The increasing attention which has been given to social history of science and to the sociological analysis of scientific activity has resulted in a renewed interest in scientific controversies. Furthermore, the rejection of the presentist view of history, according to which those contestants who took what we can identify, with the benefit of modern knowledge, as the ‘right’ stand in a controversy, were right and their opponents were ‘wrong’, left the subject of scientific controversies with many questions. What determines their (...) emergence, course and resolution? When Froggatt and Nevin wrote on the Bio-metric-Mendelian controversy in 1971 they called their article ‘descriptive rather than interpretative’, so they avoided the very questions we would like to ask. Provine, in the same year, concentrated on the strong personalities of the contestants, their clashes, and the scientific arguments in play. But in 1975 Mackenzie and Barnes argued that the controversy could not be accounted for unless recourse was had to sociological factors. Their view has become widely known and figured prominently in 1982 in Steven Shapin's recital of the empirical achievements of the application of the sociological approach. I have returned to this subject because I do not yet feel altogether convinced by Mackenzie and Barnes' analysis. Even if their analysis of the controversy between Pearson and Bateson be accepted, it is not so obvious how effectively it can be used to explain the controversy between Weldon and Bateson, and I am not confident that it is adequate for an understanding of the evolution of their differing views of the mechanism of evolution. (shrink)

The 1919 eclipse expedition’s confirmation of general relativity is often celebrated as a triumph of scientific internationalism. However, British scientific opinion during World War I leaned toward the permanent severance of intellectual ties with Germany. That the expedition came to be remembered as a progressive moment of internationalism was largely the result of the efforts of A. S. Eddington. A devout Quaker, Eddington imported into the scientific community the strategies being used by his coreligionists in the national dialogue: humanize the (...) enemy through personal contact and dramatic projects that highlight the value of peace and cooperation. The essay also addresses the common misconception that Eddington’s sympathy for Einstein led him intentionally to misinterpret the expedition’s results. The evidence gives no reason to think that Eddington or his coworkers were anything but rigorous. Eddington’s pacifism is reflected not in manipulated data but in the meaning of the expedition and the way it entered the collective memory as a celebration of international cooperation in the wake of war. Science is above all politics. —Sir Oliver Lodge (1914) Is it not an actual fact that babies have been killed in ways almost inconceivably brutal, and not as a mere individual excess, but as a part of the deliberate and declared policy of the German army? … Is it not a fact that German men of science have gone out of their way to declare their adhesion to these things? —“From an Oxford Note‐Book,” Observatory (1916). (shrink)

Summary Popular science journalism flourished in the 1860s in England, with many new journals being projected. The time was ripe, Victorian men of science believed, for an ?organ of science? to provide a means of communication between specialties, and between men of science and the public. New formats were tried as new purposes emerged. Popular science journalism became less recreational and educational. Editorial commentary and reviewing the progress of science became more important. The analysis here emphasizes those aspects of popular (...) science which have been identified by Frank Turner as ?public science? and by Thomas Gieryn as ?boundary-work?. The religious, intellectual, and utilitarian values claimed for science by editors and contributors in their tasks of persuading the public to support science and of distinguishing science from what they often called ?applied science? are discussed. These values are shown to vary among editors and, for the editors examined here, Shirley Hibberd, Henry Slack, James Samuelson, William Crookes, and Henry Lawson, to differ significantly from those of T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and Norman Lockyer, on whom much study of the popularization of science in the 1860s has focused. (shrink)

A patriot fiddler-composer of LutonWrote a funeral march which he played with the mute on,To record, as he said, that a Jewish-Swiss-TeutonHad partially scrapped the Principia of Newton.Punch, 19 November 1919, p. 422When the results of experiments performed during the British solar eclipse expeditions of 1919 were announced at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, they were celebrated in the next day's Times of London with the famous headline ‘Revolution in science’. This exemplified the (...) general approbation with which A. S. Eddington and F. W. Dyson's results were received, the upshot of which was widespread approval for general relativity and worldwide fame for Albert Einstein. Perhaps because of Einstein's present reputation, there has been little historical analysis of why his theory should have been so celebrated on the basis of a single announcement of the results of one group's experiments. In this paper I argue that the remarkable public and professional success of the eclipse experiments was the direct result of a systematic and extended campaign by Eddington and Dyson and their associates to create interest in relativity theory, build an audience for the experiments, promote a favourable reception for the results and establish their work as a crucial experiment that would distinguish between the gravitation theories of Newton and Einstein. The campaign was motivated by Eddington's affection for Einstein's theory, and was successful largely because of Eddington's substantial credibility. (shrink)

SummaryBy now, the story of T. D. Lysenko's phantasmagoric career in the Soviet life sciences is widely familiar. While Lysenko's attempts to identify I. V. Michurin, the horticulturist, as the source of his own inductionist ideas about heredity are recognized as a gambit calculated to enhance his legitimacy, the real roots of those ideas are still shrouded in mystery. This paper suggests those roots may be found in a tradition in Russian biology that stretches back to the 1840s—a tradition inspired (...) by the doctrines of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The enthusiastic reception of those doctrines in Russia and of their practical application—acclimatization of exotic life forms—gave rise to the durable scientific preoccupation with transforming nature which now seems implicated in creating the context for Lysenko's successful bid to become an arbiter of the biological sciences. (shrink)

Historians of science have long acknowledged the important role that journals play in the scientific enterprise. They both secure the shared values of a scientific community and certify what that community takes to be licensed knowledge. The advent of the first learned periodicals in the mid-seventeenth century was therefore a major event. But why did this event happen when it did, and how was the permanence of the learned journal secured? This paper reveals some of the answers. It examines the (...) shifting fortunes of one of the earliest of natural-philosophical periodicals, the Philosophical Transactions, launched in London in 1665 by Henry Oldenburg. The paper shows how fraught the enterprise of journal publishing was in the Europe of that period, and, not least, it draws attention to a number of publications that arose out of the commercial realm of the Restoration to rival Oldenburg's now famous creation. By doing so it helps restore to view the hard work that underpinned the republic of letters.And as for natural philosophy, is it not removed from Oxford and Cambridge to Gresham College in London, and to be learned out of their gazettes?Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth. (shrink)

The article reevaluates the reception of Mendelism in France, and more generally considers the complex relationship between Mendelism and plant breeding in the first half on the 20th century. It shows on the one side that agricultural research and higher education institutions have played a key role in the development and institutionalization of genetics in France, whereas university biologists remained reluctant to accept this approach on heredity. But on the other side, plant breeders, and agricultural researchers, despite an interest in (...) Mendelism, never came to see it as the breeders' panacea, and regarded it instead as of only limited value for plant breeding. I account for this judgment in showing that the plant breeders and Mendelism designed two contrasting kinds of experimental systems and inhabited distinct experimental cultures. While Mendelian geneticists designed experimental systems that allowed the production of definite ratios of different forms that varied in relation to a few characters, plant breeders' experimental systems produced a wide range of variation, featuring combinations between hundreds of traits. Rather than breaking this multiple variation down into simple elements, breeders designed and monitored a genetic lottery. The gene was a unit in a Mendelian experimental culture, an "epistemic thing" as Rheinberger put it, that could be grasped by means of statistical regularities, but it remained of secondary importance for French plant breeders, for whom the strain or the variety -- not the gene -- was the fundamental unit of analysis and manipulation. (shrink)