Concluding Remarks: American Natural History and Biology in the Nineteenth Century

SYNOPSIS. This symposium has illustrated the important rolethat amateur naturalists played in preparing the groundworkfor professional science in the west. Like their eastern counterparts,these naturalists popularized science to the public, createdimpressive collections of natural history artifacts, formeda network of fellow enthusiasts, and initiated the establishmentof organizations and publications to further their interests.This heritage was critical to the development of the professionalbiology community in America and must be emphasized in the historyof American biology in order to understand the unique developmentof the biology community in the United States.     

How to make oneself nature's spokesman? A latourian account of classification in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century natural history

Classification in eighteenth-century natural history was marked by a battle of systems. The Linnaean approach to classification was severely criticized by those naturalists who aspired to a truly natural system. But how to make oneself nature's spokesman? In this article I seek to answer that question using the approach of the French anthropologist of science Bruno Latour in a discussion of the work of the French naturalists Buffon and Cuvier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These naturalists followed very different strategies in creating and defending of what they believed to be a natural classification in zoology. Buffon failed, whereas Cuvier's work appeared to be very successful. My argument will be that, to explain Buffon's failure and Cuvier's success, we should not focus on the epistemological or theoretical concerns and justifications of these naturalists, but on the concrete and heterogeneous means or tools through which animals were mobilized, stabilized and combined into ever more comprehensive systems of classification.     

Genomic diversity and population structure of Mexican and Spanish bovine Lidia breed

The Lidia bovine breed is distinguished for its low genetic exchangeability given its selection on aggressive behavior, its management uniqueness and its subdivided structure. In this study, we present a comprehensive genome‐wide analysis of genetic diversity, population structure and admixture of 468 animals from Mexican and Spanish Lidia breed populations and 64 samples belonging to 10 Spanish native and American‐creole breeds using 37 148 single nucleotide polymorphisms. We found similar average inbreeding values in the Lidia breed, with different distributions within groups; variability of inbreeding values among Spanish lineages was significant and no differences were found among the Mexican sub‐populations. Together, the high F_IS of the lineages and the behavior of the runs of homozygosity are consequences of the lineage's small effective population sizes, contributing to their inbreeding increase. Population admixture analysis discarded any influence on the genetic structure of the Lidia populations from the Spanish native and American‐creole breeds. In addition, both Lidia populations depicted different genetic origins, with the exception of some Mexican individuals whose origins traced back to recent Spanish importations.     

Filling in the Gaps: A Survey of Nineteenth Century Institutions Associated with the Exploration and Natural History of the American West

SYNOPSIS. In many historical studies emphasis is placed on thescientist as an individual and little on the institutions thatsupported him or her. This article details the institutionsthat supported the explorer/naturalists of the American Westduring the nineteenth century. The institutions are arrangedin chronological order of their founding. In discussing eachinstitution I include information concerning its founding, itsstructure, the way in which it supported naturalists and theirstudies, and important naturalists associated with it.     

The history of science and the introduction of plant genetics in Mexico

The emergence and development of 'national sciences' in Latin American countries were not, until very recently, part of the agenda of historians of science because the 'traditional' history of sciences was not interested in the scientific activity of peripheral areas. The history of science is a recent discipline in Mexican historiographic studies. The methodological interest in the history of science, the creation of schools and institutes that deal with it, the establishment of particular chairs, the organization of national societies, and the publication of books and periodicals are all very recent. It is important to carry out studies in the history of science that examine the development of Mexican science introducing the 'local' context, and study how this development has influenced the formation of scientific societies and the development of scientific disciplines in the country. We want to explore the introduction of genetics in Mexico as applied to agriculture between 1930 and 1960. This matter has not been investigated in Mexico and therefore this work would represent one of the first studies of this subject and one of the first studies in the general field of Mexican scientific history.     

Dragons in Distress: Naturalists as Bioactivists in the Campaign to Save the American Alligator

This article explores the scientific and environmental activism of a group of naturalists who not only studied but also advocated on behalf of an unlikely organism: the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis). A large, toothy reptile that once inhabited wetlands across much of the southeastern United States, the alligator had long been reviled as a fearsome predator and pursued as a valuable commodity. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a small group of naturalists began to note its precipitous decline and to issue calls for its protection. Initially they tended to do so working individually, largely within the pages of scientific and governmental publications devoted to the species. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, as habitat destruction joined commodification to further threaten the alligator, naturalists banded together with state officials, conservationists, and other wildlife enthusiasts to form the American Alligator Council. That organization not only promoted research on the alligator but also secured local, state, and federal protection of the increasingly beleaguered species, thereby snatching it from the jaws of impending extinction. The naturalists examined in this article were not only producers and purveyors of knowledge, then; they were also bioactivists, biologists with a strong political agenda who firmly embraced the practice of engaging in the public sphere.     

Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace The British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), well known as co‐discoverer of the “Darwinian” principle of natural selection, came from an ordinary background. Wallace left school aged 14 and never attended University. He became a land surveyor and studied, in his spare time, the works of the most famous naturalists of his age. After extensive expeditions (Amazon, 1848–1852; Southeast Asia, 1854–1862), Wallace spent the rest of his life in England as a free‐lance science writer. His contributions to systematics (he discovered/described many new species), evolutionary biology, zoogeography, anthropology and other branches of the live sciences are summarized in his 22 books and ca. 700 papers. Since Wallace became an adherent of spiritualism and mixed up supernatural phenomena with scientific facts in some of his later books, he remains a controversial figure in the history of the life sciences.     

The Specimen Dealer: Entrepreneurial Natural History in America's Gilded Age

The post-Civil War American natural history craze spawned a new institution – the natural history dealer – that has failed to receive the historical attention it deserves. The individuals who created these enterprises simultaneously helped to promote and hoped to profit from the burgeoning interest in both scientific and popular specimen collecting. At a time when other employment and educational prospects in natural history were severely limited, hundreds of dealers across the nation provided encouragement, specimens, publication outlets, training opportunities, and jobs for naturalists of all motivations and levels of expertise. This paper explores the crucial role that specimen dealers played in the larger natural history community. After briefly examining the development of local taxidermy shops in the mid-nineteenth century, it then traces the history of four large natural history dealerships established in the United States during the latter half of the century: Ward's Natural History Establishment, Frank Blake Webster's Naturalists' Supply Depot, Southwick & Jencks' Natural History Store, and Frank H. Lattin & Co. By the early twentieth century, changing tastes in interior design, the growth of the Audubon movement, and the dramatic expansion of alternate training and job opportunities for naturalists led many specimen dealers either to shift their emphasis or to shut their doors. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

How is Scientific Credibility Affected by Communicating Uncertainty? The Case of Endocrine Disrupter Effects on Male Fertility

Using the case of endocrine disrupter effects on male fertility, we explored how communicating uncertainty influences the credibility of the information that laypeople receive from scientists and how laypeople form judgments about the relationship between uncertainty and credibility. We found that laypeople assess the credibility of scientific information—whether or not it is accompanied by uncertainty—by referencing their “science model” and using non-scientific references (i.e., situations encountered in one's daily life, information received from other sources, one's own observations of the world, and one's education or professional experience). Scientific credibility is a mixture of (sometimes contradictory) considerations along these different axes. Previous studies have found that some scientists assume that communicating uncertainty will lower public credibility of science. Our results contradict this assumption for situations in which academic scientists communicate uncertainty, which is perceived as additional knowledge bringing a new perspective on certain information. People expect scientists to provide practical solutions and feel disillusionment when scientists lack straight answers. However, they accepted uncertainty as an intrinsic characteristic of science and a consequence of the limits to human beings’ capacity to understand the world. Further, the low credibility of industry scientists is further reinforced when they communicate uncertainty.     

Instruments of Judgment: Inscribing Organic Processes in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany

The paper argues for the importance to Kant's critique of judgment of epistemological reflections upon the problematics of experimentation on organic processes. It examines the investigations of generation by Wolff and Blumenbach, demonstrating how their experimental practices mediated reflectively between organic phenomena and their conceptualisation, acting as instruments of their judgments of these processes. It then reads Kant's ‘Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft’ in light of these experimental investigations, arguing that Kant highlights how the problematic relation between organic phenomena and their conceptualisation manifested in such investigations is opened up as a space for reflection, thus making this act of judgment conscious. The relation between Kant's critiques of judgment in his first and third critiques are then discussed, and it is argued that the reflective character of judgment highlighted in the judgment of organic processes draws into focus the problematic aspects of all judgments of natural phenomena, by making conscious the synthetic process of judgment effected by unconscious acts of the imagination in the first critique. Finally, the paper examines Humboldt's galvanic experiments, showing how they were informed by Kant's critical philosophy, but also how they contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between the judgment of organic and inorganic processes. Thus it is claimed that the reflections upon judgment in the Kritik der Urteilskraft problematized rather than clarified Kant's treatment of judgment in the first critique.     

Like one of the family: race,ethnicity, and the paradox of US national identity

The tensions between individual rights promised to US citizens and group discrimination targeted against African Americans and similar racial/ethnic groups constitute one enduring paradox of US society. This essay examines this paradox by exploring how a gendered family rhetoric contributes to understandings of race and US national identity. Using African American women's experiences as a touchstone for analysis, the article suggests that African American women's treatment as second-class citizens reflects a belief that they are 'like one of the family', that is, legally part of the US nation-state, but simultaneously subordinated within it. To investigate these relationships, the article examines 1) how intersecting social hierarchies of race and ethnicity foster racialized understandings of US national identity; 2) how the gendered rhetoric of the American family ideal naturalizes and normalizes social hierarchies; and 3) how gendered family rhetoric fosters racialized constructions of US national identity as a large national family.     

‘The vagaries of a Rafinesque’: imagining and classifying American nature

Some early nineteenth-century American naturalists condemned their contemporary, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783–1840), as ‘eccentric’, or worse. Both during his life and long after his death, his botanical work in particular was criticised, even ridiculed. However, in recent years, attempts have been made to restore his reputation and the term ‘genius’ has even been used to describe him. This paper examines this continuing fascination with this strange, disturbing figure and argues that in the competing interpretations of his life and work, Rafinesque has generally been used to typify bad classification; he is perhaps better understood in a broader, literary context as embodying a particular kind of American national identity.     

John W. Burgess,the racial state and the making of the American science of politics

This article examines the place of racial ideas in the constitution of political science as an academic discipline in the USA. For the Gilded Age generation that built the first PhD-granting departments in political science in the country, ‘race’ was the source of sovereignty, the basis of democratic legitimacy and a tool for delineating democracy's borders. It was also an important element of that cohort's aspiration to a ‘science’ of politics, distinct from what they viewed as the ‘abstract and formal’ theorizing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moreover, while the brand of racialism that characterized this founding moment came to seem outmoded within a few decades, in the 1920s political scientists seeking once again to claim an empirical, scientific basis for their discipline – and for American democracy – turned to new accounts and sciences of race.     

A flavour of Alzheimer's

This article describes how today in the United States neurologists diagnose forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia. Taking as a starting‐point the pervasive context of uncertainty in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, it examines how uncertainty is not merely an epistemological obstacle to the making of knowledge. On the contrary, the article analyses how uncertainty positively incites the use of clinicians’ ‘feelings’ in diagnostic work. Drawing on observations of clinical consultations and team meetings, it studies how, alongside contemporary instruments of objectification, clinicians use, share, and discuss their ‘feelings’ to ultimately renew knowledge about brain diseases. In documenting the manner in which medical expertise is bound to a concrete experience of the world, this article further explores how experts’ ‘intuition’ can be grasped as a conscious and effortful process, rather than as something ineffable, resisting analysis, and confined to an unconscious background.     

A Practical Guide for Improving Transparency and Reproducibility in Neuroimaging Research

Recent years have seen an increase in alarming signals regarding the lack of replicability in neuroscience, psychology, and other related fields. To avoid a widespread crisis in neuroimaging research and consequent loss of credibility in the public eye, we need to improve how we do science. This article aims to be a practical guide for researchers at any stage of their careers that will help them make their research more reproducible and transparent while minimizing the additional effort that this might require. The guide covers three major topics in open science (data, code, and publications) and offers practical advice as well as highlighting advantages of adopting more open research practices that go beyond improved transparency and reproducibility.     

Creating Science Picture Books for an Authentic Audience

This article presents an authentic writing opportunity to help ninth-grade students use the writing process in a science classroom to write and illustrate picture books for fourth-grade students to demonstrate and share their understanding of a biology unit on cells. By creating a picture book, students experience the writing process, understand how to share their learning with an authentic audience, and create an artifact that demonstrates their understanding of content knowledge.     

Reverend Paley's naturalist revival

This paper analyzes the remarkable popularity of William Paley's argument from design among contemporary naturalists in biology and the philosophy of science. In philosophy of science Elliott Sober has argued that creationism should be excluded from the schools not because it is not science but because it is 'less likely' than evolution according to fairly standard confirmation theory. Creationism is said to have been a plausible scientific option as presented by Paley but no longer to be acceptable according to the same standards that once approved it. In biology C. G. Williams and Richard Dawkins have seen in Paley a proto-adaptationist. This paper shows that the historical assumptions of Sober's arguments are wrong and that the philosophical arguments themselves take alternatives to science to be alternatives in science and conflate the null hypothesis, chance, with a competing explanatory hypothesis. It is also shown that the similarity of Paley's adaptationism to that of contemporary biology is not what it is made out to be.