Individuals

From Stages of Succession:

What is even more depressing is how easy it is for religious topics to sneak into the National Curriculum. This is the specification for Edexcel GCSE Science, the qualification UK students take at age 16:

Students will be assessed on their ability to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the principles of natural selection, to include:
  - How individuals within a species can have characteristics that promote more successful reproduction (survival of the fittest)
  - How, over generations, the effects of natural selection result in changes within species and the formation of new species from genetic variants or mutants that are better adapted to their environment
  - How species that are less well-adapted to a changing environment can become extinct
• Explain how fossils provide evidence for evolution
• Discuss why Charles Darwin experienced difficulty in getting his theory of evolution through natural selection accepted by the scientific community in the 19th century

Is that last point a bad thing? Surely there were scientific critiques of Darwin’s theory – on the age of the earth and the time needed for evolution to occur, on Darwin not having an answer for the mechanism for inheritance, etc. Not sure that having students “Discuss why Charles Darwin experienced difficulty in getting his theory of evolution through natural selection accepted by the scientific community in the 19th century” is sneaking religious topics into the National Curriculum. There is a history to Darwin and his theory, one that should definitely be part of the teaching of the science part of it. Darwin’s theory was not accepted by all, based on scientific and religious grounds. Students should learn that, as well as that evolution is accepted by a vast majority of scientists today, and the dissent comes from largely religious groups, some of which masquerade their critiques as “science.”

In historiographical discussions, a key concern is whether certain problematics prejudice historical portraiture.  By “problematics” I mean the dialectical process that determines what topics are researched, how they are investigated, and how the results of investigations are presented.  By “portraiture” I mean the sum total availability of information about the various aspects of history, apart from any analytical statements made by it or our ability to navigate within a historiography.  In other words, how do the questions we want to ask about the historical record both expand and limit our summary and publication of the record’s contents?

For at least a half a century, one way that professional history of science (and history more generally) has consistently attempted to distinguish itself is by pointing to its ability to recognize and correct for earlier historians’ and non-professionals’ prejudicial limitations in their portraiture.  Hagiographic biographies discount major historical actors’ flaws.  Positivistic accumulations of scientific contributions discount scientific “wrong turns” and the importance of theoretical frameworks.  Intellectual histories of science discount the culture of science.  Philosophical accounts of the historical establishment of claims discount the sociological work necessary to secure assent around them.

Invisibility

Initially, criticisms of prejudicial portraiture emphasized that important constituencies have been rendered invisible through various forms of bias.  Social history in the vein of E. P. Thompson emphasized bias against histories of common people in favor of interest in political figures, cultural leaders, and other heroic or otherwise individually influential figures identified through what we might think of as a problematic that emphasizes concerted action.  Along these lines, portraiture of disempowered and marginal constituencies has flourished, although sometimes these retain a concerted-action problematic, choosing to emphasize actors who are on the fringe but who, within the confines of their particular sphere, are influential nonetheless.  Historians who discover new classes of invisible things stand to gain significant cachet.

In the historiography of science, scientists, historians, sociologists, and, indeed, many philosophers, have been noting for an exceedingly long time that the motivation behind scientific work, and the actual processes of that work, are often expunged or rearranged when work is distilled into a finished product.  There is a strong tradition, therefore, of offering a supplementary, informal portraiture to demonstrate the “human side” of science, the craftsmanship of scientific work, or the social and political context and implications of that work, for example.

In the last 30-40 years, however, an influential socio-epistemological point has made the rounds that scientific work actually depends on rendering the socio-cultural content of science “invisible”, because, it is claimed, maintenance of the authority of claims requires that the claims be regarded as the product of a purely epistemological process.  This strategy is said to break down when assent is not successfully secured, and socio-cultural content is rendered visible.  Notable here is Steven Shapin’s chapter, “Invisible Technicians: Masters, Servants, and the Making of Experimental Knowledge” in his Social History of Truth (1994), but the whole train of objectivity studies in the mid-’90s takes this to be a key point, and it is crucial to the claims to relevance and cogency in the commentary of Bruno Latour on “science”, “nature”, and “modernity” from the late 1980s on.

Various criticisms of prejudicial portraiture and resulting invisibility have often been confounded.  Thus, discussions of historiographical craft often segue effortlessly into discussions of scientific epistemology and, for example, the nature of this epistemology’s relationship with public ideas.  I gather this is because epistemological misconceptions are taken to be a generic cause of systematic invisibilities in historiographical craft.  It is not clear to me that this is so, nor is it clear to me that scientific legitimacy has actually depended on sweeping cultural content under the rug, exactly.  More on these suspicions in follow-up posts.

For the time being, I want to suggest that there is a pressing need for an alternative posture to assumptions that a prejudicial historical portraiture is grounded in a particular kind of epistemological bias.

Positive Portraiture

The criticism of David Edgerton provides an interesting variation on the problem of historiographical invisibility.  This blog regularly promotes Edgerton’s critical observations on historiography (speaking of, see his most recent essay in the July Technology and Culture).  To date, I have paid less attention to his craftsmanship.  Edgerton’s history-writing is characterized by his assembly of inchoate sets of portraits, which typically highlight points that are “of importance”, for example, in assessing the history of British state sponsorship of R&D, he has noted the importance of the postwar Ministry of Supply.

The unity of Edgerton’s assemblages is to be found in their presentation of an amalgamated portrait that is invisible to, and at odds with, existing historiographical narratives and portraits.  The power of his work is in this strategy.  Among his recent works, Warfare State (2006) challenges the signal importance of the welfare state in British history and the search for explanations for British military vulnerability and weakness in science and technology.  Such narratives fail to discuss Britain as the major military and scientific and technological nation that it was.  Similarly, The Shock of the Old (also 2006) challenges the traditional historiographical bias toward novel technologies, arguing that even histories challenging the hype surrounding novel technologies simply “invert” the narrative to show the failures and problems associated with novel technologies.  To escape the narrative, the point is that it is important to study non-novel technologies as well (as well as related issues of technology use, like maintenance).

The difficulty here is that Edgerton’s criticism can be mistaken as claims to have simply discovered new forms of invisibility that historians can make visible.  In cases where I have seen him cited, he is often regarded as simply calling for studies of “old” technologies, or of state scientific bodies (see Melissa Smith’s article on the Home Office’s Scientific Advisers’ Branch in the June BJHS).  Such studies are certainly a step in the right direction, but I think these do not capture the full point of Edgerton’s critique, which revolves more around the historiographical riches to be mined through what I call “positive portraiture”.

Positive portraiture relates to the historiographical effort to arrive at useful and extensive depictions of what existed in history, putting individual entities (events, people, technologies) in the context of comparable entities.

Edgerton’s work is interesting in that retains existing historiography’s interest in remedying persistent invisibilities, but, unlike that historiography, it finds a way forward not by arguing with that historiography’s conclusions, but by using positive portraiture to build an alternative vision of the past that undermines the historiography’s key assumptions about what issues need to be addressed and how.

I think a crucial aspect of positive portraiture, is its emphasis on the fact that vast aspects of the past are undocumented.  Undocumented history differs from invisible history in that the assumption is that the primary task of the historian is not to diagnose and undo past concealment, though that may be a useful secondary task.  Diagnosis and remedy too often adheres to that historiography’s investigatory agenda by engaging in a dialectic with it — what Edgerton calls “inversion”.

Instead, the primary task should be to extend portraiture as best as we can, and to build new argumentation on the basis of this portraiture.  How to move forward in this vein is an open question.  We know that undirected empiricism can produce exceedingly tedious and unilluminating history, but there is not much historiographical thought laying out what constitutes the most useful methods of portraiture.  The more inchoate qualities in Edgerton’s oeuvre suggests the need for an explicit new set of problematics, and some overarching means of navigating through our portraiture and the arguments associated with it, rather than engaging with various arguments in the historiography pell mell.  Once we have a better handle on how to do this and how to make historians and others interested in it (I suspect we may actually provoke more interest from outsiders already interested in specific topics), it will be correspondingly easier to engage with the historical record in more open-ended, exploratory, and productive ways.

Due in December:

In the Light of Evolution: Essays from the Laboratory and Field

Edited by Jonathan Losos

Summary: In the Light of Evolution is a collection of essays by leading scientists, including Edmund Brodie III, James Curtsinger, Ted Daeschler, Douglas Emlen, Harry Greene, Luke Harmon, Hopi Hoekstra, Daniel Lieberman, Jonathan Losos, Axel Meyer, Teri J. Orr, Naomi Pierce, David C. Queller, Neil Shubin, David Reznick, Michael Ryan, and Marlene Zuk. The book also includes essays by science writers Carl Zimmer, Andrew Berry, historian Janet Browne, and a foreword by journalist David Quammen. As David Quammen says in his foreword, the book collects “reports from the field, plainspoken descriptions of lifetime obsessions, hard-earned bits of wisdom, and works in progress, pried loose from some of the most interesting, eminent researchers in evolutionary biology….” It is a book “for readers who are fascinated by evolutionary biology and who desire to understand better the day-by-day, speciesby-species, ecosystem-by-ecosystem texture of its practice as a scientific profession.”

The Amazon listing is calling it In the Light of Evolution: Essays from Leading Evolutionary Biologists for whatever reason…

Henry Sidgwick (May 31, 1838–August 28, 1900)

From the journal Biology and Philosophy (June 2010):

Methods of ethics and the descent of man: Darwin and Sidgwick on ethics and evolution

Lillehammer, Hallvard

Abstract Darwin’s treatment of morality in The Descent of Man has generated a wide variety of responses among moral philosophers. Among these is the dismissal of evolution as irrelevant to ethics by Darwin’s contemporary Henry Sidgwick; the last, and arguably the greatest, of the Nineteenth Century British Utilitarians. This paper offers a re-examination of Sidgwick’s response to evolutionary considerations as irrelevant to ethics and the absence of any engagement with Darwin’s work in Sidgwick’s main ethical treatise, The Methods of Ethics. This assessment of Sidgwick’s response to Darwin’s work is shown to have significance for a number of ongoing controversies in contemporary metaethics.

The September 2010 issue of Biology and Philosophy looks at the Tree of Life:

The tree of life: introduction to an evolutionary debate
Author(s): Maureen A. O’Malley, William Martin & John Dupré
PP: 441 – 453

The attempt on the life of the Tree of Life: science, philosophy and politics
Author: W. Ford Doolittle
PP: 455 – 473

The series, the network, and the tree: changing metaphors of order in nature
Author: Olivier Rieppel
PP: 475 – 496

Why was Darwin’s view of species rejected by twentieth century biologists?
Author: James Mallet
PP: 497 – 527

Ernst Mayr, the tree of life, and philosophy of biology
Author: Maureen A. O’Malley
PP: 529 – 552

Microbiology and the species problem
Author: Marc Ereshefsky
PP: 553 – 568

The myth of bacterial species and speciation
Author(s): Jeffrey G. Lawrence & Adam C. Retchless
PP: 569 – 588

Natural taxonomy in light of horizontal gene transfer
Author(s): Cheryl P. Andam, David Williams & J. Peter Gogarten
PP: 589 – 602

Evaluating Maclaurin and Sterelny’s conception of biodiversity in cases of frequent, promiscuous lateral gene transfer
Author: Gregory J. Morgan
PP: 603 – 621

Symbiosis, lateral function transfer and the (many) saplings of life
Author: Frédéric Bouchard
PP: 623 – 641

Lifeness signatures and the roots of the tree of life
Author: Christophe Malaterre
PP: 643 – 658

Gene sharing and genome evolution: networks in trees and trees in networks
Author: Robert G. Beiko
PP: 659 – 673

Testing for treeness: lateral gene transfer, phylogenetic inference, and model selection
Author(s): Joel D. Velasco & Elliott Sober
PP: 675 – 687

Trashing life’s tree
Author: L. R. Franklin-Hall
PP: 689 – 709

On the need for integrative phylogenomics, and some steps toward its creation
Author(s): Eric Bapteste & Richard M. Burian
PP: 711 – 736

For the sake of getting these links out there, I’m just copying my tweets here:

#1 – Hey, Discovery Institute, he’s referring to you when he says “stupid people’s brains”: http://bit.ly/9VBS6p #Darwin #evolution

#2 – Re: my last tweet, more: http://bit.ly/av9Hls & http://bit.ly/bmz8v6 / @PZMyers has his say: http://bit.ly/b0LtEE #Darwin #evolution

And so what if this crazy guy was obsessed with Darwin, does that discredit the science. Absolutely not. This is really getting old.

Piers Hale, an historian of science at the University of Oklahoma, taught over the summer a month-long Study Abroad course in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands: HSCI 4970/5970 Charles Darwin and Galapagos: Solving the “mystery of mysteries.” Undergraduate students took both a zoology course in evolutionary ecology and a course on the history of evolutionary thought. Plus, exploring the places and following in the footsteps… not a bad way to get some credits! Piers hopes this can become a regularly offered course.

He has been posting pictures on his Facebook page, so I share here some Darwin-specific shots with his permission.

Here’s a shot from the University of San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador, of Darwin and Wallace (George will like this one):

Darwin bust:

Darwin bust:

Darwin statue:

Charles Darwin:

The bay where the Beagle dropped anchor 15 September 1835:

The bay where the Beagle dropped anchor 15 September 1835:

Avenue 12th February, San Cristobal:

An iguana for Darwin:

That Darwin bust again, nice sunset:

Convention center named after Darwin:

On the grounds of the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island:

I’m jealous…

The Darwin Correspondence Project’s “Darwin and Gender” project has a Twitter feed: @DarwinWomen, “Charles Darwin’s women correspondents speak out!”

BBC News: Charles Darwin’s ecological experiment on Ascension isle

Science, Reason and Critical Reasoning: Modern Science Map (I’m sure there’s much that could be said about the way this is set up, but I’m just going to enjoy the awesomeness of it and not try and find any mistakes, misses, etc.).

Guardian science blogs (via Noticing/Science)

Four Nails in Darwin’s Coffin, oh my!

The 27th edition of Carnival of Evolution has just been posted at 360 Skeptic. Click here to get yer fill.



From 2002 at the AMNH, via NCSE,

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Jai of From the Hands of Quacks is, like me last year, seeking information about the use of history of science blogs. She has put together an informal survey for either history of science bloggers themselves or those who read history of science blogs. It will only take a few moments, so I would appreciate your participating!

Here’s her post, and the survey page.

Also, if you could link to the survey on your blogs, Facebook, or retweet my tweet, I’m sure she would be delighted…

From Situating Science | Science in Human Contexts:

Revisiting Evolutionary Naturalism: New Perspectives on Victorian Science and Culture

Node Workshop
May 6 – 7th, 2011
York University, Toronto, Canada

Ever since the 1970’s, when Robert Young and Frank Turner treated T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and their allies as posing an effective challenge to the authority of the Anglican clergy, scholars have found the term “scientific naturalism,” or “evolutionary naturalism,” to be a useful shorthand for referring to an influential group of like-minded elite intellectuals. But over the years, questions have been raised about the cohesiveness and the cultural status of scientific naturalism. Is the term elastic enough to include both the idealist and romantic Karl Pearson as well as the hard-nosed materialist Charles Bastian? Just how powerful were the scientific naturalists if they disagreed amongst themselves on key issues, and if, as many recent studies have suggested, they were confronted by a host of effective opponents in addition to Anglican clergymen, including North British physicists, Oxbridge trained gentlemen of science, self-trained popularizers of science, philosophical idealists, spiritualists, feminists, anti-vivisectionists, and socialists? Indeed, how far were the practices and writings of scientific naturalists actually shaped by their interchanges with such myriad opponents?

In this workshop we hope to explore new perspectives on the British scientific naturalists, re-examining their interactions with each other and with other groups within the larger culture. Speakers include Ruth Barton, Peter J. Bowler, Gowan Dawson, James Elwick, Jim Endersby, George Levine, Bernard Lightman, Ted Porter, Evelleen Richards, Joan Richards, Michael Reidy, Jonathan Smith, Robert Smith, Matthew Stanley, Michael Taylor, Frank Turner, and Paul White. The workshop will take place at 320 Bethune College, York University, Toronto, Canada on May 6th and 7th, 2011. It is sponsored by York University, SSHRC, and by Situating Science.

Barton, Dawson, Elwick, Lightman, Reidy, and Stanley are all part of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project. I’m hoping to attend.

This is the third and final part of a look at two of Simon Schaffer’s 1993 works, 1) “Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century”, and 2) “A Social History of Plausibility: Country, City and Calculation in Augustan Britain”.  In Pt. 1 and Pt. 2, and now here in Pt. 3, the focus is on the papers’ mode of argumentation and this mode’s significance within the historiographical culture of the early 1990s.

In these papers, a historiographical malignancy is identified: an insistence on seeing a rise of reasoned polity and society, and of spaces of free inquiry; this rise is attended by a decline of false belief.  This is considered a malignancy because it ignores the extensive and persistent controversies over various beliefs.  The remedy, thus, is taken to be what I call “insultography”: a charting of commonalities in the polemics used to secure the boundaries of belief about what exists, or at least what is plausible.  Historical “polemical work” consistently references widely acknowledged sources of credit-worthiness and discredit (in Pt. 1 these pervasive opinions are referred to as “grand cultural ideas”): religious piety, superstition, the vulgar crowds, the emotional manipulation and illusion of the theater, courtly society, bourgeois society, investment schemes, the legacy of Isaac Newton…  Historians’ failure to acknowledge the historical importance of this polemical work as they chart the history of knowledge is taken to stem from their own selective credulity toward of these same polemics.

The current goal is to understand why the identified historiographical issue is considered an important malignancy and why the remedy is considered apt.  As suggested in Pt. 2, portraying historiographical issues as malignancies could be used to explain a gnawing problem of historiographical craft: fragmentation.  In his (free, and well worth reading) 2005 Isis article on this fragmentation phenomenon in the historiography of science, David Kaiser traced complaints about it as far back as a 1987 article by Charles Rosenberg in Isis, a 1991 Casper Hakfoort article in History of Science, and a 1993 James Secord article in BJHS.  Kaiser suggested that the fragmentation was akin to specialization that occurred within the natural sciences as they expanded in the 20th century, pointing to similar patterns of growth in the recent history of the history of science discipline. 

In the natural sciences, the key danger of specialization is topical and methodological isolation.  Lacking an overarching understanding of the interconnections between the sciences, it becomes difficult to apply knowledge from one branch of the sciences to another even though natural phenomena often cannot be explained by reference to a single specialty.  Only expressly interdisciplinary efforts can establish new links.

If historiographical fragmentation is related to scientific specialization, this lets us see it as a symptom of unnatural divisions between historians’ efforts.  Some — such as dividing the historical record by place and period — are historians’ own doing.  Others are inherited.  Historians may limit themselves to distinct disciplines: physics, biology, physiology and medicine.  What had not occurred to me is that it could be possible to think of divisions between history of science and cultural history as being a product of this inherited fragmentation as well.  But it follows easily in Schaffer’s arguments: the historical record is divided into science and culture, or knowledge claims and polemics.  The expunging of polemics from the record of science is part of what Schaffer refers to as the “‘amnesia’ of realism”.

As with divisions by period, by region, and by discipline, the answer to fragmentation-as-specialization between the histories of science and culture is interdisciplinary work.  What constitutes a successful interdisciplinary historiography, however, seems not to have been a subject of serious meditation.  The idea seems to have been that you could put an eclectic bunch of scholars together in a room for a few days, and have them find similarities between their work.  The fact that you could find similarities validated the exercise and the notion that unnatural divisions appeared in the historical record, and that interdisciplinarity was the solution.

This is an undiscriminating kind of interdisciplinarity.  In juxtaposing portions of the historical record arbitrarily or semi-arbitrarily, commonalities found will revolve around pervasive historical phenomena, in particular the “grand cultural ideas” that manifest themselves in polemics.  This pervasiveness, combined with the notion that these ideas represented a heretofore hidden cultural content of science gave these ideas a status in the historiography of science as the missing “social” component of epistemology.  Conveniently, these ideas will also find overlap with the subjects treated by social and cultural historians.

Some sympathetic critics had long voiced their suspicions of this sort of exercise.  Notably, in his 1980 Isis review of Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin’s Natural Order (1979) collection, Charles Rosenberg had observed that the observations relating to the cultural content of science were “facile”, lacking the more detailed reference to social, political, and intellectual context that would give them meaning.  Where Barnes and Shapin, inspired by anthropologist Mary Douglas, seemed to want to reconstruct “cosmologies” that linked knowledge with social order in intricate ways, Rosenberg saw more of a kinship to Arthur Lovejoy’s (1873-1962) history of ideas in the tendency of this historiography to satisfy itself with identifying common cultural tropes in the historical record.

The 1980s were to be the proving ground to see which view prevailed.  As Shapin wrote in 1982, it was time to stop doing methodological battle, and to get on with it, to show that the new program for a history of science and culture was both productive, and an augmentation of, rather than a threat to, traditional historiography: “For my part I see no danger of ‘the history of science losing its science’”.  It is my contention that the program, for about ten years, could credibly claim it was on the road to success.  Not only was it connected to striking historiographical successes like Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), but a productive tension arose between approaches such as Jed Buchwald’s, Smith & Wise’s, Morrell & Thackray’s, Jan Golinski’s, Martin Rudwick’s, and Schaffer’s to major issues like the transformations in the sciences in the decades surrounding 1800.

By the early-to-mid-’90s, claims to programmatic success would be much harder to maintain as warnings such as Rosenberg’s remained apt.  It is possible we can pin this on faulty models of historiographical fragmentation and integration.  If the fact that interdisciplinary history could successfully find overlaps between social history and the history of science validated the exercise, then there was no need to place more stringent bounds on interdisciplinary historiography, despite pleas such as Lorraine Daston’s “Moral Economy of Science” piece (1995).  Further, if the pervasive grand cultural ideas identified came to be seen as a missing key to epistemilogy and as an intentionally effaced fragment of the historical record, pieces could attain value simply by identifying points in the historical record where these ideas manifest themselves (which is what this blog has referred to as the “socio-epistemic problematic”).

Schaffer’s two articles are a microcosm of the resulting historiography: there is no rationale underlying his selection of historical episodes to discuss, nor are the specific connections, or lack of specific connections between them especially important.  Only the most pervasive ideas are taken to be of intellectual value, and thus worthy of historians’ interest.

Perversely, this mode of history-writing exacerbates rather than remedies the phenomenon of historiographical fragmentation.  Aside from any specialization between branches of the historiography, individual works even within specialized branches of historiography become isolated from each other, because the chief concern of historians is not to engage with the details of others’ works, but to share with them an interest in pervasive cultural ideas.  Importantly, though, this historiographical phenomenon is no longer fragmentation-as-specialization, but what this blog refers to as the “new internalism” or the “gallery of practices”.

If the isolation of individual works exacerbates, rather than remedies, the fragmentation of historiography that causes such wide frustration, the question is: why does it persist?  My quite speculative contention is that it is because this mode of historiography had already been identified as possessing the virtue of combating the maladies of fragmentation-as-specialization.  This results in a situation so familiar to political economy: if something does not appear to work, but it has virtue ascribed to it, it must be because it has not been tried strenuously enough.

Schaffer’s pieces must be seen as instrumental (but very far from alone) in instilling this virtue in this mode of historiography.  In identifying a key source of historiographical error and fragmentation, and identifying a key strategy to reverse this malignancy, what was being sold from the hustings, I speculate, was not the history of science to social historians, but the idea of a virtue in a new historiographical culture to historians of science and to social historians alike.

I do not think it was Schaffer’s intention to unify sources of historiographical error, or to unify remedies into a mode of scholarship.  After all, in 1993 he also published the excellent “Comets & Idols”, which had similar arguments about trust and cultural sources of authority, but was much more nuanced in their application (pointing to the function of canonical or “sacred” texts in historical polemics) and addressing the needs of specific branches of historiography (those of cometography and the legacy of Isaac Newton).

Yet, the unifying of sources of error and remedy was precisely what was happening.  Differences between the diversity of perspectives that thrived in the 1980s were slowly ironed out.  In reviewing the Ferment of Knowledge volume (1980) in 1982, Geoffrey Cantor had been optimistic that disparate views of the 18th-century could be productively reconciled, but warned against the language of partisanship that divided historiography into distinctly old and new approaches.  By 1993, amid a rapidly decohering historiography, I speculate that partisan consensus allowed historians to maintain a sense of the virtue and progressiveness in their work.

Necessarily, partisanship papers over differences within parties, and augments the differences between them.  Once the key source of historiographical virtue had been identified, all other tensions hinging on detailed argumentation and synthesis between pieces could be viewed as superfluous.  Technical history was edged to the sides of mainstream history of science; tenuous links to political and business history were severed; philosophy of science was shunned; and strong connections to interested members of the scientific community were allowed to wither.  As I have previously argued, Schaffer’s own approach to the genre of natural philosophy disappeared.  Methodological homogenization and the self-containment of individual pieces followed.

(Note for newer readers of this series: Schaffer’s early work emphasized a systematic relationship between morality, social order, and the contents of knowledge.  See his work in pneumatics and pneumatology for an excellent example; see my post on his “Self Evidence” and my post on what I call the “entente cordiale” between the methodological use of anthropological cosmology and the analysis of historical natural philosophical cosmology for a discussion of the waning of this interest.)

Stephen Jay Gould‘s collections of Natural History essays were some of the first books about evolution I explored in high school. It’s nice to hear his voice. The NCSE posted this video of Gould discussing creationism & fossils while reminsicing on his involvement in McLean v. Arkansas (1981):

He also has with him a few really old books. When seeing him interviewed from his office in various documentaries, I always thought his library would be awesome to look through:

From the New York Times of January 24, 1986:

TV WEEKEND; ‘SMITHSONIAN WORLD’ TRACKS SCIENTIFIC SLEUTH

By JOHN CORRY

”SMITHSONIAN WORLD” has always been a good series. ”On the Shoulders of Giants,” the episode tomorrow night, is one of its best. Indeed, it is everything that a program about natural science is supposed to be. It will be shown on Channel 13 at 8 o’clock.

For one thing, it’s intelligent; for another, it’s wonderfully entertaining. It spends most of its time following a young scientist, David Steadman, who looks in passing like the actor Kris Kristofferson, as he scrambles around the Galapagos and Cook Islands.

Mr. Steadman, trained in ornithology, biology, geology and zoology, is looking for fossils. That might not sound like much fun to watch, but it is. The photography is wonderful. Mr. Steadman’s venues – beaches, forests, rock formations, caves – are unspoiled. We may not be able to visit, but this is the next best thing.

Moreover, the production has a feeling of playfulness. ”Smithsonian World” has always suggested that science isn’t a bad way of life. ”On the Shoulders of Giants” is positively overt about this. Thus, David McCullough, the knowledgable, intelligent and utterly-at-ease host of the program, watches Mr. Steadman sift through old bones.

”You’ve really got a good job, don’t you?” he says.

”I don’t complain,” Mr. Steadman replies.

How could he? We see him hobnobbing with marine iguanas, sea lions and giant tortoises. It’s a terrific job. Among other things, he’s proved that the giant rice rat and giant ground finch really existed.

The thread running through the program, as reflected in its title, is that Mr. Steadman is building on the work of Charles Darwin. This is no mere gimmick. Whereas Darwin, who began thinking about evolution when he visited the Galapagos in 1835, was on the islands only once, Mr. Steadman has been there seven times. Among other things, he has reclassified some of Darwin’s old evidence, and identified species that have vanished since Darwin’s visit.

The program, whose executive producer is Martin Carr, also visits Darwin’s old home, the British Museum, Tahiti and Mangaia. This last is a rugged, rocky outpost of the Cook Islands, and is home to some 1,200 Polynesians. ”On the Shoulders of Giants” savors some of their culture: dancing, churchgoing and stories of a ferocious, warlike past. This is a rewarding and well-done production.

Pt. 1 of this post began a discussion that stems from (but extends well beyond) two works of Simon Schaffer: 1) “Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century”; and 2) “A Social History of Plausibility: Country, City and Calculation in Augustan Britain”.  These works identified misleading narratives within a broader social and cultural historiography: a rise of reasoned polity and culture, and a decline of superstition and enchantment.  I suggested that in critiquing these narratives Schaffer had taken to the hustings to show how these narrative faults could be remedied by making use of then-recent insights in the historiography of science.  According to Schaffer, in order for all historical beliefs (scientific or superstitious) to survive and proliferate, their proponents had to engage in polemics that portrayed the beliefs as beneficial — and opposed beliefs as dangerous — to the social order.

In a sense, Schaffer was playing a role that is quite similar to the people he was writing about.  As he wrote in (1), “Representations about nature were stabilized … because … natural philosophers made their representations grip key interests within culture.”  His diagnosis of a historiographical ill and offer of a remedy from the historiography of science should invite us to consider why the diagnosis and remedy were deemed apt by the critic, and why he thought it would be received as apt by his intended audience.  Also, as Aaron suggested in the comments to Pt. 1, we should likewise be open to questioning who this audience really was.

Our first question relates to the appeal of the diagnosis.  One possibility I want to consider right off the bat is that maybe the patient was a hypochondriac.  In the terminology of argumentation: was the identified historiographical flaw a straw man?  My answer is maybe.

G. M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) and his English Social History (1942) are rolled out for a ceremonial whipping at the beginning of (2), as is Lucien Febvre’s (1878-1956) The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (also 1942) which sought to historicize the appearance of “a concept of the impossible” as a “mental tool”.  (I should note that (2), as opposed to (1), is a history of what beliefs are “plausible” rather than accepted as “real”).  A little later on Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) is cited in the footnotes as a source on “the discrediting of popular beliefs”.

A little closer reading reveals a kind of anti-Popperian slant.  The argument is against those who purport to tell the history of the creation of a cultural space where free inquiry can take place.  The Stallybrass & White reference in Pt. 1 on the importance of “processes of social exclusion, boundary maintenance and satirical ribaldry” was made to oppose literary critic Terry Eagleton’s discussion of the historical importance of the creation of a bourgeois space “for the free, equal exchange of reasonable discourse” in The Function of Criticism (1984).  In (2), the chief targets of criticism seem to be Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), and another literary critic and historian, Ian Watt and his account of the rise of literary (rather than scientific) realism, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Schaffer cites a 1983 edition, but the work was apparently 1957; Schaffer had already written on Defoe).

Attacks on scholars of the past and on the instrumental uses of history by those in fields like literary studies might be signs of a critic looking too hard for enemies to best.  However, the critique lands closer to home as well.  Schaffer cites The Scientist’s Role in Society (1972) by sociologist of science Joseph Ben-David (who had actually died in 1986, and whom Shapin had identified as an opponent of the new sociology of scientific knowledge in 1982) as an “influential survey of scientific institutionalisation as the creation of intellectual autonomy”.  The living purveyors of this influence were left anonymous, perhaps because they received the strongest words:

…too many historians of science have found these cushions [i.e. the idea of economic, cultural, and technical isolation] comfortingly seductive.  The clerisy’s fragile isolation is used as an excuse for intellectual laziness.  Links between scientific problems and economic purposes are dismissed as vulgar Marxism.  Connections between natural knowledge and social interests are damned as sociological relativism. (2; 133)

The failure to attend to the insultography that persisted around scientific work was part and parcel of controversies within the historiography of science that had been percolating steadily for well over a decade at that point.  If indeed this was a straw man, it was at least related to reasonably recent conflicts.  Aaron was right to suggest that I question what audience Schaffer had in mind.

Even if we allow that historiographically misleading positions persisted, that the targets were more than straw men, there is still a question of why the diagnosis is needed.  If the historiographical sins of various brands of scholarly realists and politico-epistemic Popperians were so noxious, why not walk away, create a schism (as was happening anyway), and move onwards and upwards?

Aside from run-of-the-mill conflicts over academic positions and resources, I speculate the answer might have to do with a need to see one’s own historiographical program as suffering affliction that cannot be solved by simply cutting out dissenters.  In 1993, it seems to have been as yet unclear what a functioning historiography absent the constraints of past views would actually look like.  However, one can postpone indefinitely a reckoning with problems of historiographical craft if one can understand oneself as engaged in an ongoing struggle to purge oneself of malignancies of historiographical method.

Adrian Wilson expressed this anxiety well in his introduction to the 1993 Rethinking Social History volume that (2) was a part of.  He referred to “the diversity of themes treated in this book” as reflecting the “contemporary paradox of English social history” which juxtaposed “an enormous vitality and a very wide range of concerns” with its lack of “a clear sense of direction or unifying perspective”.  He acknowledged a “sense of fragmentation which besets the subject today.”  The consequence was that “social history has tended to lose both its integrative potential and its ability to grapple with historical change.”

I have always thought of historiographical “fragmentation” as an obvious product of newer historiographical priorities.  But I’d like to make a new speculation: what if this “fragmentation” that bedeviled historiography could be portrayed as an inheritance of past historiography?  If it were, then diagnosis of the past malignancies and a recitation of their most common historiographical manifestations might be seen as offering a clear prescription for undoing this fragmentation once and for all, so that a properly reintegrated historiography might finally emerge.

Unfortunately this post has ballooned on me again, so Pt. 3 will have to deal with further speculation about how this fragmentation process was envisioned as working, and, following from that, how it was imagined reintegration could best be brought about.

Courtesy of the National Center for Science Education, you can read an excerpt from Ian McCalman’s Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution here, it’s a PDF!

From Claire Inman of the Linnean Society:

Darwin’s family tree rediscovered

The Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood pedigree, first exhibited in 1932, has been found in the archives of Truman State University

A poster of the Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood pedigree was prepared by Harry Hamilton Laughlin, Director of the Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Institute, and exhibited at the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932 at the American Museum of Natural History.

A photograph of this poster has been discovered in the archives of Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri alongside a photograph of a poster of a collection of rare Darwin family photographs, assembled by Leonard Darwin. The original posters have not been located.

Professor Tim Berra FLS, The Ohio State University, has made this information and associated images available to Darwin scholars world-wide in a paper in volume 101, Issue 1, September 2010 of The Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. Professor Berra said “The newly available pedigree and photographs open a window into the family life of Charles Darwin, the man. He was a husband, brother, father and grandfather, and, along the way, he also had the greatest idea ever had by the human mind.”

The Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood family is descended from the prominent 18th century doctor Erasmus Darwin; Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the pottery firm Josiah Wedgwood and Sons and Samuel John Galton, an arms manufacturer. The family contains at least ten Fellows of the Royal Society, several artists and poets and of course Charles Darwin who laid the foundations of the theory of evolution and transformed the way we think about the natural world and our place in it.

Here’s a link to the paper mentioned.

an image from the article

This post looks at two works from the oeuvre of Simon Schaffer:

1) “Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century” in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levin, 1993, pp. 128-157.

2) “A Social History of Plausibility: Country, City and Calculation in Augustan Britain” in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its interpretation, ed. Adrian Wilson, 1993, pp. 279-318.

Both papers find Schaffer on the hustings.  As historian of medicine Adrian Wilson puts it in the introduction to the Rethinking Social History volume, “Simon Schaffer’s chapter … can be read as a plea to social historians to concern themselves with the history of science.”  This appeal is made by identifying certain misconceptions about the role of science in history prevalent in a broader historiography.  According to Schaffer:

Received history has it that the eighteenth century was a crucial period for the establishment of [realist] regimes.  The novel and the experimental report appeared as legitimate means of representing the moral and the natural order….  Somehow or other, older, courtly forms of making knowledge failed or were thrust aside. (1; 283/5)

Likewise:

The social history of [stories about claims about things like humans giving birth to animals, perpetual motion, and the inverse square law of gravity] has typically been described in terms of the ‘decline of magic’ and the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ (2; 128)

Schaffer diagnoses the source of these narrative misconceptions to be historians’ credulity  in polemical rhetoric used by historical actors who sought to establish themselves as intellectuals leaders who, if followed, could realize this narrative.  Crucially, according to Schaffer, this rhetoric specifically portrayed natural philosophical, and, by extension, scientific knowledge as free from cultural influence:

In the sciences, we are told, the facts speak for themselves.  Here communal authority and individual dogmatism allegedly have no place.  Early modern natural philosophers’ slogans set the pace.  (2; 131)

Also:

Representations of nature were stabilized not because their promoters escaped from culture’s grip, but because these natural philosophers made their representations grip key interests within culture.  Scientific realism is a philosophical position that distracts attention from this cultural work of representatives of nature, and points it toward the adequacy of nature’s representations.  There is a relationship between the ‘amnesia’ of realism, in which the work that establishes representations is forgotten, and the apparent power of realism as a scientific and literary genre.  (1; 279)

Thus, the methodological solution to mainstream historians’ misconceptions is to reintegrate the histories of science and culture.  According to Schaffer,

Epistemologists [citing Ian Hacking and Nick Jardine] using the work of Kuhn or Foucault have sought to describe ‘scenes of inquiry’ or ‘positivities’, the set of questions judged urgent and proper by a well-defined community of investigators.  Here communities are defined by shared questions rather than common answers.  We may ask sociohistorical questions about the genealogy of such apparently secure communities. ” (2; 129)

However, the key historiographical task was apparently not to chart these communities and survey their questions, but instead to survey the means they used to identify their allies and to exclude their opponents.  In other words the united historiography of science and culture takes the form of a historical study of the same polemics that produced mainstream misunderstanding of the past in the first place, except now polemics are to be charted symmetrically, i.e. there is to be no prejudice between the polemics used by or against natural philosophers:

An account of the real contents of nature rules out enterprises that tell different stories about the world.  So the polemical work that establishes that a group of representatives are reliable delegates of some natural order can also settle the contents of that order.”  (1; 280)

Likewise:

“…as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White pointed out [in 1986's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression] … references to the public sphere are insufficient unless accompanied by attention to the processes of social exclusion, boundary maintenance and satirical ribaldry which helped intellectuals fashion themselves as uniquely privileged bearers of culture and knowledge.”  (2; 132)

What this amounts to is a tabulation of spots where natural philosophy and certain grand cultural ideas converged in rhetoric.  As Schaffer explains, “Natural philosophical conduct hinged on conventions of trust.  The conduct of eighteenth-century courts and exchanges threatened the basis of credit in traditional culture.  Courtiers’ status relied entirely on customary means of representation before their lord.”  However, “Many were distrusted, either in principle or in fact: the vulgar, the hired hand, womenfolk, ‘enthusiasts’” (1; 288).

Where pervasive ideas like the enthusiasm of the crowds, the illusion and emotional manipulation of the theater, the scurrilousness of projectors, and the immorality of atheists appear in the historical record of natural philosophy, these are signs that an integration of the  historiographies of science and culture has been achieved.

The papers resulting from this confidence amount to a tedious procession of not-directly-related things some people wanted other people to believe (the circulation of the blood, the oblateness of the earth, Jethro Tull’s farming methods, investment and insurance schemes, electrical cures…), juxtaposed with lists and some analysis of the structure of common 18th-century insults (hysterical, illusory, immoral, superstitious, atheistic…), which were hurled when belief was not successfully instilled.  All this is interposed with repetitious invocations of the same historico-epistemological point voiced in slightly different language each time: to be accepted, claims must be trusted, but trust is subject to dissolution in the face of cultural attack.

In all of this, though, it is not at all clear to me that the pervasiveness of a science-culture distinction is the source of the identified misconception in the mainstream historiography, or that an absolute independence of science from culture was a key feature of 18th-century rhetoric.  It is not clear to me that the historiographical recommendations actually constitute the remedy to the identified misconception, nor that they constitute the best method of integrating the history of science with the history of culture.

We will explore some of the deeper historiographical issues underlying these opinions in Pt. 2.

A few links on public history from around these webs:

Please start reading the excellent Fredericksburg Remembered and its sister blog Mysteries and Conundrums from folks from the NPS at Fredericksburg.   Thanks to @jmcclurken for bringing them to my attention.

The Civil War Augmented Reality Project is a neat project prototyping AR binoculars for Civil War landscape interpretation.  Their kickstarter is in its last days; give them a boost!

NCPH has a new blog:  Off the Wall is a place for “critical reviews of history exhibit practice in an age of ubiquitous display.”  The reviews up already are thoughtful, smart and unexpected, and I’m sure they will continue to be so even when my posts appear.

Magpie is wondering about defining “historian,” and if her reenactor communities “count.”

Are you all reading Prerogative of Harlots, Chris Norris’ excellent blog on issues in natural history collections?  Though I resent the general elision of “art museum” to “museum,” I fear that when talking about museum collections challenges I’m just as parochial and tend to leave out natural history.  Chris’ provocations are essential here.

ArchivesNext is continuing to explore this “citizen archivist” idea and what a “participatory archives” would look like.  I like how all the LAM fields are addressing these issues:  what does it mean to be open and encourage engagement and participation in our work, the communal work of collecting, preserving and providing access to cultural (and natural!) heritage materials?