This paper explores how three central figures in the field of British prehistory – Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and Louis Leakey – deployed different disciplinary practices and narrative devices in the popular accounts of human bio-cultural evolution that they produced during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows how they used a variety of strategies, ranging from virtual witness through personal testimony to tactile demonstration, to ground their authority to interpret the increasingly wide range of (...) fossil material available and to answer the bewildering variety of questions that could be asked about them. It investigates the way in which they positioned their own professional expertise in relation to fossil interpretation, particularly with regard to the – sometimes controversial – use they made of concepts, evidence and practices drawn from other disciplines. In doing so, they made claims that went beyond their original disciplinary boundaries. The paper argues that while none of these writers were able, ultimately, to support the wider claims they made regarding human prehistory, the nature of these claims deserves much closer attention, particularly with respect to the public role that historians of science can and should play in relation to present-day calls for greater interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

In a recent book onThe Publics of Science; Experts and Laymen Through History, Agustí Nieto-Galan introduced his subject of a (mostly Western) history of public science, covering the times from the Scientific Revolution to the twenty-first century, with reference to Sigmund Freud. In one of his essays of cultural critique, Freud had, so to speak, put culture itself on his couch, and this session also featured talk about science and technological application.Civilization and Its Discontentsidentified a factor of disillusionment in the (...) progress of science and technology, which gave rise to “The Uneasiness in Culture” (the literal translation of the title of Freud's German essayDas Unbehagen in der Kultur), and this uneasiness tainted a great deal of the happiness science and technology were intended to cultivate (Nieto-Galán 2011; Freud 1930). New technology and inventions like telephones, ocean liners, or drugs, Freud argued, were mostly remedies for negative developments technology had just created; for instance, without modern transportation people would stay close to each other and not need any telephone. (However, he did not address the issue of whether scientific knowledge itself may have provided some satisfaction.) The modern individual, as analyzed by Freud, was therefore constantly ill at ease with modern scientific and technological culture. (shrink)

Julian Huxley’s contribution to twentieth-century biology and science popularisation is well documented. What has not been appreciated so far is that despite Huxley’s eminence as a public scientific figure and the part that he played in the rise of experimental zoology in Britain in the 1920s, his own research was often heavily criticised in this period by his colleagues. This resulted in numerous difficulties in getting his scientific research published in the early 1920s. At this time, Huxley started his popular (...) science career. Huxley’s friends criticised him for engaging in this actively and attributed the publication difficulties to the time that he allocated to popular science. The cause might also have its roots in his self-professed inability to delve deeply into the particularities of research. This affected Huxley’s standing in the scientific community and seems to have contributed to the fact that Huxley failed twice in the late 1920s to be elected to the Royal Society. This picture undermines to some extent Peter J. Bowler’s recent portrayal of Huxley as a science populariser. (shrink)