This essay argues that science in twentieth‐century China is a rich topic that can be productively integrated into research and teaching on the history of modern science. It identifies major issues of science in twentieth‐century China and demonstrates that they can prove useful to any scholar who wishes to consider science in a comparative and trans/international context. The essay suggests two important steps for a fruitful investigation into the topic of science in twentieth‐century China: first, revising the historiographic assumptions and (...) categories that underlie much of the conventional historical narrative of modern science; and, second, breaking free from the tunnel history of national science. To illustrate these points, the essay examines a series of case studies of science in modern China and discusses the relevance of such subjects as scientific nationalism, Maoist mass science, and transnational scientific networks for the understanding of science in the twentieth‐century world. (shrink)

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

During the first decades of the 20th century, many anthropologists who had previously adhered to a linear view of human evolution, from an ape via Pithecanthropus erectus and Neanderthal to modern humans, began to change their outlook. A shift towards a branching model of human evolution began to take hold. Among the scientific factors motivating this trend was the insight that mammalian evolution in general was best represented by a branching tree, rather than by a straight line, and that several (...) new fossil hominids were discovered that differed significantly in their morphology but seemed to date from about the same period. The ideological and practical implications of imperialism and WWI have also been identified as formative of the new evolutionary scenarios in which racial conflict played a crucial role. The paper will illustrate this general shift in anthropological theory for one particular scientist, William Sollas. Sollas achieved a synthesis of human morphological and cultural evolution in what I will refer to as an imperialist model. In this theoretical framework, migration, conflict, and replacement became the main mechanisms for progress spurred by 'nature's tyrant,' natural selection. (shrink)

Fossils have been traded for centuries. Over the past two hundred years the market has developed into an organized enterprise, with fossils serving multiple functions as objects of scientific study, collectors' items, and investments. Finding fossils, digging them up or purchasing them, transporting, studying, and conserving them, and putting them on display was and still is expensive. Since the early nineteenth century, funding bodies, academic institutions and museums, philanthropists, dealers, collectors, amateurs, and professional paleontologists have constituted elaborate networks driven by (...) collaboration, necessity, ambition, accolades, and capital to generate knowledge and produce geological artifacts, increasing our understanding of the natural world, advancing careers and institutions, and contributing to personal fortunes. The emergence of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline around 1900 generated a scientific focus on the human story that was easy to sell. The scarcity of ancient human remains made it close to impossible for a commercial market to evolve, yet finding them required serious funding. Elaborate schemes for financing expeditions and excavations went hand in hand with individual aspirations, patronage, philanthropy, networks, and alliance building, as concession rights and access to sponsors were objects of regular political intrigues and often bitter disputes. (shrink)

By the early twentieth century there was a growing need within palaeoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology to find a way of dating fossils and artefacts in order to know the age of specific specimens, but more importantly to establish an absolute chronology for human prehistory. The radiocarbon and potassium–argon dating methods revolutionized palaeoanthropology during the last half of the twentieth century. However, prior to the invention of these methods there were attempts to devise chemical means of dating fossil bone. Collaborations between (...) Emile Rivière and Adolphe Carnot in the 1890s led to the development of the fluorine dating method, but it was not until the 1940s that this method was improved and widely implemented by Kenneth Oakley to resolve a number of problems in palaeoanthropology, including the Piltdown Man controversy. The invention of the fluorine dating method marked a significant advance in the quest for absolute dating in palaeoanthropology, but it also highlights interesting problems and issues relating to the ability of palaeoanthropologists and chemists to bring together different skills and bodies of knowledge in order successfully to develop and apply the fluorine dating method. (shrink)

Although he died in obscurity, the Belgian museum conservator Aimé Rutot was one of the most famous European archaeologists between 1900 and 1920. The focus of his scientific interest was stone flints, which he claimed to be the oldest known human tools, so‐called eoliths. Skeptics maintained that the flints showed no marks of human workmanship, but Rutot nevertheless managed to spread his “Eolithic theory” in an important part of the scientific community. This essay demonstrates how material objects—series of stone flints (...) and sets of statues that purported to reconstruct prehistoric “races”—were given scientific meaning by Rutot. Rutot diffused his ideas by disseminating his stones and statues, thus enlarging his networks of influence. For a time he managed to be at the material center of a trade network as well as at the intellectual center of archaeological debate. The essay shows how Rutot achieved this status and how he eventually fell from favor among serious scientists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Evolution cartoons served polemical and satirical purposes even before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and they proliferated afterward. Yet even though Victorian evolution cartoons often pictured Darwin himself as a personification of his theory, by the time of the Scopes trial controversy in the 1920s cartoons about evolution had come to popularize ironically non‐Darwinian views of evolution. Cartoons repeated, reflected, and perpetuated teleological views of evolution and often implicitly associated evolution with prevalent attitudes about race, gender, and (...) social hierarchies. Cartoons drew on old iconographic traditions, expanding them to fit changing historical circumstances, forming a lasting cartoon lexicon. Though adaptable and protean, the language of evolution cartoons, like any language, carries its history with it, and in them we can read the history of the cultural context of evolution controversies. (shrink)