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The Story of Western Science

Page 28

by Susan Wise Bauer


  16. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, 23–24.

  17. Ibid., 84–85; Reader, Missing Links, 49.

  18. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, 168.

  19. Ibid., 190; Trevor Palmer, Perilous Planet Earth: Catastrophes and Catastrophism through the Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30.

  20. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, 248.

  FIFTEEN A Long and Steady History

  1. William Buckland, Vindiciae geologicae: or, The Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained (Oxford University Press, 1820), 24.

  2. Charles Lyell, Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., ed. Katharine M. Lyell (John Murray, 1881), 1:63; J. M. I. Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829–1859 (Brill, 1997), 19.

  3. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, ed. James A. Secord (Penguin, 1997), 3, 6; Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment, 21–22.

  4. Lyell, Life, Letters, and Journals, 186–87; Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment, 22, 26.

  5. Lyell, Life, Letters, and Journals, 234–35.

  6. Ibid., 262.

  7. Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 17ff; Lyell, Principles of Geology, 240–42.

  8. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Wonderful Century: The Age of New Ideas in Science and Invention (Swan Sonnenschein, 1903), 349.

  9. Walter Alvarez, T. rex and the Crater of Doom (Princeton University Press, 2008), 51.

  SIXTEEN The Unanswered Question

  1. Charles Lyell, Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., ed. Katharine M. Lyell (John Murray, 1881), 1:269, 270.

  2. Untitled column, Exeter Flying Post, October 3, 1844.

  3. G. Brent Dalrymple, The Age of the Earth (Stanford University Press, 1991), 32–33.

  4. Ibid., 69–71; LaVerne Tolley Gurley and William J. Callaway, Introduction to Radiologic Technology, 7th ed. (Mosby, 2011), 58–62; Kristin Iverson, Full Body Burden (Crown, 2012), 173.

  5. Ernest Rutherford, Radioactive Transformations (Yale University Press, 1906), 190–91, 194.

  6. Don L. Eicher and Arcie Lee McAlester, The History of the Earth (Prentice-Hall, 1980), xvi; Cherry Lewis, The Dating Game: One Man’s Search for the Age of the Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27.

  7. Arthur Holmes, The Age of the Earth (London: Harper Brothers, 1913), 17.

  8. Lawrence Badash, “The Age-of-the-Earth Debate,” Scientific American 261, no. 2 (August 1989): 96.

  9. Holmes, Age of the Earth, 21, 22.

  10. Ibid., 11, 164, 166.

  11. Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, and Charles Drummond Ellis, Radiations from Radioactive Substances (Cambridge University Press, 1930), 536.

  12. Holmes, Age of the Earth, 173.

  SEVENTEEN The Return of the Grand Theory

  1. Naomi Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (Oxford University Press, 1999), 10, 16–17.

  2. Edmund A. Mathez and James D. Webster, The Earth Machine: The Science of a Dynamic Planet (Columbia University Press, 2004), 87.

  3. Oreskes, Rejection of Continental Drift, 27, 33.

  4. Alfred Wegener, “The Origin of Continents and Oceans,” Living Age, 8th series, vol. 26 (April/May/June 1922): 657–58; Mathez and Webster, Earth Machine, 87.

  5. Oreskes, Rejection of Continental Drift, 157; H. E. Le Grand, Drifting Continents and Shifting Theories (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 65.

  6. Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, trans. John Biram (Dover, 1966), viii.

  7. Wegener, “Origin of Continents and Oceans,” 658.

  8. Wegener, Origin of Continents and Oceans, 217.

  9. David M. Lawrence, Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution (Rutgers University Press, 2002), 17–18.

  10. Mathez and Webster, Earth Machine, 90–91.

  EIGHTEEN Catastrophe, Redux

  1. Victor R. Baker, “The Spokane Flood Debates: Historical Background and Philosophical Perspective,” in History of Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology, ed. R. H. Grapes, D. R. Oldroyd, and A. Grigelis (Geological Society of London, 2008), 33, 36–37.

  2. John Eliot Allen, Marjorie Burns, and Scott Burns, Cataclysms on the Columbia: The Great Missoula Floods, 2nd rev. ed. (Ooligan Press, 2009), 56.

  3. Baker, “Spokane Flood Debates,” 47.

  4. Allen, Burns, and Burns, Cataclysms on the Columbia, 71–72.

  5. Timothy Ferris, “It Came from Outer Space,” New York Times, May 25, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/25/reviews/970525.25ferrist.html; Walter Alvarez, T. rex and the Crater of Doom (Princeton University Press, 2008), 45, 53.

  6. Janine Bourriau, Understanding Catastrophe: Its Impact on Life on Earth (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 29.

  7. Alvarez, T. rex, 42.

  8. Luis W. Alvarez et al., “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” Science 208, no. 4448 (June 6, 1980): 1095.

  9. Alvarez, T. rex, 81–82.

  10. Ibid., 12–14.

  11. Ibid., ix.

  12. Bourriau, Understanding Catastrophe, 5.

  NINETEEN Biology

  1. John Cassell, Cassell’s History of England (Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1884), 5:9; Georges Cuvier, “Biographical Memoir of M. de Lamarck,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 20 (October 1835–April 1836): 8.

  2. Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 390.

  3. M. J. S. Hodge, “Lamarck’s Science of Living Bodies,” British Journal for the History of Science 5, no. 4 (December 1971): 325.

  4. André Klarsfeld and Frédéric Revah, The Biology of Death: Origins of Mortality, trans. Lydia Brady (Cornell University Press, 2004), 7.

  5. J. B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals, trans. Hugh Elliot (Macmillan, 1914), 51, 202.

  6. Ibid., 2.

  7. Ibid., 12, 41, 46.

  8. Ibid., 38–39, 60, 175–76; Ernst Mayr, “Lamarck Revisited,” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 60–61.

  9. Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 63.

  10. A. S. Packard, Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work (Longmans, Green, 1901), 56–58, 70.

  TWENTY Natural Selection

  1. J. B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals, trans. Hugh Elliot (Macmillan, 1914), 35, 176.

  2. Richard A. Richards, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 31; Aristotle, The History of Animals, trans. Richard Cresswell (Henry G. Bohn, 1862), I.1, sec. 6–8.

  3. Monroe W. Strickberger, Evolution, 3rd ed. (Jones & Bartlett, 2000), 9.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Harvard University Press, 1982), 257–58.

  6. Ibid.. 394–96; Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (John Murray, 1908), 20.

  7. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, ed. R. D. Keynes (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16.

  8. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Wordsworth Classics, 1998), 36; Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, 265–66.

  9. Frank N. Egerton III, “Darwin’s Early Reading of Lamarck,” Isis 67, no. 3 (September 1976): 453.

  10. C. R. Darwin, Notebook B: [Transmutation of Species (1837–1838)] CUL-DAR121 (transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker), Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk, accessed May 2014.

  11. Darwin, His Life Told, 52; Darwin, Origin of Species, 186; Charles Darwin, On Evolution: The Development of the Theory of Natural Se
lection, ed. Thomas F. Glick and David Kohn (Hackett, 1996), 83.

  12. T. R. Malthus, Population: The First Essay (University of Michigan Press, 1959), 4, 6.

  13. Darwin, His Life Told, 82.

  14. Alfred Russel Wallace, Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology, ed. Andrew Berry (Verso, 2002), 51.

  15. Darwin, His Life Told, 82 ; Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, 423.

  16. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, 423–24.

  17. Darwin, His Life Told, 42, 46.

  18. Untitled column, Annual Register of World Events: A Review of the Year 113 (1872): 368.

  TWENTY-ONE Inheritance

  1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Wordsworth Classics, 1998), 13.

  2. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (D. Appleton, 1897), 2:371; P. Kyle Stanford, Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (Oxford University Press, 2006), 65.

  3. Michael R. Rose, Darwin’s Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 1998), 33; Peter Atkins, Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (Oxford University Press, 2004), 45–46.

  4. Gregor Mendel, Experiments in Plant Hybridisation (Cosimo Classics, 2008), 15, 21ff, 47.

  5. Atkins, Galileo’s Finger, 48–49; Alain F. Corcos and Floyd V. Monaghan, Gregor Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybrids: A Guided Study (Rutgers University Press, 1993), 28–30.

  6. J. A. Moore, Heredity and Development, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1972), 29, 45; Atkins, Galileo’s Finger, 52–55.

  7. Rose, Darwin’s Spectre, 41.

  8. Moore, Heredity and Development, 74.

  TWENTY-TWO Synthesis

  1. David Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the “Origin of Species” to the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1, 15; Raymond Pearl, “Biology and War,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 8, no. 11 (June 4, 1918): 355.

  2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (D. Appleton, 1899), 1:326, 328; Edwin Scott Gaustad and Mark A. Noll, eds., A Documentary History of Religion in America since 1877, 3rd ed. (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 350.

  3. Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology (Oxford University Press, 2003), 63; Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Harvard University Press, 1998), 3, 8–9.

  4. Mayr and Provine, Evolutionary Synthesis, 8, 282, 315, 316.

  5. T. H. Huxley and Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (D. Appleton, 1900), 1:391.

  6. Krishna R. Dronamraju, If I Am to Be Remembered: The Life and Work of Julian Huxley with Selected Correspondence (World Scientific, 1993), 5, 9–12, 15.

  7. Ibid., 42.

  8. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton University Press, 1996), 140.

  9. Calendar entry (“Association for the Study of Systematics in Relation to General Biology”), Nature, July 24, 1937, 164.

  10. John Krige and Dominique Pestre, eds., Science in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2013), 422.

  11. Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, definitive ed. (MIT Press, 2010), 22, 26–28.

  12. Ibid., 3, 6–7.

  TWENTY-THREE The Secret of Life

  1. James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (Scribner, 1993), 197; Daniel D. Chiras, Human Biology (Jones & Bartlett, 2013), 357; John C. Kotz, Paul M. Treichel, and John Townsend, Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity (Cengage Learning, 2009), 392; Peter Atkins, Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (Oxford University Press, 2004), 62.

  2. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (James Allestry, 1664), Observation 18; Robert C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science (Routledge, 1990), 358–59.

  3. Olby et al., Companion to the History, 359; Theodor Schwann, Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants, trans. Henry Smith (Sydenham Society, 1847), 242.

  4. J. Craig Venter, Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life (Viking, 2013), 13; G. P. Talwar and L. M. Srivastava, eds., Textbook of Biochemistry and Human Biology, 3rd ed. (Prentice-Hall of India, 2003), xxiv.

  5. Joseph Needham, ed., The Chemistry of Life: Eight Lectures on the History of Biochemistry (Cambridge University Press, 1970), 17–18.

  6. Paul O. P. Ts’o, ed., Basic Principles in Nucleic Acid Chemistry (Academic Press, 1974), 1:2; Rudolf Hausmann, To Grasp the Essence of Life: A History of Molecular Biology (Kluwer Academic, 2002), 42.

  7. Ts’o, Basic Principles, 8.

  8. David Bainbridge, The X in Sex: How the X Chromosome Controls Our Lives (Harvard University Press, 2003), 5.

  9. Eric C. R. Reeve, ed., Encyclopedia of Genetics (Routledge, 2014), 7.

  10. Israel Rosenfield, Edward Ziff, and Borin Van Loon, DNA: A Graphic Guide to the Molecule That Shook the World (Columbia University Press, 2011), 3.

  11. Isidore Epstein, ed., Hebrew-English Edition of the Babylonian Talmud: Yebamoth (Soncino Press, 1984), 48.

  12. Hermann Joseph Muller, The Modern Concept of Nature (SUNY Press, 1973), 36, 132; Hausmann, To Grasp the Essence of Life, 56.

  13. William Purves et al., Life: The Science of Biology, 7th ed. (Sinauer Associates, 2004), 107, 114, 234; Reeve, Encyclopedia of Genetics, 10; Hausmann, To Grasp the Essence of Life, 48.

  14. Hausmann, To Grasp the Essence of Life, 103–4.

  15. Ibid., 63–66.

  16. Watson, Double Helix, 33–35.

  17. Ibid., 14–15.

  18. Ibid., 20, 50.

  19. Ibid., 174, 220.

  20. Colin Tudge, Engineer in the Garden (Random House, 1993), e-book, chap. 2 subheading “How Does DNA Work?”.

  21. Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (Basic Books, 2008), 108–9.

  TWENTY-FOUR Biology and Destiny

  1. Albert Rosenfeld, “The New Man: What Will He Be Like?” Life 59, no. 14 (October 1, 1965): 100.

  2. Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis, eds., Evolution: The First Four Billion Years (Harvard University Press, 2009), 579–81; Paul S. Agutter and Denys N. Wheatley, Thinking about Life: The History and Philosophy of Biology and Other Sciences (Springer, 2008), 194.

  3. John H. Gillespie, Population Genetics: A Concise Guide, 2nd ed. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), xi.

  4. Pierre-Henri Gouyon, Jean-Pierre Henry, and Jacques Arnold, Gene Avatars: The Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution (Kluwer, 2002), 98.

  5. Connie Barlow, ed., From Gaia to Selfish Genes: Selected Writings in the Life Sciences (MIT Press, 1992), 156.

  6. Gouyon, Henry, and Arnold, Gene Avatars, 159–60; Barlow, From Gaia to Selfish Genes, 156–57.

  7. Steven A. Frank, “The Price Equation, Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem, Kin Selection, and Causal Analysis,” Evolution 51, no. 6 (August 1997): 1713; Kalyanmoy Deb, ed., Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (Springer, 2004), 915; Karthik Panchanathan, “George Price, the Price Equation, and Cultural Group Selection,” Evolution and Human Behavior 32, no. 5 (September 2011): 369, 371.

  8. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), 1; Barlow, From Gaia to Selfish Genes, 195.

  9. Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (Harper Perennial, 2003), 9; Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, eds., Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.

  10. Edward O. Wilson, Letters to a Young Scientist (Liveright, 2013), 83–85.

  11. Barlow, From Gaia to Selfish Genes, 158.

  12. Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (W. W. Norton, 2012), 169; Barlow, From Gaia to Selfish Genes, 149–50.

  13. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard University Press, 1975), 3.

  14. Ibid., 6.


  15. Elizabeth Allen et al. “Against ‘Sociobiology,’” New York Review of Books 22, no. 18 (November 13, 1975), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/nov/13/against-sociobiology.

  16. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 2004), xvii.

  17. Ibid., 2, 137, 188, 201.

  18. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and exp. ed. (W. W. Norton, 1996), 20–21.

  19. Hans J. Eysenck, Intelligence: A New Look (Transaction, 2000), 10.

  20. Stephen Jay Gould, The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould, ed. Steven Rose (W. W. Norton, 2007), 446.

  21. Ibid., 465–66.

  TWENTY-FIVE Relativity

  1. Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. 6, Revolution and the New Science (University of Missouri Press, 1998), 194–95; Nick Hugget, ed., Space from Zeno to Einstein: Classic Readings with a Contemporary Commentary (Bradford Books, 1999), 182; George Berkeley, De motu: Sive de motus principio & natura et de causa communicationis motuum, trans. A. A. Luce (Jacobi Tonson, 1721), sec. 66.

  2. Isaac Newton, Newton: Philosophical Writings, ed. Andrew Janiak (University of Cambridge Press, 2004), 100–101.

  3. Ioan James, Remarkable Physicists: From Galileo to Yukawa (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69; Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A Life in Exact Science (Princeton University Press, 2000), 273.

  4. Edward Harrison, Cosmology: The Science of the Universe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70.

  5. Newton, Philosophical Writings, 94; Harrison, Cosmology, 60–61.

  6. Harrison, Cosmology, 76; William Huggins, The Scientific Papers of Sir William Huggins (W. Wesley and Son, 1909), 221.

  7. Eli Maor, To Infinity and Beyond: A Cultural History of the Infinite (Princeton University Press, 1991), 131.

  8. Ian Stewart, In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World (Basic Books, 2012), 16–17; Jeremy Gray, Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (Princeton University Press, 2008), 48.

  9. Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Wars, and the 10th Dimension (Oxford University Press, 1994), 36.

 

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