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Creation book at Powell's City of Books in Portland

Although the Darwin film Creation is out on DVD (see my collection of reviews), it will be featured as the finale film for the Portland Humanist Film Festival from October 1-3. The festival is being put on by the Center for Inquiry (CFI), Freethinkers of Portland State University, and the Humanists of Greater Portland (HGP). Check out the full schedule here.

Oh, and all the films will be free to attend!

The website behaviortherapist.com has posted an interview with Irving Kirsch (pictured right), the well-known critic of the efficacy of antidepressant pharmaceuticals. Kirsch made a name for himself with a series of studies that showed that most of the effect commonly attributed to antidepressants is actually a placebo effect. Although the difference between the effect of antidepressants and placebo alone attains statistical significance, the size of the difference is, Kirsch says, “vanishingly small.” He also argues that this near-non-effect holds for different levels of depression, and for different classes of antidepressants,such as SSRIs (e.g., Prozac) and  SSRE(nhancer)s. He says the reasons for the widespread belief in the effectiveness of antidepressants include (1) the lack of placebo control groups in early research, (2) the typical clinician’s inability to distinguish between placebo effect and real pharmaceutical effect in any given patient, and (3) the fact that a large amount of (presumably negative) research data has never been made public by the pharmaceutical companies that sponsored the research.

Kirsch argues that the effects of cognitive-behavioral therapy are better (perhaps not surprisingly, given the sponsor of the interviewer), but he also claims that simple physical exercise has an important effect on depression.

The interview runs about 30 minutes in length.

Click for the Ralph Gomory profile at the IBM archives

One of my activities on my recent blogging hiatus was an oral history interview with Ralph Gomory.  The interview was originally instigated as part of the AIP History Center’s History of Physics in Industry project, on which I’ve helped out here and there.  Our discussions with researchers at IBM all pointed to Gomory as a crucial figure in that company’s history.  Personally, I had a strong interest in the interview, because Gomory’s background is in mathematics, and he is a notable figure in the operations research (OR) community, primarily on account of his foundational work on integer programming.  (For those keeping track, I wrote my dissertation, and am currently polishing up a book manuscript, on the history of certain sciences of policy analysis, including OR.)  This post is mainly based on the background research I did ahead of the interview.

Gomory was director of research at IBM from 1970 to 1986.  IBM Research had been established in its present form in the late 1950s by Emanuel Piore.  Piore had spent much of his postwar career at the Office of Naval Research, culminating in a stint as Chief Scientist.  Careful readers of Zuoyue Wang’s recent book on the President’s Science Advisory Committee (to be discussed on this blog presently) will know that Piore became a ubiquitous figure on various high-level government panels (i.e., though not well-known to historians, he was a big deal).

The idea behind establishing IBM Research was the general sense, widespread in the 1950s and ’60s, that technologically-oriented companies would be well-served by conducting their own basic research.  Piore’s goal was to establish an environment — housed in a modern building designed by Eero Saarinen — where researchers could freely explore their own ideas.  Gomory had originally been brought in to be part of the new mathematics department (along, incidentally, with fractal geometry pioneer Benoît Mandelbrot).

Now, going back to my previous post’s interest in basic research and the “linear model” in history: once one had established the importance of the link between research and technological development, one was faced with a series of subsidiary questions, to which one would have devoted more or less thought. At what level should this research be funded, overall?  What sorts of organizations should house research activities?  In what ways, and to what degree, should research activities be connected to, or liberated from, organizational (or simply others’) goals?  Of all possible specialties, what sorts of specialists should particular organizations hire?  According to what criteria should organizational managers initiate, discontinue, prioritize, and fund competing research projects?  Answers to these questions necessarily depended on more specific notions of the importance and character of research activities and their connection to technological work.

Gomory’s long term as director of research was, in many ways, centered around an attempt to better integrate IBM Research’s to-that-point freestanding activities into corporate strategy.  He became convinced that the best opportunities for research contributing to IBM’s products were generally limited to very certain points in the product development cycle (the succession of generations of products).  Developers and manufacturing engineers were often better positioned to offer judgment on what research results would prove the most useful to them, even as their ability to do so was predicated on researchers effectively communicating potential implications of their work to the engineers.  IBM Research, meanwhile, would continue to pursue open-ended academic-type work — including Nobel Prize-winning work — but the research division also began to concentrate more on problems suggested by difficulties and challenges foreseen in the product development and manufacturing processes.

In the 1980s and ’90s, at IBM, and then as president of the Sloan Foundation, Gomory began to publish short articles about the management of research, initially concentrating on the problem of the Japanese challenge to American competitiveness.  IBM, of course, experienced first-hand the threat from surging Japanese electronics firms.  Gomory’s articles responded to what he believed were misguided appeals to American underinvestment in research and science education as explanations for the challenge.  For example, some commentators, particularly academic researchers, were likely to point to large Japanese research investment and state projects, notably those at MITI (now METI), as a key source of the challenge.  (Incidentally, the international polemical/political arc leading from DSIR to MITI would be well worth tracing.)  Gomory preferred to point to particular Japanese methods of integrating design, manufacturing, and marketing, and their contraction of the product development cycle, to explain their successes.

Accordingly, while Gomory supported funding American basic science to maintain competitiveness in all fields, he argued that it was unlikely to make a substantial contribution to pressing problems of national economic competitiveness.  He attributed the idea that it could to what he referred to as the “ladder of science” model (essentially the linear model).  He asserted that whatever advantages might accrue from success with that model were fleeting as new industries based on novel technologies were quickly replicated in other nations.  Most economic advantage and long-term success was grounded in large industries’ ability to put low-cost, high-quality products through the development cycle more rapidly than their competitors.  Academic researchers were even less likely than industrial researchers to know what research results could be fruitfully applied in the cycle.

One lesson we could draw from the arc at IBM Research from the ’50s to the ’80s is a progression in ideas from Piore to Gomory.  This would map well onto existing narratives detailing a widespread questioning of the wisdom of unalloyed support for research in the 1960s and ’70s, which has been linked to a decline of the perceived validity of the linear model more generally.  The classic example is the increased Congressional questioning of military support for university research, punctuated by the Defense Department’s mid-1960s “Project Hindsight”, a study that failed to find a substantial link between advances in military technology and investment in research.

Framing this story in terms of the rise and fall of the linear model makes sense, because it renders a rationale for the support for research as a path to technological and economic prowess.  However, my own preference (and I think this mainly accords with David Bruggeman’s suggestion for thinking of the linear model as “incomplete”) is to think of a sort of undefined virtue as having been attributed to research, with little further reflection being given to problems such as who should be responsible for supporting research, and what institutional frameworks best mediate between university research, industrial research, and technology development communities.

This could all reduce down to “I say po-tay-to, you say po-tah-to”, but my feeling here, also expressed in my previous post, is that doing away with the historical idea of a linear model frees us up to look at, and evaluate the relative significance of the history of other rhetoric, other ideas, and other practices.  For example, while it seems likely that high-level managers and policymakers were convinced to support research perhaps out of some vague notion that it would yield occasional windfalls, this support would likely have been disconnected from their management or policymaking regarding technology development activities, which do not seem to have been substantially chained to any linear model, even though these activities were ostensibly a part of it.

From this perspective, the focus in the IBM Research narrative can be detached from Gomory’s reforms and criticsm; instead those reforms and criticism become an invitation to look at the significance of the history of company management, technology engineering, and marketing, and its relationship to scientific research for what it was, rather than for what it failed to be.  Fortunately for us, the house history of computing leaves us with a good head-start in the case of IBM, and studies such as Christophe Lécuyer’s of Silicon Valley, or Joan Bromberg on the joint-history of quantum optics and the laser industry, give us a good look at what a more integrated history would look like (although one should note both these cases focus on novel industries).

Indeed, we have a good start on a long-term historiography of these areas, as early modern technology-knowledge confluences in areas such as naval architecture, waterworks, practical medicine, and chemical dyes have found historians’ interest, and there is also good work in later periods on topics such as metrology, telegraphy, and forestry.  The difficulty, as ever, is broader survey and synthesis.  To develop what I would view to be a satisfying historiography, it is not enough to say, “but so-and-so did their case study of X, which amply demonstrates the historical connection between science and technology; how can you say there is not a sufficient historiography on the matter?”

The point is, we need to find better ways to talk about developments and trends en masse, to get out of the “view from the archive folder”, to deal not with just the actions of a single committee, for instance, but to describe how the work of thousands of committees coordinated the scientific and technological world.  I am convinced that if this happens, the historiographical importance of things like some “linear model” will start to seem very odd in retrospect, that, somehow, we became distracted by a few snippets of rhetoric that, while prominent and even influential in some respects, can only be properly evaluated amid a much larger, and more complex context.  From this view to focus historiography on a few items of rhetoric would be to make the same mistake of incompleteness as those who deployed that rhetoric in the first place.

… outside! (at this place)

Tualatin Hills Nature Park, Beaverton, OR

On his blog for a course entitled “History of Science for the Science Classroom,” science educator Ron Gray at Oregon State University shared a link to The Story Behind Science, a new website for an NSF-funded project:

What is science? How does science work? What are scientists like?

Misconceptions regarding the answers to these questions abound. Too often science comes across to students as unapproachable an devoid of human involvement. These mistaken ideas can interfere in understanding science concepts, cause students to avoid prursuing careers involving science, and result in poor social decision-maiking by citizens and policy-makers.

Thirty stories spanning five disciplines help students explore the development of key science concepts through the eyes of scientists who were involved. Supplemental resources are provided for teachers to help achieve the greatest impact from the stories.

The project team included folks in biology, geology, chemistry, astronomy, and physics, a few science educators, and, I’m happy to report, an historian of science (Matthew Stanley of NYU, who is a participant in the Tyndall Project).

There are thirty stories, six each in Astronomy, Biology, Physics, Geology, and Chemistry. Be sure to check out the support materials, and for more on the goal of the project, research presented at the Tenth International History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching Conference, “Humanizing Science to Improve Post-Secondary Science Education” (PDF).

Readers of this blog may like to check out the stories about Darwin (PDF) and Wallace (PDF).

Inform your teacher/educator friends & colleagues!

David Edgerton

Although I have discussed the paper here a few times in the past, including in one of this blog’s first-ever posts, this post will revisit David Edgerton’s argument in “‘The Linear Model’ Did Not Exist” (available in .rtf format via his website @ #49, and published in The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications, Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm, eds., 2004; hereafter GWW).

The “linear model” is a very specific claim stating that basic scientific research in universities (or other non-profit institutions) contributes to national economy and security by producing new knowledge, which can then be translated into new technological applications.  Edgerton’s argument that it “did not exist” is that it is an idea that has been held, in a strict sense, by few, if any, actors, and that it has been concocted as a straw man by individuals purporting to offer a superior alternative.  I believe continued discussion of Edgerton’s argument is needed because the reasoning underlying its claims is not obvious, it is now being used productively in new work such as Sabine Clarke’s, and because it has broader historiographical significance.

Much difficulty may be caused by the problem of what it means for an idea to “exist” in history: how well does a historian’s articulation of an idea have to map on to the actual idea in order to claim that it existed?

For instance, at HSS last November, one participant (at the special session on John Krige’s American Hegemony book on the reconstruction of science in postwar Europe) held that Edgerton’s view that “the linear model did not exist” was absurd in that arguments for basic scientific research as leading to new technologies was prevalent, especially in the postwar period.  I forget who said this, but the idea is also expressed in David Hounshell’s comment on “Did Not Exist” in GWW.

In this view, to say that basic research was merely linked to technological development qualifies as an expression of the “linear model”; it is not necessary to say that there was a direct relationship between a research result and its technological implementation.  What seems to be the bottom line of qualification here is not the specificity of the model, but that it was used polemically as a justification to initiate new funding of basic research.  This justification was essentially a promise that the research would, in some sense, result in future technological advance.

This interpretation causes a problem, though, because the implication is that the linear model was a specious justification — a self-serving rationalization designed to garner public (or, in the case of industrial research labs, corporate) funding for work that had no necessary economic benefit.  However, to ascribe the status of rationalization to the idea is almost necessarily to presume the strictest version of the model.  But (as Dan Kevles pointed out at the aforementioned HSS meeting) the mere point that technology developers can make productive use out of recent research is practically a truism.

The upshot here is that, depending on one’s interpretation of what the linear model means, historical claims can range from truism to cynical and specious self-justification.  Clearly, then, much depends on what specific views historical actors held.  The difficulty is that historical actors saw no need to theorize explicitly and in detail about the relationship.  We must read their views from their proposals and their rhetoric.  Let us go to the canonical case.

As Edgerton detailed, Vannevar Bush’s published report to the President, Science: The Endless Frontier (1945), is often cited as an important expression of the linear model on account of its advocacy for federal funding for basic, university-based research on the basis of its importance for further technological progress.  Reference to the model allowed Bush to countenance a major violation of the tradition of federal non-involvement in university life.

However, one must willfully read a linear model into Bush’s phraseology, because nowhere did he state that basic research results are necessarily the immediate source of new technologies and applications.  The more likely reading is the weaker truism that scientific research simply makes new developments possible, perhaps as a kind of catalyst in the process of technological improvement.  Bush, remember, was himself an academic engineer, and would have understood intuitively the function of knowledge in technological work.

Reading Bush’s words against the spectrum of views described in Clarke’s recent Isis article, he seems to have been thinking of basic research somewhat along the prewar lines of Richard Gregory, wherein basic research provides a kind of pool of primordial intellectual resources, which were at that time being increasingly drawn upon in the advance of technical work:

Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.

However, Bush also seems to have been fully aware of the day-to-day independence of industrial and military “research and development” — geared specifically toward the improvement of existing technologies — from “basic research” activities.  (One would hope, given his wartime experience as head of OSRD, which oversaw decidedly non-basic research.)  Beyond that distinction, Bush likewise recognized the peculiar role of longstanding research programs in civilian government agencies, using language more-or-less echoing that used (per Clarke) to describe work in the British DSIR.  Bush:

Much of the scientific research done by Government agencies is intermediate in character between the two types of work commonly referred to as basic and applied research. Almost all Government scientific work has ultimate practical objectives but, in many fields of broad national concern, it commonly involves long-term investigation of a fundamental nature. Generally speaking, the scientific agencies of Government are not so concerned with immediate practical objectives as are the laboratories of industry nor, on the other hand, are they as free to explore any natural phenomena without regard to possible economic applications as are the educational and private research institutions. Government scientific agencies have splendid records of achievement, but they are limited in function.

Bush’s report was ultimately very ambiguous in describing the nature of “basic research”, industrial “research and development”, as well as the in-between work pursued in government agencies, and especially in describing the nature of the relationship between these categories.  This ambiguity should not be taken as a license to ascribe a naive linear model to him.  The only thing we can affirmatively ascribe to him, as far as basic research is concerned, is the view that basic research is simply important to the progress of technical development, that without it technical development, in the long run, may not be able to proceed past a certain point.

To say that the linear model did not exist is to liberate us to ask further questions, which cannot be answered by textual exegesis, but only by examining how Bush actually managed various activities in basic research, and in industrial and military research and development, working as director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, as chair of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, as director of the committee structure of the wartime OSRD, and the postwar Research and Development Board.  It is clear, for example, that Bush did not derive his budget proposals for his proposed National Research Foundation from any sort of correlation between university funding and expected economic output, but rather from “studies by the several committees” which provided “a partial basis for making an estimate of the order of magnitude of the funds required to implement the proposed program.”  We have little idea of how these “studies” were conducted and integrated into recommendations, but they clearly point to a more sophisticated point-of-view than we would garner from being satisfied by describing Bush’s ideas simply in terms of the “linear model” divined from his rhetoric.

In a follow-up post, we will look at the persistent difficulties in finding a role for basic research in industrial organizations, wherein it will be emphasized that a lack of clear policy is not adequately described in terms of adherence to a linear model.



For any Darwin stamp collectors out there:

The May-June issue of Topical Time, a philatelic (stamp) magazine, has a great article by Barry N. Floyd titled, “Charles Darwin: the great naturalist.”  There have been (apparently) 140 stamps honoring Darwin, his work, or his travels, and for those you who are stamp-collecting evolution fans, the American Topical Association has produced a checklist for you (you have to join first…then they’ll send you the list). I don’t have access to the checklist, but I can’t seem to find any Darwin stamps released by the United States.  (I know, I know — you are shocked.)  One might argue that the United States wouldn’t bother to issue a stamp honoring somebody who never even came to the country…but that didn’t stop  North Korea (see stamp block below), Democratic Republic of Congo, and many others.

Anyone a member of ATA and have access to the article and checklist?

Also, see here.

Via PZ:

Before 2004 I drew this, and posted it on my Flickr page on March 12, 2009:

Today I came across this, from May 21, 2009:

Hmmm…

Here we have another quote-mine of Charles Darwin, from “Darwin Recant?” on the blog for the book Darwin, Then and Now by Richard Nelson, which is:

a journey through the most amazing story in the history of science; encapsulating who Darwin was, what he said, and what scientists have discovered since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859.

…

Darwin, Then and Now examines Darwin’s theory with more than three hundred quotations from The Origin of Species, spotlighting what Darwin said concerning the origin of species and natural selection using the American Museum of Natural History Darwin exhibit format.

With over one thousand referenced quotations from scientists and historians, Darwin, Then and Now explores the scientific evidence over the past 150 years from the fossil record, molecular biology, embryology, and modern genetics.

While we receive this tired argument:

The rise of atheism early in the twentieth century, rather than bringing an age of enlightenment, became the breeding fields for the bloodiest century in history—largely at the hands Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao. Contrary to Dawkins contention, the theory of evolution unleashed worldwide insanity—not peace.

I am more interested in another claim. Earlier in the piece the author provided information concerning the myth that Darwin recanted evolution of his deathbed, and asked to be saved, which we know to be false. Then:

Certainly, Darwin was critical of his own arguments for evolution in The Origin of Species. In a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote,

I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish

In the wake of 150 years of unprecedented scientific research on the fossil record, embryology, molecular biology, and genetics, the theory of evolution remains as it started —“rubbish.” However, any recanting document prior to his deathbed experience in April 1882 continues to escape the reach of historians.

Surprisingly, the author provides a link to the actual letter in which Darwin wrote this, on the Darwin Correspondence Project website. Here’s the before and after:

Nevertheless just to explain by mere valueless conjectures how I imagine the teeth of your elephants change; I should look at the change, as indirectly resulting from changes in the form of the jaws, or from development of tusks, or in case of the “primigenius” even from correlation with the woolly covering; in all cases natural selection checking the variation. If indeed an elephant could succeed better by feeding on some new kinds of food, then any variation of any kind in the teeth, which favoured their grinding power would be preserved. Now I can fancy you holding up your hands and crying out what bosh! To return to your concluding sentence; far from being surprised, I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved rubbish; but I expect and hope that the frame-work will stand.

The author, rather unsurprisingly for an anti-evolutionist, purposefully leaves out a crucial portion of the quote – “but I expect and hope that the frame-work will stand.” Surely Darwin is not writing against his theory as a whole, only stating that details about it may change. Nelson said that historians should pay attention to “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved rubbish,” as it provides evidence that Darwin recanted before 1882. But this is clearly not a recanting, if you just look at the quote in context.

But, reading “any recanting document prior to his deathbed experience in April 1882 continues to escape the reach of historians,” is   Nelson still perpetuating that Darwin did recant in 1882? Ken Ham doesn’t even believe it. If so, Nelson, I suggest you read a book: The Darwin Legend by James Moore.

All this, despite the description on the book reading, in part: “encapsulating who Darwin was, what he said” (emphasis mine).

The Spring 2009 issue (PDF) of ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America has some articles about Darwin and the Galapagos, including a piece from Janet Browne about Darwin in South America and another about teaching evolution.

The 2010 annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science is going on right now in Aberdeen. I just posted to my Tyndall blog about a Tyndall session put together by folks from the Tyndall Correspondence Project – here. While you can view the whole programme (PDF), these are the various talks concerning Darwin and one on Wallace:

“Darwin and the Tree of Life: The Roots of the Evolutionary Tree,” Nils Petter Hellstrom:

To speak of evolutionary trees and the Tree of Life is presently routine in evolution studies. Until the nineteenth century however, the same tree grew in Paradise and was rather a common image in religious discourse. It is only since Darwin that the Tree of Life has also been understood as a genealogical tree of all life, rooted in common origins. Although many see Darwin‘s tree as a secondary illustration to his theory—an analogy with which to communicate his findings—it is clear from Darwin‘s private notes that he visualised his genealogical Tree of Life before he developed his theory of descent by natural selection, and before he drew any diagrams to illustrate it. In fact, the tree was not secondary to evolutionary theory; it was the theory. Recent studies of prokaryote evolution have called into question the suitability of the tree model and have fuelled anti-arboreal sentiments within parts of the research community. Despite this, the tree prevails as the privileged evolutionary model. Because it is not immediately obvious why a tree is best suited to represent evolution—for a start woodland trees don‘t have their buds in the present and their trunk in the past—the reasons why trees make sense to us are rather historically and culturally predicated. This paper will thus explore the particular context in which Darwin came to represent the classification and history of life with a tree, and to call his tree the Tree of Life.

“Charles Darwin really was the naturalist on HMS Beagle,” John van Wyhe:

For decades the orthodox view amongst historians of science has been that Charles Darwin was not the “naturalist” or “official naturalist” during the 1831-6 voyage of HMS Beagle but instead Captain Robert FitzRoy’s “companion”, “gentleman companion” or “dining companion”; that is, foremost a companion and only secondarily a naturalist. Although this view has been upheld by many able historians and repeated in countless accounts of Darwin, this presentation will argue that it is incorrect. Almost everyone educated in the history of science will be highly suspicious of such an argument. The “companion” interpretation is one of a number of distinguishing views that card-carrying historians of science believe to correct earlier views. The “companion” hypothesis has, after all, opened up the history of Darwin and the Beagle voyage to far richer social and contextual approaches. Nevertheless the “Darwin was the captain’s companion” view can be demonstrated to be incorrect. The original journal articles which established this view cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. The ship’s surgeon was not, as is almost universally claimed, the “official naturalist”. Whether we consider the appointment of the Admiralty, the title for Darwin all contemporaries used before, during and after the voyage, “official” or private, or what Darwin actually did during the voyage, “naturalist” is, I will argue, the overwhelming conclusion.

“Wallace, spiritualism, and anthropology at the BAAS: A new interpretation,” Juan Manuel Rodriguez Caso:

From the time of its foundation in 1831, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) allowed its annual meetings to serve as a forum for the scientific study of man, including anatomy, physiology and ethnology. But there was no section dedicated to anthropological issues until 1866 — a year when, as is well known, two societies dedicated to anthropological issues, the Ethnological Society of London (ESL) and the Anthropological Society of London (ASL), were in the middle of a struggle for the domination of the emergent discipline. At such a delicate juncture, the man of science elected president of the new section was Alfred Russel Wallace. A naturalist whose interest in man had led him to embrace transmutation, Wallace had acquired a great deal of experience as an ethnographer thanks to his travels to the Amazon (1848-1852) and the Malay Archipelago (1854-1862). In 1864, he presented a famous paper on the origins of man by means of natural selection. He was not aligned with the ESL or the ASL — a point which may have weighed in his favour in the considerations about who should serve as section president. At the same time, however, Wallace by 1866 had already begun to express public sympathy for spiritualism, notably in a pamphlet entitled The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural — an attitude which seemed to clash with longstanding BAAS principles. Certainly it is striking that the anthropology section was absent from the programme at the following year’s BAAS meeting. Using previously little-explored documents, this paper will offer a new answer to the question of why Wallace was chosen as section president for the anthropologists in 1866, instead of other people much more involved and better recognized in anthropology, and also perhaps more obviously acceptable in their scientific attitudes and beliefs. The paper will also consider the question of why the section disappeared so rapidly after Wallace’s term of service.

“Gavin de Beer and the notion of mosaic evolution,” Silvia Caianiello:

The paper will deal with the notion of ―mosaic evolution‖ developed by de Beer in his 1954 paper “Archaeopteryx and Evolution.” His authorship of this fortunate expression in later biological theory, however, was and still is mostly unrecognized. I will argue that, notwithstanding its fleeting appearance in de Beer’s scientific production, the roots of “mosaic evolution” lay deep in his thinking and synthetic endeavour. I will also tackle the significance of the “conceptual transfer” of the notion of “mosaic” from development to evolution, as well as its implication for his approach to macroevolution. I will finally investigate some possible reasons for the uneasiness that de Beer‘s formulation of his principle might have unleashed at a time of “hardening” of the Modern Synthesis, and its relevance in foreshadowing major Evo-Devo themes.

“The evolutionary archive,” Katrina Dean:

Accounts addressing the recent history of British evolutionary science have not yet fully benefited from research using archives held at British Library including the papers of W.D. Hamilton, George R. Price and John Maynard Smith. This paper offers a preview of the John Maynard Smith archive, which primarily contains correspondence, original research records and offprint collections. I’ll explain how the archive is structured and what work is being undertaken to make it accessible to researchers, and mention some of the challenges. Using the papers as a guide, a survey of the work of Maynard Smith might suggest some potential lines of inquiry in the recent history of evolution and raise issues of more general interest to the history of twentieth century science in Britain. I will also invite feedback about what researchers would find helpful in the way of making these archives more accessible and seek guidance on priorities. This paper may be of interest to specialists in the history of evolution, of recent British science and anyone who is curious (or has some good advice to offer) about curating contemporary research collection.

“‘Everything gives way to experiment’: empiricism and beauty through the history of the Wedgwood family,” Chiara Ceci and Stefano Moriggi:

Seeking beauty does not mean you get lost in the taste for decoration, but that you imagine the style of an era and the meaning of society. The aesthetic empiricism of Josiah Wedgwood I evolved into a pedagogical approach within the family. For generations after him, boys and girls in his family and their circle, were brought up following these ideals: cultural and political awareness are conveyed by an education leading to freedom and tolerance through his technical and scientific approach to the experience of beauty. In particular, political, cultural and social ideals can be traced in the education of women and in their sensibility to the importance of knowledge as public good for the development of citizenship. From the Grand Tour and many abroad experiences to Sunday schools, Wedgwood women embody an educational attitude almost as a civil duty. They had not just the passion for art, literature, music and openness to sciences typical of the Victorian middle and high classes, but they carried concrete efforts, also due to their common Unitarian background, in the opening and management of schooling centres for poor, filling the lack of state and public institutions. Emma Darwin, née Wedgwood, is one of these women: analyzing some steps of her Bildungsroman and then following her life, we can see how the aesthetic education of her youth evolved into her cultural and civil commitments towards society. Even towards her husband‘s ―dangerous idea‖ she never failed to recognized the social importance of the advancement of scientific knowledge, even when that conflicted somehow with her religious believes: this attitude blooms from that cultural seed whereby “everything gives way to experiment.”

A new book looks at the author of Darwin, and after Darwin, 3 vols (1892–97), George Romanes, a young biologist and supporter of Darwin:

Darwin’s Disciple: George John Romanes, A Life in Letters by Joel G. Schwartz:

Darwin’s Disciple is a careful biographical study of the life and letters of George John Romanes (1848-1894), who was a strong advocate for Darwinian evolution. “Because of his cental role in definding evolution and his close relationship with Darwin during the last decade of Darwin’s life, Romanes’s life and career deserve a fresh look.” This publication by Joel Schwartz is the culmination of more than thirty-five years of work in this history of biology, particularly nineteenth-century natural history and the role played by prominent early evolutionists in shaping the debates in evolutionary biology.

Thanks to Glenn for the info.

Harvey Mudd College invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the History of Science and/or Technology beginning Fall 2011. We are conducting a broad search, but the successful candidate will be expected to teach the modern segment of the three-course sequence on the history of science and technology. Candidates should have completed the Ph.D. degree and be able to provide evidence of excellence in teaching and promise of significant scholarship.

HMC is a highly selective institution that offers majors in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. The position is in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts, an interdisciplinary department supporting a broad-based liberal arts program, and the teaching load is five semester-courses per year, including a writing-intensive first-year seminar. HMC’s membership in the Claremont consortium offers significant opportunities for cooperation and collaboration with disciplinary colleagues at the Claremont Colleges and the Claremont Graduate University as well as participation in the Intercollegiate Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Situated approximately 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, HMC offers easy access to LA’s vibrant cultural scene and is also convenient to the Huntington Library, which includes the Burndy Library and other collections in the field. Applicants should send a letter of application, CV, a sample of scholarly work (no more than 35 pp.), three letters of recommendation, course evaluations, a statement of teaching philosophy, and syllabi of three proposed courses to: Professor Hal S. Barron, Chair, History of Science and/or Technology Search Committee, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts, Harvey Mudd College, 301 Platt Blvd., Claremont, CA 91711-5990. If possible, submit these materials electronically to: hal_barron@hmc.edu. Please include in the cover letter a statement about working in and promoting diverse academic environments. Applicants should indicate whether they plan to attend the SHOT meeting in Tacoma and/or the History of Science meeting in Montreal. While applications will be considered until the position is filled, we plan to conduct preliminary interviews at both meetings and files received by September 16 will be given preferred consideration.

Harvey Mudd College, an Equal Opportunity Employer, is committed to the recruitment of candidates historically underrepresented on college faculties. Experience with or demonstrated ability to effectively teach students from diverse backgrounds will be considered among criteria for appointment.

From the NCSE:

“Biology, the Bible, and the First Amendment”. Genie Scott and Stephen Meyer tangle over First Amendment issues in February 1997:

Much more from the NCSE here.

Coming off this blog’s discussion of Paul Lucier’s “The Professional and the Scientist in 19th-Century America,” I would next like to look at Sabine Clarke’s “Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 1916-1950″ (abstract + paywall) from the most recent Isis.

Lucier’s piece delineated important distinctions and connections between 19th-century American and British vocabularies of science, with an attendant examination of important issues to which the American lexicon was applied.  Reading that work, I found myself not really willing to believe that the subject matter had not been previously parsed that way, and am still half expecting someone to pop up with some obvious reference that tells all about it — it’s really useful stuff.

Clarke’s piece seems to offer more of a clarification of certain points of vocabulary, rather than an important new delineation of historical ideas, but it is successful in the task it sets out to accomplish.  The actual ideas discussed — the relationship between “research” (as in “research and development”) and “science” — should already be familiar to those with a serious interest in the relationship between scientific research and technological development in the industrial era.  What is of primary interest here is the search for appropriate language to describe this relationship.

The idea we should all already have in mind is this: “research” connotes any form of investigation that is not immediately directed toward the development of a new technology or industrial process (henceforth, simply “technology”).  Over the past couple of centuries, research entailed developing an understanding of, or even just exploring, certain classes of phenomena — the properties of certain classes of materials, for example.  This research was often inspired by efforts to improve existing technologies.  Sometimes, it might well have led to deeper developments in scientific knowledge, but did not necessarily need to do so.

Institutionally, because research subjects and problems of technology development are expected to be linked, contact and coordination between researchers and developers may be desirable.  In some regional institutional frameworks, universities may not be desirable places for this research to be undertaken.  University researchers’ academic interests may not prompt them to pursue problems of industrial interest, and when they do, weak university-industry relations might prevent the implications of their research for technology development from being seen.

In the early 20th century, there was a great deal of anxiety that such an institutional framework existed in Britain.  Industries were thought not to undertake sufficient research for the nation’s firms to produce competitive goods, and universities, pursuing a “pure science” ideal, could not make the necessary contributions to Britain’s economy.

To bridge this gap, it was thought that the government might take responsibility for encouraging research of benefit to industry.  This talk resulted in the creation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in 1916 (just as World War I had revealed certain technological gaps in Britain’s home industry, augmenting existing anxieties).  DSIR was to run certain government laboratories.  It would, for instance, soon take over the National Physical Laboratory (previously mentioned here).  It would also fund research, and oversee a series of “research associations” through which industrial firms would fund and undertake mutually beneficial research.  The DSIR’s story has been told a number of times.

Clarke’s piece elucidates the vocabulary deployed by DSIR’s proponents to describe its activities.  At first, DSIR used the term “pure science” to distinguish its contributions from the typical activities of industrial workshops, but the term, in turn, failed to distinguish DSIR activities from university science.  Some critics feared DSIR would simply support academic research irrelevant to British industry.  Meanwhile, proponents of the idea of “pure science”, such as Nature editor Richard Gregory, were likely to tout the primordial foundations of technologies in scientific discoveries (e.g., electromagnetic induction as prerequisite to telegraph and telephone).  Emphasizing the inherent unpredictability of scientific progress, they were skeptical of DSIR’s ability to plan the research programs that would lead to improved industry.

Responding to these difficulties, the DSIR soon adopted the terminology of “fundamental research”, as distinct from “pure science”, to emphasize the character of research that could be inspired by industrial concerns as well as fruitfully subjected to bureaucratic direction, and that, while beneficial from a national standpoint, might not otherwise be done in industry or universities.  This point modifies careless historical literature that suggests the terms, as well as terms like “basic science” were interchangeable.

In making this observation, Clarke adopts two methodological slants.

First, “In its focus on language this paper is a contribution to a body of scholarship that has sought to investigate the strategies employed in scientific discourse to construct and disseminate knowledge claims, demarcate science from non-science, and assert the cultural value of science” (286).

However, I would distinguish this article from that literature, because the terminology adopted in DSIR relied on no firm demarcations being drawn — just the opposite, it bridged otherwise misleadingly demarcated domains.  No one would have claimed that “fundamental research” represented an unimpeachable category into which DSIR work had to be pigeonholed to legitimize state support.  The rhetoric served more as a clarification of intended bureaucratic function.

While it’s true this clarification did serve in some ways as a defense of DSIR’s work against some criticisms of what constituted proper state activity, that is a somewhat different concern from the sociological and historical literature on demarcation and boundaries, wherein much is taken to depend on the epistemic purity of domains and the integrity of boundaries between them.  One could plausibly argue that clarification nevertheless fits into the literature on historical demarcation, but if nearly any act of description for the sake of facility in communication and purpose is an act of demarcation, then the potential analytical power of that literature is substantially diluted.

The second methodological slant runs somewhat against the first.  Clarke astutely points out, “The more general problem with many accounts of the DSIR has been a tendency by scholars to focus on making an assessment of its success or failure that reflects the concerns of the particular writer, rather than focusing on any debates that occurred at the moment of the DSIR’s establishment.  In addition, evaluating the contribution of the DSIR to British science policy, or to state and science relations, misses the point that the DSIR was specifically concerned with research, not science per se” (289-290).

In other words, the reason why DSIR has been a historiographical focus is because the instantiation of an industrial research organization within the state apparatus has been taken as a moment when some action was taken in bodies responsible to the public to address the aforementioned anxieties over the British nation’s institutional framework (in their roughest form, expressed as a national problem with “science” — a rhetorical legacy dating at least to Babbage).

In fact, though, fundamental research flourished in Britain prior to, and regardless of, the contribution of DSIR or, for that matter, a clearly expressed concept of “fundamental research”.  “David Edgerton and Sally Horrocks have … shown that the picture of absolute neglect by British industry to be misleading.  British firms were conducting scientific research before World War I, notably the United Alkali Company, Cadbury, Noble, and Vickers, and it has proven difficult to substantiate the claim that British industry was far behind that of Germany in its spending on research” (289).

Perhaps the most interesting part of the article for me is the insistence of British Marxist scientists, such as J. D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, and Lancelot Hogben, on not distinguishing “pure science” from “fundamental research” in view of their commitment to portraying all scientific work as inextricably the product of its social-economic milieu, which served their goal of seeing the state provide a forum for the coordination of scientific work in view of potential industrial-technological contributions to social welfare.  Clarke might also have mentioned their predilection for the term “scientific research worker” rather than “scientist”, which also nicely links this article to the concerns over the terminology of the “man of science” vs. “scientist” noted in Lucier’s piece.

Importantly, Clarke acknowledges how loosely critical rhetoric mapped onto historical practices, and thus how toothless it was: “this paper shows that the ideal of pure science promoted by public scientists [I dislike this term, by the way -- too vague] around the time of World War I exercised very little influence on the character of policies that were being developed for the funding and organization of research….  A close examination of the texts of the DSIR reveals that actors had more nuanced understandings of the interplay between research and practice [technological development?] than they sometimes have been credited for, and that they also knew the difference between the rhetoric of official documents and journals, and the nature of scientific work in practice” (287).  Edgerton’s important paper “The Linear Model Did Not Exist” is profitably cited here.

My feeling is that the disconnect between rhetoric and practical considerations somewhat undercuts the impact of the paper’s extended analysis of the use of the term “fundamental research”, but that the forthrightness about this issue augments the paper’s credibility and utility — an all-too-rare restraint in a literature often seemingly determined to mine profundity from the tea leaves of historical rhetoric.

I really think we should have a book with Darwin quotes much like  The New Quotable Einstein.

What are your favorite Darwin quotes?

I am extremely happy that my son has recently enjoyed having his picture taken. From the last few days:

From the Journal of Evolutionary Biology [V. 23, N. 8 (August 2010): 1732-43]:

Using creation science to demonstrate evolution: application of a creationist method for visualizing gaps in the fossil record to a phylogenetic study of coelurosaurian dinosaurs

P. SENTER

Abstract It is important to demonstrate evolutionary principles in such a way that they cannot be countered by creation science. One such way is to use creation science itself to demonstrate evolutionary principles. Some creation scientists use classic multidimensional scaling (CMDS) to quantify and visualize morphological gaps or continuity between taxa, accepting gaps as evidence of independent creation and accepting continuity as evidence of genetic relatedness. Here, I apply CMDS to a phylogenetic analysis of coelurosaurian dinosaurs and show that it reveals morphological continuity between Archaeopteryx, other early birds, and a wide range of nonavian coelurosaurs. Creation scientists who use CMDS must therefore accept that these animals are genetically related. Other uses of CMDS for evolutionary biologists include the identification of taxa with much missing evolutionary history and the tracing of the progressive filling of morphological gaps in the fossil record through successive years of discovery.