institutions, their practitioners deliberately went about setting themselves apart from other sectors of society. I would argue that it is certainly worthwhile to investigate their reasons for doing so, as well as the mechanisms by which they succeeded in policing the epistemic boundaries that signal their status as holders of expertise.

Biology and the Public: Ischia (1 of 3)

2011-07-31T13:25:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, three of the four of us (Hank, Joanna, Lukas) spent a week together on Ischia, an island off of Naples.

We were there for the The Twelfth Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences, sponsored by the Wellcome, the MPIWG, and the Stazione Zoologica.

Lukas, Helen, Joanna, and Hank (poolside)

Here's a description of the event. This year's theme was "Biology and the Public: Participation and Exclusion from the Renaissance to the Present Day," which was relevant to each of our projects in different ways.

We had a great time–inside and outside the seminar room–and decided to do a three-part report for the blog. Each of us will pick an interesting theme from the week's conversation and run with it (briefly).

I'm kicking things off, so here goes:

"Biology and the Public" vs. Biology and "the Public"

One thing I kept jotting down in my notes was that we spent way more time interrogating the category of "the public," and a lot less time hitting an older hobby-horse: "biology." Focus is necessary in a conversation ranging across centuries and continents, but the disparity in our analysis was striking for a few reasons.

Even in seminars on topics far-removed from "biology" (sixteenth-century exploration, for example), we tended to focus more on who the public was and how they were involved, rather than on what they were involved in. Victorian botany isn't modern biomedicine, but we talked about their "publics" in similar terms.

This isn't a bad thing, but it suggested some unspoken assumptions. There's something that justifies hitching Réaumur to radiation oncology but not to the real numbers. Whatever that "something" is, it was in the background of discussions about the themes that cancer patients and collecting practices have in common.

Talking about "the public" more than "biology" wasn't a reification of the latter as something stable that engaged, more or less, with a more nebulous public. Or at least, it wasn't for everyone. This came up when Potter Stewart was invoked as part of a working definition of science in general: "I know it when I see it."

We all use this sort of shorthand in our work: generalizations and metaphors provide a framework for whatever it is we're analyzing. That said, over the week in Ischia, the technical content of ideas tended to move to the background as social and material questions came to the fore. "Content" and "context" switched places.

What has this got to do with AmericanScience? One thing it might suggest is a parallel shift in context and content: instead of asking what makes some science "American," we might ask, paraphrasing Andy Jewett: What makes America scientific? How has America been re-imagined in light of scientific thought?

To put it another way: instead of answering history-of-science questions with American-history answers, we're increasingly answering American-history questions with history-of-science answers. For those of us at the boundary–especially those on a market with more jobs in one than the other–this is a promising path.

Ishkabibble

2011-07-20T18:21:00.000-04:00

I just got back from a week in Salt Lake City, Utah. I spent about five days at the archives, in addition to attending talks at this year's ISHPSSB conference. (For the uninitiated, that's: International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology). I then spent a long weekend hiking in the Uinta mountains, which is a pretty spectacular place to go!

ISH is unique and different from other conferences insofar as it tries to bring together an interdisciplinary bunch of people, all of whom share an object of study in common: the life sciences. That's the idea, anyway. But, in recent years, it has become increasingly dominated by philosophy. This is not a bad thing per se -- philosophers have a lot to offer those of us who are interested in writing critical intellectual history. But why aren't the historians showing up?

If indeed we are seeing a resurgence in philosophical issues among young historians of science, this seems like an excellent place for us to get to know each other, share ideas, criticize one another's methods and assumptions, and so on.

I gave a talk about 3 dimensional representations of dinosaurs at US Natural History museums around the turn of the 20th century. The discussion afterwards was really great. Not only did several biologists show up, but I also met people working on the history of invertebrate paleontology, a practitioner in museology, and several philosophers who are interested in paleontology. I don't think you could ever expect to get such a diverse audience at a conference like HSS or 4S.

Consider it a plug if you will, but I'd like to see more historians of science at these events.

HPS? History and vs. History of

2011-06-13T17:00:00.000-04:00

Last April, the Sixth Annual UK Workshop on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science was held at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. The workshop's title was “Revisiting the Aims and Methods of Integrated HPS," and the account of its proceedings (written up by attendees) suggests that the title was an accurate one.

While I wasn't able to make it to Free School Lane for the big show, I was happy to be able to peruse the e-version. Because I wasn't there, I can't say whether the summaries offered on the web are accurate to the actual conversations; still, the blend of nostalgia and optimism that rings through them can't be far off.

Hasok Chang's opening remarks set the tone. Nostalgia for "an earlier heyday of integrated HPS" is central: "These were the days of N. R. Hanson, Imre Lakatos, Gerd Buchdahl and Mary Hesse, the now-forgotten Herbert Dingle, and the up-and-coming Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Larry Laudan." This was the rise of the rise-and-fall; all was hope.

It wasn't long for this world, though. By the standard account, what was a happy marriage at midcentury (philosophy framed history; history substantiated philosophy) collapsed under the combined weight of disciplinary fraction and SSK(-epticism): "people began to talk of a marriage of convenience, a looming divorce, or being just friends."

Whatever you think of the rise-and-fall narrative - and personally, I think the notion of a "rise" and attendant wedding metaphors are particularly misleading - it's a popular one, though not the focus of the workshop. Rather (and this should be obvious), Chang opened the event with a hint that "the tide seems to be turning again."

With historians demanding bigger pictures and philosophers getting past "logic-chopping," a new age of integrated HPS, offering civilization a "critical self-understanding" otherwise unavailable, is said to be in the works. To that end, the workshop was about justification and goal-setting. Its four sessions, *briefly* summarized on the web, constituted a meta-level discussion of means.

The whole write-up isn't that long, and is probably worth reading in full. I'll just spell out one reaction I had while reading it:

The opening session (after Chang's introduction), called “Why Integrated HPS?”, was justificatory in nature. It purported to lay out exemplary problems for which iHPS (their acronym, not mine) was the best methodological approach. An appropriate starting-point, though it's unclear to me how far it succeeded.

Let's take the first case (the invention of the category of "classical physics"): it seems like a classic example of a "philosophical" question ("Are revolutions invisible?") and an "historical" answer ("Not in the case of physics around 1900!").

Part of me wonders whether this question-answer format would be satisfying to either philosophers or historians; another part, admittedly, recognizes that maybe the desire to "satisfy" either constituency is precisely what iHPS is trying to get beyond.

Reading this and the other two examples in the first session - one, more philosophical, on "the epistemic condition of reference"; the other, more historical, on Charles Bell - I was reminded, in part, of Morton White's Social Thought in America, first published in 1949.

A philosopher by training who split his active career between Harvard and the IAS in Princeton, White wrote STA as a "history and criticism of liberal social philosophy." In subsequent editions, he qualified and then defended his critical (later "analytical") approach, and the series of new prefaces are worth a glance for those interested in the issues facing iHPS.

One such issue, and the one with which I'll close, is the boundary between what we might call two meanings of HPS: "History AND Philosophy OF Science" (HaPS) vs. "History OF Philosophy AND Science" (HoPS). While April's workshop focused decidedly on the former, there were (and often are) whispers of the latter, and the two bleed together in exciting if confusing ways.

This divide - raised under a different name in the workshop's second session on "How Is It Actually Done?" - is an important one, since HaPS implies a methodological rapprochement while HoPS highlights the historical propinquity of philosophical and scientific questions.

Obviously, splitting up the two HPSs as "method" and "content" is too simple, but keeping the distinction in mind might bring some clarity to what's at stake in discussions of iHPS. In particular, the two seem to justify iHPS in different ways. Ideally, HaPS ("method") might get us back to the midcentury "heyday" of big questions; HoPS might help us (continue to) break down the boundary between intellectual history and the history of science.

We've discussed this question of ends a number of times on this blog, but these seem like two different projects (among many), and each has a number of facets.

Audience is a crucial one: creating a distinct HPS readership is different from enticing philosophers AND historians to read things, which is different in turn from breaking into the larger general readership for history books.

Pedagogy is another: teaching comprised a whole session ("How Do We Teach It?") at the workshop, and the related issue of the job market was evidently in the air as well. Whether to nurture or suppress the urge to "specialize" in history or philosophy as a method is a live issue for HaPS. HoPS, on the other hand, seems more oriented toward breaking down barriers of content.

Finally, there seem to be two different sets of boundaries under attack by iHPS. On the one hand, Chang seems to be urging a methodological marriage around a shared conceptual content ("science"). On the other, efforts to dissolve the boundary between figures and ideas in the past (scientific, philosophical, and more) might be read as cutting against this solid foundation.

HaPS and HoPS aren't necessarily at odds (indeed, much of the best work with which I'm familiar today does both), but it does seem there are enough tensions to merit further scrutiny. Whether these tensions prove productive or not will require a shift in the iHPS conversation - Athens, anyone?

Announcing the FHSA Grad Student Travel Award

2011-06-01T10:32:00.001-04:00

Exciting news: Graduate Students presenting papers on American topics (broadly defined) at the History of Science Society Annual Meeting are invited to apply for travel assistance funding from the Forum for the History of Science in America. The Forum will be awarding one grant of $250.00 (USD) to assist with the cost of traveling to and attending the meeting.

To apply, please submit the following:

The title/panel/abstract for the paper being presented.
A brief statement indicating:

whether or not the applicant has additional or alternative sources of travel funds ( e.g. departmental support);
whether the applicant has presented papers at previous HSS meetings;
estimated cost of transportation to the meeting (e.g. airfare).

The successful candidate will be presented with the award at the Forum's Annual Business meeting normally held during the lunch hour on the Friday of the Conference. Please send your application materials via email to Professor Gwen Kay (gwen.kay@oswego.edu)by August 31, 2011.

Recapping the Reinvention of Time

2011-05-25T14:42:00.008-04:00

A couple weeks ago, while I was in the Bay Area for archival research, I ran into our very own Joanna on Berkeley's campus. She was there to participate in a two-day conference called "The Reinvention of Time: Articulations of the Past and Future in the Scientific Present," and invited me to tag along for her paper and a keynote (and the reception, naturally).

We decided, when we parted ways, that it might be fun to write up a few of the many tantalizing threads from the weekend's conversation. So, what follows is a continuation of our "interview" series, wherein Hank (a relative outsider who saw a fraction of the proceedings) poses questions to Joanna (a relative insider and a participant-observer over the weekend) about what made the event so exciting.

The conversation recaps the conference, goes into detail on some of its thematic highlights, and goes on to address temporality, periodization, interdisciplinarity, and other topics of interest to readers of this blog.

-------------------------------------------------

Let's start with a softball: what was up with "The Reinvention of Time"? How'd it come together, who was there, how'd you get involved?

The conference was the brainchild of four amazing graduate students at Berkeley and UCSF: Theresa MacPhail, Martine Lappe, James Battle, and Jade Sasser. Their call for a forum on "The Reinvention of Time" was inspired by shared interest in a paper titled "Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality" co-authored by Vincanne Adams (UCSF), Adele Clarke (UCSF), and Michelle Murphy (U of Toronto) and published in 2009 in the journal Subjectivity.

These grad students decided that the most efficient way to figure out "the essence" of a recent focus on time [bad pun!] was to get scholars from a range of relevant disciplines (e.g., history, anthro, sociology, etc) into the same room to consider their work in terms of issues of temporality. The program read like a who's who of West Coast science studies and I'll list it for our readers' edification: Vincanne Adams, Andrew Lakoff, Rosemary Joyce, Cathryn Carson, Thomas Laqueur, Larwence Cohen, Timothy Choi, Kimberly Tallbear, Paul Rabinow, Cori Hayden, Charis Thompson, Joseph Dumit, Sharon Kaufman, Adele Clarke, and Michelle Murphy.

The organizers also sent out a CFP for junior scholars interested in work-shopping their own projects the following day, which is how I got involved. My current research deals with how technologies (e.g., freezers) and ideologies of preservation combined in the 1950s to produce repositories of frozen human tissue for studies of evolution, migration, and variation. I think a lot about the consequences of that endeavor and the ways in which freezers lead body parts to become temporally out of joint with social and cultural circumstances. It was exciting to have the opportunity to present my historical work to this interdisciplinary audience.

-------------------------------------------------

Can you give a specific example of what it means to work out issues of temporality in a group of scholars from different disciplines? How does being a historian lead you to approach these issues, and how's that different from an anthropologist (if at all)?

Ok, that's a big question. Let me start by making some gross generalizations about how historians regard their relationship to temporality: we think about the past (including what people in the past thought about the future). At the same time -- sensitive to matters of contingency -- we are cautious about using our knowledge of the past to make 'predictions' about future events.

Perhaps for this reason, many of us resist engagement with the communities or we study or with their descendents (though I think this is an open issue for discussion). Time is seen as linear: first past, then present, then future.Now, many at the symposium pointed out that, as historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of science, technology, and medicine, our very subjects of study challenge us to reconsider or "reinvent" our linear notions of time. In turn, our own roles as experts are being reinvented.

A powerful example came through during historian Michelle Murphy's keynote talk, "Time in the Data of Cholera" She made a reflexive -- and, I think, fundamentally anthropological -- move that I found deeply satisfying. She took the archive (in this case, the archive of public health data about cholera in Bangladesh) not as an unproblematic resource for information about the past -- but as a historical subject. Murphy considered this archive not as a simple repository for what has already happened (the past), but a resource that becomes available to be mined for the future. This resonated with my own attention to how old anthropological blood samples are being mined for new components as they pass through novel experimental systems.

For Murphy, the effort to historicize the past and future as relational effects required taking time itself as a category to be probed. Where I think she most strongly drew from anthropological approaches in her task as a historian was to be explicit in acknowledging her own participation in the refiguration of the archive. In other words, she cannot claim to stand 'outside' of efforts to produce data about cholera. By working in the archive she is changing the archive and this insight becomes central to her ethical and intellectual positioning.

A similar expression of the fruits of this kind of reflexivity could be seen in historian Cathryn Carson's talk "Past Futures of Nuclear Waste," on the relation between historical knowledge and conceptualizations of the appropriate modes of disposal for nuclear waste. She tracked changes in efforts to account for the huge timescales over which such materials need to be sequestered. Carson highlighted shifts from modeling to simulation in officials' efforts to 'produce control over the future.'

Like Murphy, Carson found herself compelled to accept her own complicity in this enterprise. She was called to testify for a blue ribbon committee on nuclear waste about what it means to project a possible future. In other words, her historical expertise in how people in the past have thought about the future became a resource for those in the present tasked with forecasting the future. No one used this exact phrase, but there was a general sense that 'social construction' having run its very productive course, the 'temporal construction' of things might be the next wave of science studies.

-------------------------------------------------

Let me ask about periodization: the projects you're talking about tend to be on very recent topics. What does reflexivity and/or "temporal construction" look like for folks who work on earlier periods (admittedly uncommon for historians of American science, but maybe worth thinking about anyway)?

Good question. While the topics addressed in this conference were overwhelmingly late 20th/early 21st century ones, I don't think that the consequences of these insights are irrelevant or difficult to extrapolate to those working in earlier periods. Much as the move to 'social construction' was taken up and most persuasively illustrated by those concerned with knowledge in the 17th century (e.g., Leviathan and the Air Pump), 'temporal construction' -- as you so nicely phrase it -- is actively being pursued by historians like Thomas Laqueur, whose work on sexed and gendered bodies reaches back to the earliest glimmers of the Enlightenment.

Laqueur also participated in the symposium with a talk he called "The Deep Time of the Dead." His engagement with matters of temporality, as applied to corpses, provided him with a justification for backing away from a self-described hard-core commitment to social construction. The dead body, he suggested, does work quite independently of cultural views. In other words, thinking about the new kinds of things that dead bodies do after the beginning of the Enlightenment (e.g., encourage nation building by reburial in new territories) shifts our focus to problems of time *and* to the materiality of the body.

Different bodies have their own times -- and one thinks of Jakob von Uexkull as invoked at the confernece by M. Mather George. She is an anthropologist who is thinking about intersecting lifecycles of dogs, parasites, and humans in the context of Indian public health campaigns. That said, the reinvention of time doesn't escape from social construction -- for the ways in which we measure and account for time (even biological time) are profoundly social. However, it does inspire a call to action . . . in terms of the question of 'relevance' for academics.

If our work can engage with how notions of time mediate and saturate our experiences, then we may succeed in provoking a new awareness of the consequences and possibilities inherent in the ways people have oriented themselves towards the past, present, and future. To me, this is a means for historians of science working across sub-fields and time periods to provide resources for making sense of a present that fetishizes the past even as it direct our gaze towards the unknown future.

I also want to add that there are many paths towards reflexivity, not just via conversations with anthropologists. It would be exciting to see what a reflexivity born out of sustained conversations within history of science would look like -- I suspect it would have its own distinct flavor. However, the conversations taking place across history and anthropology provide some very useful articulations to work with and against.

-------------------------------------------------

So, is the lesson I should take away that I should be engaging with time in subtler ways ("temporal construction"), or that I should be engaging in more cross-disciplinary dialogues about all sorts of things, time included?

I definitely think we can expect to see more work -- across time periods -- engaging with nuanced and non-linear conceptions of temporality. That said, I don't want to be prescriptive. I do find it invigorating to engage with people from different disciplinary backgrounds around common concepts. Even if one rejects what is being offered, the encounter may stand to sharpen one's own commitments and sense of purpose.

My training in history and sociology of science has particularly sensitized me to the ways in which disciplines cut up knowledge. Meetings like these can provide a space for therapeutic 'suturing,' be it through sharing ideas and tools or for getting traction on a issue of global concern. To wit, prior to this meeting, Cathryn Carson and anthropologist Rosemary Joyce did not realize they were both investigating issues of nuclear waste. It was a shared recognition of the question of temporality that brought them to this symposium and I am eager to see how this experience impacts their respective endeavors.

Baseball by the Numbers

2011-05-20T11:17:00.001-04:00

Since we're clearly relaxing our way into summer (at least on this blog), I thought I'd talk about sports again. But really, I want to talk about statistics.

I got to thinking about baseball statistics last month after reading a post by one of the internet's brightest---Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket--- about the origins of Rotisserie/Fantasy baseball and the way we read games as culture.

The conversation about fantasy sports often intersects with the story of Sabremetrics---that is, the study of baseball by the numbers, the recent founding of which is traditionally attributed to the baseball writer Bill James and his famed Baseball Abstract.

My hunch is that Sabremetrics first erupted into polite culture by way of Steven Jay Gould. In his famous New York Review of Books essay on Joe DiMaggio's streak he wrote:

Among sabremetricians¹—a contentious lot not known for agreement about anything—we find virtual consensus that DiMaggio’s fifty-six–game hitting streak is the greatest accomplishment in the history of baseball, if not all modern sport.

The footnote leads to an explanation of the origins of the term in the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research. And the next footnote shows that the Daily News had previously introduced the world to Sabremetrics, but with a less august framing. The story was titled: ""Buncha Pointyheads Sittin' Around Talkin' Baseball."

Sabremetrics has now become substantially more well known. Michael Lewis' Moneyball can be held responsible to a large degree. Fantasy sports in general has undoubtedly been an excellent educator. And the 2008 US presidential election included its own advertising for Sabremetrics in the form of the popular, statistical analyses of Nate Silver, a Sabremetrician who turned his skills to politics at fivethirtyeight.com (now a NY Times sub-domain).

It is not surprising that most of the attention to Sabremetrics surrounds the creation of new and interesting metrics or the way able statisticians can interpret and mathematically test vast dumps of data. When we talk about statistics these days, we generally mean a way of thinking or a discipline related to mathematics.

I tend to think about statistics through a mid-nineteenth century lens, however. My statistics happen at a point when some people (ahem, Quetelet) were doing something like what we mean when we talk about "statistical thinking." But most "statisticians" were essentially collectors---like naturalists, but on the look-out for numbers rather than skulls or species. The American Geographical and Statistical Society, founded in 1854 New York as one of the earliest American statistical organizations, neatly folds the statistician in with the explorer. Check out the society's statement of its objects here.

So when I think about the history of baseball statistics, I wonder: where did the numbers come from? Who collected them? Who aggregated them long before Bill James was born?

One might suspect that baseball teams were the first to pay attention to statistics. After all, they were the ones managing their teams. That could well be. But I doubt they are too important to this story.

Individual fans are also likely culprits. But that depends on when it became common for fans to keep their own scorecard. I don't know when that was. I do know that baseball games are *much* more fun if you keep score.

But credit for the popularity of baseball statistics clearly belongs to the press and more particularly to the box score. The New York Times published a brief info-graphic on the evolution of the boxscore a few years ago. And Wikipedia ties early baseball statistics to Henry Chadwick and his publications for the famed dime novel purveyors, Beadle and Adams.

Why and how did the box score become a must for newspapers? I don't know. But I think with that answer and some further digging we can also get some new insights into the way that Americans became more and more invested in a world suffused with numbers and statistics.

Teach 3/11

2011-05-10T12:29:00.005-04:00

It's hard to be a scholar of Cold War history and not see all things nuclear as relevant to that enterprise. For that reason, I'm taking this post to share an important teaching resource for understanding the Fukushima disaster in Japan: Teach 3/11. To quote from the site:

'As an independent initiative spurred by the hope of helping people find answers to such questions more quickly, Teach 3/11 is a participant-powered online project built in the spirit of international cooperation and solidarity that disaster recoveries depend upon, regardless where they occur. In partnership with the Forum for the History of Science in Asia, Teach 3/11 has a simple goal: to help you develop teaching materials with the help of the the collective wisdom of scholars worldwide working at the intersections of history of science and technology and Asia.'

I recently ran into one of the contributors, Lisa Onaga, a historian of biology finishing her dissertation at Cornell. She informs me that Teach 3/11 continues to grow and is being integrated into teaching curriculum in number of different national contexts. Beyond being an event-specific resource, I'm excited about the collaborative, multi-lingual, and multi-media format of the project. It's an example of one way that the expertise of historians of science and technology can be extended in concert with and beyond academic publication.

Check it.

Science, Political Economy, and Oysters, Past and Present - or - How to turn that diss into a prize-winning book

2011-05-04T09:05:00.000-04:00

Yet again, I have the privilege of sharing a conversation between two scholars at different stages in their careers. This one highlights Christine Keiner's excellent first book, raises fascinating questions about the intersection of science and political economy in the US over the last century, and offers a glance into the journey from dissertation to book. I can't thank Anna Zeide, a Wisconsin graduate student and treasured member of our AmericanScience community, enough for engaging Keiner in this conversation and for putting together such an informative interview. I'll let her do the rest of the introducing. But in the meantime, let this serve as a reminder that the FHSA is still seeking nominations for this year's publication prize. For details see here [scroll down]. The deadline is July 31, 2011.

A Conversation with Christine Keiner, This Year’s FHSA Book Prize Winner

By Anna Zeide

At the 2010 History of Science Society annual meeting in Montreal, the Forum for the History of Science in America awarded its book prize to Christine Keiner for The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 (University of Georgia Press: 2009). This exciting work of environmental history and history of science examines the struggle for control of the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster industry over the course of the twentieth century. Christine is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).

Anna Zeide

I had the opportunity to sit down with Christine in Montreal to talk about the process of writing this book that began as a dissertation, about straddling disciplinary boundaries, and about connecting historical work to contemporary environmental debates. Because I am a graduate student in the process of writing my own dissertation and thinking through many of these very same questions, I found our conversation to be instructive, insightful, and revealing. Christine’s passion and clarity of thought (not to mention her personal warmth) comes through very clearly when she talks about her work.

How did you come to the topic of your book?

Christine Keiner

It all began with William Keith Brooks, who was a zoologist at Johns Hopkins in the late nineteenth century. My graduate advisor at Johns Hopkins, Sharon Kingsland, suggested I look more deeply into Brooks’s oyster work for a seminar paper I was writing. A few historians, like Keith Benson and Jane Maienschein, had written about other aspects of Brooks’s career, but when I began researching his oyster work, I was amazed to find how he had inserted himself into political debates. This really flew in the face of the image of this objective, lab-based, scientific researcher. He published a popular book in 1891 on oysters that was this early interdisciplinary work, drawing both on biology and political economy to argue for the importance of sustaining the Chesapeake oysters. For over twenty years, he advocated privatizing oyster beds because he thought it would bring prosperity to the impoverished people of the eastern shore. The watermen themselves, though—the people he was trying to help—were against the idea of privatization because it was expensive and threatened many aspects of their worldview. It was the packers, the canners, the Yankee capitalists who would be able to afford the high costs of underwater farming and would therefore gain control of the oyster beds. Watermen fiercely value their independence and being corporate employees was anathema to their self-image.

One of the impressive aspects of The Oyster Question is how well it draws on insights from several different historical disciplines to tell its story. What are some of these different fields you drew on and how did they shape the project?

The book began primarily as a history of biology, with a focus on scientists in environmental politics. I only became acquainted with the field of environmental history after I began the project, and it took me a few years to figure out what that means to bring in those perspectives.

I also started getting into political science. The book looks at Brooks’ and succeeding scientists’ attempts to convince the Maryland legislature to liberalize oyster leasing laws. However, the watermen had a great deal of power because Maryland, like many states, suffered from malapportionment, or unequal representation in the state house. Rural people had more power relative to their numbers, which was especially an issue in the South. In many states, this ended up meaning that rural populations controlled conservation lawmaking. It would be an interesting project for other historians to take up to try to understand how this population distribution issue played a role in environmentalism emerging when it did. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the rise of the suburbs came at roughly the same time as the rise of the modern environmental movement.

I also had contemporary politics in mind as I was writing the book. The conversion of my dissertation into the book took over five years, and the book’s last chapter looks at the 1990s through 2009. So, it’s a long sweep of time, coming up to the present. But even so, it’s already outdated because the Maryland legislature has since passed a historic law that changes the terms of opening up the Chesapeake to oyster farming.

Finally, I was lucky to have an editor, Paul Sutter, who directed my attention to specific books in all of these different sub-discplines. Because the book is part of a series on the American South, he directed me to material on agricultural modernization and also on the role of the public domain in western history.

And how did you end up working with Paul Sutter and the University of Georgia Press? What did you learn from that experience of finding a publisher?

There was a lot of serendipity in my getting to be a part of this series. There was a publishing seminar at RIT in 2004, with four editors—from university presses and more commercial ones. After the workshop, each of the editors met with people in the audience for a pitch session. I gave my spiel on the book, just for practice. But it turned out that three of the presses were interested in my project! Georgia offered me a contract two days later. Then, a year later, I got in touch with Paul for his particular series.

I learned from that publishing workshop that editors have to acquire 25 titles or so a year, so they want to hear ideas. That means talking with editors at conference book exhibits is a good thing. You should always be prepared to give that elevator speech, just so you can share what you’re working on with anyone who might be interested.

We talked earlier about your relatively heavy teaching load at RIT. Have you been able to draw on insights from this book in the classroom?

Since we’re in upstate New York rather than the Chesapeake, I usually stay away from the specifics of the oyster case in my classes. But talking about the larger issue of the tragedy of the commons is a major part of the environmental studies classes I teach. My book challenges the idea that the Chesapeake epitomizes the tragedy of the commons. I suggest that the state-funded program of replenishing the oyster beds actually worked out pretty well. It wasn’t a perfect system, of course, because there were tensions and scientists were upset when administrators ignored biological criteria. But it was a compromise that worked for the most part for several key decades.

Your book has so much relevance because it connects so directly to questions being debated today in Maryland politics about how to manage the oyster beds. What kind of responses to your book have you gotten from policy makers or the general public?

I’ve given radio interviews and talks for people in the community. I often begin by showing recent newspaper articles that display no historical awareness—they say that because of the new oyster leasing law watermen are going to have to suddenly give up their hunter-gatherer role. My book shows that oystermen have been evolving away from this image for the last 80 years. The legislature mandated public repletion of the oyster beds in 1927, thereby helping to create a regulated commons in which harvesters acted almost like state employees.

But overall, I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from all sides. A waterman called my parents’ house and ended up talking with my Dad for a long time, and told him he thought I’d nailed the main issues in the book. I think that meant more to my Dad than any award I might get.

I’m looking forward to talking more with the Department of Natural Resources, because in their very own literature they say that previous strategies haven’t worked. But this isn’t true. There have been sustained harvest strategies for the last century. Between the 1930s and 1980s, they were harvesting 2-3 million bushels of oysters per year. Now, it’s more like 25,000 bushels per year. But the goals have also changed. Today, the goal is 2-3 million, but during those earlier decades, the goal was 10 million, which is just an unsustainable expectation set in the nineteenth century. So I hope I can make people in the broader policy arena realize that a lot of people have been dealing with these questions for a long time. We can’t always apply the same solutions, but it’s important to realize that there are many different stakeholders. We shouldn’t assume that one group was wronged, that scientists never had any input. The political process is always about compromise, and it’s most frustrating to see cases in contemporary politics where neither side wants to back down and so there is an impasse.

What’s the next project you’re working on, and how, if at all, did it emerge from your first book?

In my next book, I’d like to continue my broader goal of contributing to marine environmental history and explicating the “political role of scientific expertise” (Stephen Bocking’s phrase) by examining Cold War debates over building a sea level Panama Canal, something I kept coming across in my Smithsonian research for the Chesapeake project. Some scholarly work has been done with respect to efforts to use nuclear explosives to build the waterway, but I’m more interested in the concern about nonnative species crossing between oceans, and how the specter of invasive species was raised in the 1960s, a generation before zebra mussels in the Great Lakes brought the issue to a national audience.

To close, do you have any advice for me or other young scholars informed by the process of writing your book?

Well, because I know you’re writing about the history of canning, I’d encourage you to look at a couple of books on canning in the eastern shore. There were many issues over labor in oyster canneries in the Chesapeake that would be interesting to look at.

More generally, I’d suggest not trying to make your dissertation perfect. There’s a lot you’ll have to redo anyway. Even after my first manuscript, which was itself a huge revision, I still had to go back to archives for more research, five years after the end of grad school. Be flexible in realizing your thinking will evolve over time. Dissertations and books have very different purposes and with very different audiences. The former shows your committee that you can do original research, while the latter is a broader story for a large audience. Publishing is such that we can’t write specialized monographs anymore, so it’s good to be thinking at the dissertation stage about the broader impact, but also to recognize that it’s important to finish the dissertation, and not get caught up in making it perfect.

Anna Zeide is a PhD student in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is working on a project about the history of canned food in America, which explores the various forms of expertise that shaped how American consumers began to see industrial food products as a safe, reliable, and desirable part of their diets

A Nice Derangement of Empathies

2011-04-27T13:30:00.001-04:00

In the wake of JAS-BIO (which I mentioned earlier and which Joanna thoroughly recapped last week), Nathaniel Comfort over at PACHSmörgåsbord has been continuing his ongoing thinking about what academic history of science is good for.

After beginning with a query ("Who Cares about the History of Science?"), Comfort shifts gears to ask (and provide a few answers for) why anyone should care. His first stab was about "History as a Way of Knowing." In that post, he paints scientific and historical reasoning as the contrast between determinism and contingency, simplification and complication. He ends with a plea to reach out to broader audiences, to engage ourselves and to change people's minds.

After JAS-BIO, Comfort takes what looks like a sharp turn. His third installment answers the question about why we should care more polemically: "Maybe we shouldn't." Here, he's arguing against careerism and in favor of passion. He adopts a similar stance in his latest post ("Toward a Poetics of HSMT"), which, as the title suggests, makes the case for attention to beauty and to the aesthetic qualities of our scholarship more generally.

I'm basically on board with Comfort's perspective, but today I'd like to carry this aesthetic strand even further and talk a little about empathy. The concept doesn't really come up in Comfort's posts, but it's an important one, and has come up on this blog in discussions of audience and the ability of actors (or those who take themselves to be their successors) to "recognize themselves" in our work (for snippets of this discussion, see here and here.)

I'm obviously in no position to attempt a definition or a history of empathy (as usual, for better or for worse, the SEP provides a good starting point). What I'd like to focus on is (a) two principal ways historians justify their work in terms of empathy and (b) a suggestive conclusion one might come to through their synthesis.

The first "use" of empathy comes in historical practice. It's akin to the "estrangement as historical Verstehen" Daston mentioned in her Critical Inquiry piece: it's understanding through attempted embodiment, rather than through inference of analogy. I won't belabor the historicio-hermeneutical sense of empathy we get from Dilthey through to Gadamer (which is fascinating in its own right), but will instead suggest the difference between what I'm picking out here and the issue of "fair representation" into which our previous discussion morphed (see here).

A call to empathy is not about giving actors a fair shake: that's an ethical mandate that precedes the sense of empathy I'm highlighting. Empathy and understanding, in the early-twentieth century, were contrasted with objectivity and explanation - the latter were the province of the natural sciences, while the former delimited special terrain for the newer human sciences. To access the meaning of an idea to its early proponents, we have to embody the experience of developing, holding, and communicating that idea in its time.

Though it overemphasized the individual mind, this sense of empathy as understanding-through-embodiment ("transposition," for Dilthey) found a new voice in Quentin Skinner's famous early essays. He and others of the "Cambridge School" developed a practicable sense of "ideas in context" that drew on the phenomenological approach to "meaning" and "understanding" while putting flesh, in the form of the narrative approach already familiar to historians, on those philosophical bones.

There are a bunch of fascinating parallels between Skinner and contemporary philosophers like Gadamer and Davidson - but I'll now move on to the second sense of empathy I promised to touch on , which may be of more interest to readers of this blog.

Where the first use of empathy was practical, the second is pedagogical. It, too, is expressed in terms of dislocation - a call to embody and experience the full weirdness of the past - but its purpose is less about getting the past "right" and more about inculcating certain habits of mind in students. Both are noble aims to which I'm sympathetic, and they often go together - especially, as Comfort notes, in the self-justification of those who study earlier periods.

This is a point Daston emphasizes as well, and it's worth noting given the audience of this blog. According to Daston, "only specialists in the twentieth century can allow themselves to take their subject matter for granted," by which she means that everyone else, by necessity, is "concerned with what science is, as well as how it works."

I'd imagine (or at least I'd hope) that historians of recent science - by which I mean science practiced by folks who are still alive, or near to it - might push back here, but rather than double down on that point, I'd like to use the case of twentieth-century science to sharpen my thoughts on empathy.

Being empathetic doesn't mean being uncritical - far from it. But it also isn't just an effort at fair representation - something like "empathy to the best explanation." Rather, empathy is a tool for understanding. Questions like "How could person X have simultaneously held views A and B?" often require us to first admit that (A&B) would've "made sense" to person X, and to then attempt an understanding of how this could've been by gathering in all the relevant pieces of X's lived experience.

Let me close with two related points:

Empathy is risky. In our effort to "make sense" of how a particular constellation of views or answer to a problem could've "made sense" to an actor, we don't want to import our own context-dependent, historically-contingent assumptions and categories. There is a neat parallel with Rawls' "veil of ignorance" here: while we aren't trying to assume an "original position" (much the opposite, in many ways), we do have to decide what features we take with us as we begin the thought experiment. This is tricky business, since cries of "Whiggism" rain down on she who fails to check her preconceptions at the door to the time machine.

Empathy runs both ways. While the previous point about checking one's assumptions is a truism for historians, I would argue (and have before) that we also have to watch out for how inflated ideas of our own agency infect our accounts of the past. That is, some use the language of empathy to urge us to grant more agency to our actors: they argue that we're too dependent on larger-than-life forces in our historical accounts, given that we deny or deflate the importance of such forces on us.

What I'd rather do is reverse the process - let empathy flow uphill. If we agree - and I think we do - that our privileged vantage helps us see the wider patterns and powers (ideological, institutional, or otherwise) determining day-by-day behavior in the past, then we might import that sense back into the way we account for our own activities. This is a sort of methodological actualism, albeit one run in reverse. Whereas in geology (for example), actualism forbids the invocation of anything not presently in play to explain past phenomena, I want to rely on the recognized strength of historical explanation to limit the stories we allow about our own lives.

Why empathy? Because I think it really is something that good historians have to offer accounts of both past and present - which means it's a valid answer both to Comfort's question about what history's good for as well as to questions we asked a while ago (here, here, and here) about how or why historians might raise their voices in current debates, political or otherwise.*

----------------------------

*It's also an interesting complement to the distinction, proposed by Donald Davidson in the essay from which I bowdlerized the title for this post, between "prior" and "passing" theories in communication. For Davidson, understanding between speaker and hearer isn't about a shared language ("There is no such thing as a language," he famously concludes), but rather about the production of a "passing theory" out of unshared "prior theories" and present data. His sense of constant, ongoing adjustment parallels the hermeneutics I dealt with earlier as well as the sense in which empathy, as a tool, should urge us to write and rewrite our own theories of how the world works as we put past and present into dialogue.

JAS-BIO, Evolving

2011-04-21T22:02:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, Henry, Lukas, and I all traveled to New Haven for the 46th meeting of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology. Many of today’s leading scholars in the field gave their first papers at the conference and it continues to be a welcoming forum for junior scholars to share works-in-progress.

It has become a tradition to include a citation on the back of the program to a short essay on the history of the meeting by Mary P. Winsor, published in Isis in 1999. In that piece Winsor points out that the spirit upon which the conference was founded and perpetuated in the early years was not, in fact, professionalization. It was to provide a “stimulating day of friendly intellectual exchange.” What makes the JAS-BIO an important gathering is that it serves as a space where people from many generations can think together about why and how we do what we do. In my own experience, it has been a particularly important opportunity for me to learn from my peers.

The event began Friday night with a talk by medical anthropologist Marcia Inhorn, who spoke about her research on assisted reproductive technologies in Muslim countries. Her ethnographic research, and the lively discussion that followed her presentation, appropriately foreshadowed a conference in which it became impossible to ignore the evolution of history of biology. By this I mean that the participants at this year’s meetings unabashedly pushed the conceptual and methodological boundaries of the field, seeking to engage with history of technology, industrialization, philosophy, etc.

On Saturday, three quick sessions took us from 19^th century collecting to Cold War psychological research, to philosophical, religious, and social legacies of Darwinism.

Lukas Rieppel and Courtney Thompson each articulated novel commercial aspects of 19th century natural historical collections. Rieppel presented work from his dissertation, which (forgive me if I’m overstating the case) situates museum-based vertebrate paleontology as a site for reinterpreting broader processes of industrialization. By focusing on the assembly of museum collections he encouraged us to consider the interrelationship of railroads, robber barons, and philanthropy as fundamental to American cultures of capitalism. At a different register, Thompson’s paper oriented us towards the home, where children were instructed, through books on natural history, to establish their own collections. Many of us who do history of biology index early such experiences as influential (for me, it was visiting the American Museum of Natural History). Thompson’s research also raised questions about the material legacies of the books themselves – they have become collectors’ items in their own right.

Nellwyn Thomas and Brian Casey explored the ways in which psychological research during mid-20^th century reflected shifting notions of human potential and pathology. Thomas took us to the ocean floor in her account of the interplay between marine biological and psychological research at the underwater Tektite experiment station. Beyond giving us insight into practices of standardization that enabled the rich, otherworldy experiences of aquanauts (those marine biologists who lived in the aquatic environment for weeks on end) to be rendered statistically, Thomas’ paper tracked the mutating status of the human at mid-century. Casey, in his account of psycho-surgical research during the Cold War also pointed to the question of what it means to be human. Casey's project, part of a collaborative endeavor, emphasized the role of technology in psychological research. The history of 20^th century biology has much to gain from a deeper engagement with technology. We have only just begun to pay attention to the consequences of technological intervention at the register of the biological.

As a panel, David Crawford, Stephen Dilley, and Myrna Perez offered us a kaleidoscopic portrait of the legacy of evolutionary thought. Their respective talks considered the material cultures of scientific publication as well as issues of theology and contemporary public intellectuals. Crawford, a philosopher, demonstrated the productive intersections of the history of ideas with attention to practice and material culture. His talk focused on the discrepancies between Lamarck’s printed work and his intellectual intentions. Dilley, also a philosopher, trained his attention on the religious content of Darwin’s work. By putting theological concerns on a par with ‘scientific’ content, Dilley’s paper was an implicit (and perhaps ironic?) reminder of the merits of a symmetrical SSK-style approach. Working in the 20^th century, Perez described her efforts to view debates about evolution through the life and career of Stephen Jay Gould. This is a bold effort to consider the role of evolutionary biologist as public intellectual during a tumultuous period in American history. Commentator Janet Browne rightly commented of the three papers in the last session that the study of Darwin and his influence continue to generate explanations of how we order our world.

The day ended with a rather sobering conversation about the state of the field and prospects for jobs (see here). Much ink has been and will continue to be spilled over these problems. However, for today, I want to conclude this particular post with an unambiguously positive sentiment. JAS-BIO has always been a place to enact the life of the mind and I left this year’s meeting in awe of how much we – as junior scholars – have to learn from each other. Thank you…

AmericanScience: A Team Blog

CFP: George Perkins Marsh Conference

What is the best (first) book on HOS in America right now?

Science & US Intellectual History

Reflecting on History of Science, Feb 3 in Philadelphia

History of Medicine, For Human Dignity

Diagnosing the diseases of the past, today

Funding Database

Now that's a dune, Dr. Cowles!

No dessert unless you eat your US history...

Print Culture and Online Publishing

Happy Birthday, William James

Cetacean Scientists in the US

Happy New Year!

Teaching Farmers to Be Men

Looking at Science

Save the Date for the 47th Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology

Science and The New Inquiry

Mergers & Bailouts in American History

Pre-science/Prescience and the History of the Future

Asbestos, and Pesticides, and Web-links, Oh My!

Historians and their Index Numbers

Do we still need harvest festivals?

Beyond Presentism vs. Historicism in the History of Anthropology

AmericanScience in Literature: Pynchon

American science and the budget crisis

What Science Does to the Environment

4S/HSS/SHOT Recap #2

Because Raccoon Intelligence Really Is a Problem

4S/HSS/SHOT Recap #1

Dr. Cynthia Beall and the Science of Human Adaptability

"Science Conservatively Defined"

AmericanScience Goes to Cleveland

Race and Violence in Occupied Oakland

The Buzz on Google NGram Viewer

Moon Trees

Carlo Ginzburg on the Historian's Craft

Gould's fundamental miscalculation

Science & Religion in America

Cinematic Cultural Cartography: Scientists in Hollywood

Cases: History, Philosophy, Science

Economic vs. Scientific Value: The Case of National Parks

Statistical Infrastructure

Science in America: History?

Dinosaurs and Dime Museums: Exhibiting the Past

Using Scrivener: A Brief Overview

HOS methods, American history questions

History of Science in America . . .and Zombies

Tools of the Trade: How Historians Work

Biology and the Public (Bonus Image!)

Publics *As* Biology? (Part 3 of 3)

Biology & the Public: Actor's and Analyst's Categories (Part 2 of 3)

Biology and the Public: Ischia (1 of 3)

Ishkabibble

HPS? History and vs. History of

Announcing the FHSA Grad Student Travel Award

Recapping the Reinvention of Time

Baseball by the Numbers

Teach 3/11

Science, Political Economy, and Oysters, Past and Present - or - How to turn that diss into a prize-winning book

A Nice Derangement of Empathies

JAS-BIO, Evolving

Publics As Biology? (Part 3 of 3)