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This chart comes from a post by Terry Hancock at Free Software Magazine, “Impossible thing #2: Comprehensive free knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg“. It’s hard to come to grips with the scale of Wikipedia, which is growing faster than anyone could keep up with reading 24/7. But any well-stocked university library has two, sometimes three, orders of magnitude more content than English Wikipedia; the aggregate collection of library material is tens of thousands of times larger the Wikipedia. Of course, many books have overlapping content and encyclopedia articles will rarely go into as much detail as books on the same topic.

But most writing that was worth printing in the first place has something of relevance for Wikipedia.

Peacay of the amazing BibliOdyssey blog has joined Wikimedia Commons (after a bit of encouragement from me). BibliOdyssey, which focuses on scans of printed art, is quite an amazing blog; it serves as a continual reminder of just how big the web is, and how little of it the typical person ever sees. Hundreds of libraries and archives are digitizing thousands of fantastic images, and Peacay trawls through the wide web and finds the best of them.

Unfortunately (as I understand it), although most of the original versions of what Peacay showcases are public domain, the copyright status of most of the images are in that murky space between free and unfree. The United States is fortunate (or maybe unfortunate if you are a world class library) to have Bridgeman v. Corel (for now, at least), but in most countries, a “sweat of the brow” doctrine means that whoever scans the pages of a rare book can claim copyright on the scans, even if the original is public domain. Even in the United States, it is typical for libraries to assert copyright control over scans of public domain material they own (e.g., as the University of Oklahoma does on its wonderful, growing collection of history of science images). Of course, no one on the web pays much attention to such claims (whether they have legal force or not), but for many of the images on Commons, a re-user trying to publish nominally free images in the traditional publishing world will still have to go through the usual trials and tribulations to secure permissions.

Anyhow, check out the great image sets Peacay has uploaded so far, and hopefully we’ll see more in the future.

I’ve been working through Octavia Butler‘s Xenogenesis trilogy (a.k.a., Lilith’s Brood) in preparation for qualifiers. Butler, who died a year ago today, was an African American novelist who was the first science fiction author to win a MacArthur Fellowship. Her early work focuses heavily on the themes of race and gender (among others). With the Xenogenesis series, began in 1987, Butler makes human identity in general the central issue. A species of alien genetic engineers attempts to save the human species in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, but their means of doing so, genetic hybridization and improvement, destabilizes the meaning humanity. Characters argue about what it is to be human and what price should be paid for survival.

It’s interesting to read Butler against ST:TNG, which also premiered in 1987. Unlike the original Star Trek, which juxtaposed a utopian post-racist, post-sexist, post-nationalist humanity in the persons of Uhura and Chekov against the Klingon other who could stand in for blacks or Commies in turn, Next Generation took a more complex view of “human” nature. Humans and aliens, despite outward appearances, are usually treated as biological and social (if not political) equals; the species barriers are more cultural than biological. (The most interesting exception is the Ferengi, whose roles can be interpreted in a number of ways ranging from blatant anti-Semitism to an attack on misogyny and materialism to, in their DS9 iterations, a critique of the Trekkian leftist utopia itself.) In general, biology is secondary; humanity can be extended for all practical purposes to Klingons, Romulans, maybe even androids.

In Butler’s universe, biology is the root of human society and culture. Dawn opens many years after the end of human civilization; according to the Oankali who have “saved” humanity, humans are inherently intelligent and hierarchical–a combination that inevitably leads to disaster. Thus the only fix for humanity is a genetic one. For the aliens, almost all aspects of culture, even technology and material culture, are biological. The aliens commit no intentional violence, but have a deadly instinctual sting reflex; 3-way alien sex is primarily chemical and neurobiological, and doesn’t even involve physical contact except to interconnect their nervous systems. For Butler’s (post-)human characters the end of civilization is a small thing compared to biological transformations. The only value in the remains of Earth civilization, mainly of interest to the bio-luddite resisters, comes from whatever practical use can be derived from salvage.

So how does the culture- and knowledge-centric Star Trek universe line up with the bio-centric Xenogenesis universe? The Borg offer the clearest point of entry. While in-universe discussions of the origin of the Borg are numerous, their literary-cinematic origins are much more obscure. It’s certainly possible, though, that the Borg were partly inspired by Butler’s Oankali. Butler’s tendencies toward biological determinism would have been anathema to Gene Roddenberry; the Borg are the only recurring Star Trek species that offer no hope of cultural assimilation into the
peaceful Federation vision of humanity, and make a fitting arch-nemesis for the good collective (i.e., all the other humanoid races).

The Prime Directive makes for another interesting comparison. This doctrine of non-interference was a frequent point of contention as the Trek franchise evolved. The sentiment behind it was there in a few original series episodes, but in the Next Generation era (perhaps still feeling the weight of the Vietnam) the Prime Directive became a central practical and philosophical motif. New life and new civilizations means taking an anthropological perspective, and occasionally there are civilizations too unstable to keep from destroying themselves… sort of a Social Darwinism of the stars. This is what tempers the cultural assimilation aspects of the Federation. It’s the distinction between the third world and indigenous peoples. Even with the third world (i.e., post-warp civilizations), it’s more about the Open Door and the Big Stick than outright imperialism. In the later seasons, the movies, and in DS9 and Voyager (I can’t say much about Star Trek: Enterprise, since I’ve never seen it) there are plenty of points where the Prime Directive is pinched and poked, but for the most part it remains in place.

For Butler’s aliens, there can be no prime directive; they would stagnate and die themselves without new genetic trading partners, and here “trade” is of the non-optional, colonial (perhaps even slave trade) kind. The ethical crux is that the paternalistic higher beings really are saving the lower peoples from themselves. I’m not quite sure how to read this, especially from a feminist and anti-racist perspective. Whether we sympathize with Lilith (the black woman protagonist who grudgingly accepts the alien-imposed breeding program) or the resisters, neither offers much in the way of hope going forward… just different moral judgments on history.

I just finished a delightful (and fairly concise) book, The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen (“ABC”, I’m told they’re called). These three have been working together for about ten years to create philosophical system to revive the essence of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

Despite Kuhn’s huge, multi-discipline-changing influence, there weren’t (and aren’t) really any intellectual schools of philosophy, sociology, or history of science built around his ideas. Philosophers have never fully shaken free of the need to create a philosophy of science that can be used to demarcate science from non-science/pseudoscience and to categorically separate obsolete theories from reality/truth/currently accepted theories; Kuhn’s incommensurability threatened to make that simply impossible. Sociologists liked Kuhn, but wanted to take it further; only the most extreme advocates of the Strong Programme actually suggested that cognitive/intellectual/empirical/real-world factors were irrelevant altogether, but they generally attempted to explain as much of science as possible in terms of social structure and individual and group interests. Historians also liked Kuhn’s work, especially at first, but could not accept it as a general account of scientific development; historical counter-examples of gradual change are easy to find, like the Copernican revolution (ironically, the subject of Kuhn’s earlier work).

The premise of ABC’s book is that the mature version of Kuhn’s ideas (as opposed to the version in Structure) is historically justifiable and matches up well with developments in cognitive psychology that describe how humans make sense of the world. Revolutionary science happens when scientists (or scientific communities) have to disrupt the dynamic categorical hierarchies (called “frames”) by which they make sense of the world. They take the idea of frames straight from cognitive psychology (as developed by Lawrence W. Barsalou in the ’80s and ’90s), and supposedly they are a pretty good representation of the way humans actually think. Depending on the what aspects of the frames are disrupted, revolutionary change is science may or may not involve incommensurable theories. But incommensurability, in Kuhn mature philosophy and in the frame theory version here, is much less drastic than in Strucuture. In fact, by ABC’s analysis, the shift between geocentrism and heliocentrism did not involve incommensurability; the crux of the “Copernican revolution” was actually Kepler’s idea of orbits, which replaced the orbs (spherical shells) that provided the cosmological basis for Ptolemaic astronomers, Averroist astronomers, and Copernicus and his early adopters (who actually rejected his heliocentrism as well). Both revolutions and incommensurability, in this account, become matters of scale; it depends on how high up the hierarchy the disruptions occur.

Reading Structure was basically what got me into the history of science, and I’m hoping it comes back into fashion. I’ve periodically attempted to restructure the argument into a form that is actually defensible historically without being very very selective about which cases to apply it to. Mainly, this consisted of dividing up science into expansive hierarchies and finding revolutions of differing scale everywhere. Thus, it’s gratifying that the (only, as far as I know) science studies professionals who still take Kuhn seriously have fitted Kuhn to history and the realities of scientific practice by means similar to mine (though, obviously, in a much more sophisticated way, and with the support of some interesting empirical evidence).

ABC’s manifesto is found at the end of the book; they call out both philosophy and sociology for not following the methodology of history closely enough. Neither has lived up to David Bloor’s criteria for a satisfying analysis of science :

1. I would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions which bring about belief or states of knowledge. Naturally there will be other types of causes apart from social ones which will cooperate in bringing about belief.
2. It would be impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure. Both sides of these dichotomies will require explanation.
3. It would be symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain say, true and false beliefs. And,
4. It would be reflexive. In principle its patterns of explanation would have to be applicable to…itself. Like the requirement of symmetry this is a response to the need to seek for general explanations.

Like many people in science studies (including many who don’t adhere to the Strong Programme in general), I take these criteria to be axiomatic. History’s method of explaining science, which relies primarily on historical context, of course satisfies all four. But the scope of its generality is too wide… nothing conceptually separates the history of science from garden-variety history, and cognitive-intellectual content of scientific knowledge has no special status. Thus, the attraction of the theory-oriented approaches of philosophy and sociology. But, as ABC point out, philosophy and sociology have so far not created compelling theoretical approaches that leave enough room for historical context. ABC are convinced they’ve created such an approach, and I think they’ve convinced me. I’ll have to mull it over, but it’s tempting to try to frame my own research in terms of ABC’s reformed Kuhnianism.

I have a weakness for book buying, especially old books that are in some way related to the history of science. I don’t yet have anything very valuable, although I have a few that are fairly interesting finds (the American 5th edition of Origin of Species, The Memoirs of Robert Chambers, the book club edition of Silent Spring including the “Report by Justice William O. Douglas” pamphlet, and some nature study books that even Yale doesn’t have), especially considering how much I paid for them (<$10 each, for the above). I think the first old book I bought was John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, a 1902 edition. I didn’t know what to expect; what I got was a cute little octavo with marble boards, three-quarters leather binding, gilt lettering on the spine, with good enough paper that it isn’t falling apart or foxing much, and a bookplate that said “Ex Libris William Robert Smyth”. I had never heard of “ex libris” before, but that’s what really made the book-buying experience for me, and inspired me to make my own. Since then, the miracles of eBay and alibris.com have brought me plenty of material to stock my shelves, and a few more bookplates.

Via the incredible BibliOdyssey blog, I chanced upon Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, and it reminded me of the joy I’ve gotten out of bookplates, especially from the process of designing my own and one for my dad.Another interesting bookplate came in each of two volumes of Harwicke’s Science Gossip that I won a few months ago on eBay.Cha[rle]s E[lihu] Slocum wrote a book in 1909 on the dangers of tobacco, and he has an elementary school and I think a few other things named after him.

It’s a shame that bookplates are out of style, as it’s never been easier to design and produced your own.

I was fortunate enough to receive an advance reading copy of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail (which was just released yesterday). Well after Anderson announced 100 free copies for blog reviewers (which were claimed within hours), I sent him an email about my previous Long Tail related blogging and my brief thoughts on the potential for a Long Tail analysis of science. His publisher apparently thinks blog review buzz is a good investment, because I got a copy just a few days later (this past Saturday). I plan to post about science and the Long Tail some time soon (update: see post here) , but without futher ado, my review of the book:

Chris Anderson’s concept of The Long Tail (read the Wikipedia article if you’re unfamiliar with it), widely known since his Wired magazine article in 2004 of the same name, is one of those ideas that opens up a box of other ideas; an intellectual tool for creating insights into many different domains. It started as a sort of pop-economics idea applied to digital entertainment: the internet opens up the entertainment market so that people can find niche content that appeals to them, rather than lowest-common-denominator radio hits and blockbuster movies.

Pretty soon, Anderson realized that concept had potential far beyond the entertainment industry; eBay, Google, Amazon, iTunes, and a host of other businesses were tapping into information technology-driven Long Tails. Anderson decided to expand his ideas into a book, and along the way, blog about the ideas he was developing.

The Long Tail blog was and continues to be a very interesting read. It often features fairly detailed econometric discussion along with speculation about the cultural implications, with mathematical digressions and nice graphs. The readers’ comments pushed Anderson to be thorough and precise, and gave him plenty of new ideas.

Unfortunately, the book does not deliver on the potential of Anderson’s concept. Anderson looks at the “Short Head” of watered-down hits and says “good riddance,” but his book is written to appeal a little bit to everyone. The graphs are almost uniformly qualitative (in fact, almost every graph of the long tail has the same proportions), the numerical detail is minimal, and structure is loose and repetitive. At a slim 226 pages, mostly anecdote and repitition, the book version is unlikely to challenge those already familiar with The Long Tail.

At times, the prose seems like the output of a context-free grammar program (like the classic automatic complaint letter generator, or the scholarly PoMo version) built from infomercial transcripts. To give you a taste, the following phrases appear on a single page (with a few liberal paraphrases on my part):

• “In other, more obvious words, [the same thing I just said]“
• “The calculation goes a little like this”
• “It doesn’t have to be that way”
• “A traditional retailer would have to… Yet as we’ve already learned…”
• “That’s the dirty little secret of traditional retail”
• “In a nutshell, [act now and The Long Tail can be yours for just three easy payments of $49.95]“

In part, Anderson seems to have ignored the very lessons he tries to teach his readers, about the value of niche content and uncompromised cultural products. Or maybe he learned the lesson too well; an early anecdote in the book explains how a strong online following can pave the way for mainstream success once a potential hit does finally hit the market. And Anderson’s blogger fanbase has already launched the book to #10 (and probabably rising) in Amazon’s daily sales rank for books. I guess he knew when to ditch the nerds and go for the mainstream jugular. Too bad he didn’t publish two versions, as the people who would ultimately get the most out of this are not well served by the “hit” version.

See some other reviews here.

When I start publishing, I’m going to have three versions of my book, so that the 2 or 3 people who would actually want a scholarly monograph on whatever my subject is will get it, other professional historians can get a normal-sized academic book, and grad students and, perish the thought, even a general audience can a concise book that doesn’t bog them down with details.

I did a group book review for Beverly Gage’s class on American Conservatism last Spring, covering 4 books that deal in one way or another with the history of Intelligent Design. Best of the bunch was definitely Ruse’s book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle. (The others were Creationism’s Trojan Horse, Doubts About Darwin, and the 3rd edition of Ed Larson’s excellent Trial and Error.) In particular, I think Ruse’s book is relevant to all the pronouncements about the status of ID as science/pseudoscience/junk science and the frequent invocations of the mystical scientific method, in the wake of Kitzmiller v. Dover. And since I saw other sites mentioning the book recently, I thought I’d post that portion of the review. I also stumbled across this interesting interview with Ruse on the book.

My review:

Michael Ruse—who cultivates a great oval beard to emulate Darwin—has written about fifteen books, mostly on evolution, and edited about that many more. Ruse has a gift for melting down detailed historical scholarship and reforging it into something grander, capturing the broad themes in the history of evolution. His latest offering, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, demonstrates the historical continuity of thinking about creation, evolution, and the relationship between religion and science, putting Intelligent Design into context as a philosophical continuation of the same questions that partially-overlapping circles of evolutionists and Christians have been pondering and debating for hundreds of years.

Ruse begins by describing the cultural context in which evolution first arose, which is crucial for understanding the tensions and links between evolution and religion, then and now. Ruse argues that though “the eighteenth century did see much scientific activity, and some was certainly pertinent to the issue of evolution,” “metaphysical ideas played as big if not a bigger role in the origins of evolutionism.” Particularly, ideas of progress heavily informed the theories of virtually every prominent evolutionist before the 20^th century, with the partial exception of Darwin himself. Ruse compares the spread of evolution after Darwin’s Origin of Species to the formulation of a religion from Jesus’ teachings, with T. H. Huxley—Darwin’s bulldog—playing the part of Saint Paul.

Ruse invokes a tripartite distinction of “pseudoscience,” “public science” and “professional science” to classify early work on evolution, demonstrating a remarkable parallel to Intelligent Design. He describes all the evolutionary theorizing before Darwin, from Lamarck to Robert Chambers, as pseudoscience, because it was derived as much from ideology as from empirical observations. With Darwin, evolution became public science; it was intellectually and empirically grounded, but it had little bearing on the actual practice of science. Even the celebrated evolutionary apologist Huxley, a great innovator in biological education, found room for only half a class on evolution in his two-year, 150-lecture course; while he championed the social and (anti-)religious dimensions of evolution in public speeches, he did not find it relevant for future scientists and doctors. Only with T. H. Morgan, and to a lesser extent Ernst Haeckel, did evolution become the pursuit of professional scientists, somewhat separate from ideology and metaphysics.

Ruse is thus more forgiving than most of the fact the Intelligent Design springs from religious ideas and has not been conducive to novel experimental work. Though ID is at best public science, if not pseudoscience, that does not preclude professional science in the future. Ruse is skeptical of its future potential as well, as he sees the retreat from methodological naturalism as a “science stopper,” but his commitment to a historical approach precludes the typical facile demarcation of science and religion as entirely separate entities, with ID consigned to the latter. In nearly a century and a half since Darwin, the relationships among religion, concepts of creation, and evolution have taken many forms, but religion and evolution have never been entirely distinct.

Ruse addresses the historical role of evolution as a secular religion, especially for the group of scientists who established the core modern evolutionary theory (neo-Darwinism or the synthetic theory of evolution) in the 1930s and 40s. A complicated set of connections grew up gradually among evolutionary theory, Christian theologies, secular and religious humanism, and theories of creationism. Of particular importance was, and is, the distinction between premillennialists and postmillennialists. Most creationism, particularly the tradition of creation science and flood geology, derives from premillennialist, fundamentalist Christian theology. Ruse also claims that for many evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson, “evolutionism entail[s] its own brand of postmillennial theology.”

Intelligent Design represents a new mixture of scientific, philosophical and religious concepts, and Ruse does his best to separate each thread of ID for analysis. For each aspect, historical continuity is critical, and The Evolution-Creation Struggle makes sense of ID in terms of the very real and continuing tensions between science and religion without reducing history to the old trope of a war between science and superstition. While the conclusions will not sit well with ID proponents, Ruse separates his philosophical judgments from his historical analysis so that a wide audience will find this book useful.

The proprietor of SciLitera, a science, literature and culture website under development, contacted me about my review of Dava Sobel’s The Planets (which he read on Amazon, where it is now one of the Spotlight Reviews). He wants to put it on his site as well as possibly other reviews or articles in the future, and I would get a share of the (probably negligible) ad revenue. It’s nice to be noticed. (The 13/13 helpful votes on Amazon is also gratifying.)

I’ve submitted the NSF GRFP application for the last time. Hopefully it will go better than last time.

Meanwhile, classes are getting the better of me and soon the papers I have due before the end of the semester (for classmate review) will be raining down misery upon me. We’re through the short papers in Narrative History. My last paper was fun; I reconstructed a heliocentric/geocentric dialogue between a Galileo character and a Bellarmine character (mostly from correspondence) to show the irrational side of Galileo and the rational side of the Church position, basically to support a Feyerabendian view of the way science works (i.e., “anything goes”). It went over well. For my final paper in that class, I’m going to be writing about Kepler, and basically trying to illustrate all my favorite history/sociology/philosophy of science ideas though a very selective narrative of his life.

I started reading Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method recently, and I’m appalled that I haven’t read it before. I find myself agreeing with almost everything Feyerabend says, and even better, I feel like he shares my view of what’s important about the history and philosophy of science (and by implication of what he leaves out, what isn’t).

One beautiful quote:
“…the increasing separation of the history, the philosophy of science, and science itself is a disadvantage and should be terminated in the interest of all these three disciplines [and I would add, the interest of scientific laypersons and society in general]. Otherwise we shall get tons of minute, precise, but utterly barren results.”

When I’m teaching introductory history of science classes, this will be the second book on the syllabus, right after Structure.

Classes continue unabated; I’m almost back into the swing of things, as far as reading and working all the time.

I’ve not been particularly inspired by any readings lately, except Flatland. The Time Machine was also a good reread. I was also somewhat intrigued by Principles of Scientific Management; it’s surprisingly readable and it basically still informs a lot of management philosophy today. It’s a sort of capitalist manifesto.

For Narrative Histories, I read the superb The Murder of Helen Jewett. As far as garden-variety micro-history goes, it really doesn’t get much better (if you don’t mind reading about 1830′s NYC). Unfortunately, the next book was the dull Judge Sewall’s Apology, a masterful boringification of the Salem witch trials.

We’ve yet to read a whole book, or anything really insightful, in the sociology of knowledge course, but it gives me a chance to reflect on some the methods and approaches of sociology that I’m only slightly familiar with. I’m going to write my paper for that class on the role of letters of recommendation in science; last semester I wrote a research paper based on G Evelyn Hutchinson’s letters of recommendation, so I hope to be able to strengthen that paper with the insights of a more general look at recommendations. I’m not sure if any literature exists in sociology or if I’ll have to make it up as I go.

For Science, Technology and Modernity, I’m probably going to do my research paper on visual images in science pedagogy and popular science. It seems like abstract images conveying scientific content were really rare (especially at a non-expert level) before the mid-20th century. Graphs and charts were virtually non-existent in popular literature, and most scientific illustrations were obviously aiming for naturalistic representation of actual sights. So it seems like this shift toward more abstraction of concepts visually went along with the other changes that get lumped into “modernism” and “modernity.” We’ll see how well that thesis bears out once I get down to looking at lots of sources, and hopefully I can pin down the timeframe a little better.

Meanwhile, I’ve redone the Lamarck sticker; it’s slicker now, and I put it on t-shirts. I ordered one today and plan to wear it to the History of Science Society meeting.