Author Archive for homer

From Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books:

It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there were performances of a one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert (‘Twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whale;/His hands have grown to flippers/And he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free drinks, science-themed rock bands, cake, decor and a dancing gorilla’ (stuffed with a relay of biology students). Circulating around the university, student and faculty volunteers declaimed the entire text of the Origin.

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The very idea of paying homage to the great scientists of the past is problematic. Scientists are not widely supposed either to be heroes or to have heroes. Modern sensibilities insist on scientists’ moral equivalence to anyone else, and notions of an impersonal Scientific Method, which have gained official dominance over older ideas of scientific genius, make the personalities of scientists irrelevant in principle. Honouring past scientists is therefore a different sort of thing from, say, paying homage to history’s generals, politicians or, indeed, imaginative artists. You don’t need to subscribe to a strict form of Pascal’s theory of history (had Cleopatra’s nose …) to accept, in one way or another, that individuals and circumstances can make a difference to the course of events. Had Lincoln not been president, the Civil War would quite probably have had a different trajectory and outcome; had Bush and Cheney not run the show, it’s plausible that Iraq would have not been invaded as a response to 9/11 or that an invasion would have turned out differently; and had Mozart not lived there would have been no Figaro. But it’s hard to accept that if Watson and Crick – clever and ambitious though they were – had not found the double helical structure of DNA, no one else would have done so.

For the full article…

John Markoff reviews W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology in the New York Times,

The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.

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Dr. Arthur tries to explain the emergence of radical new technologies from jet engines to GPS. He correctly points out that the jet engine did not arise from the steady accretion of small improvements in piston engines nor did the modern computer burst forth as the next generation of mechanical calculator.

He points to the human propensity to solve problems as the force that leads to new generations of technology through recombination of existing technologies. Technology is “alive” in the sense that a coral reef is alive. The reef is an ecological system with many species, and technology in the broadest sense is an elaborate and constantly changing structure made up of thousands of discrete technologies, themselves composed of separate technologies.

For the complete review…

Science Magazine Cover, 6 November 2009

The 6 November 2009 issue of Science announced the theme for the February 2010 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This issue of Science includes the program of the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting. The theme of the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego, 18 to 22 February 2010, is “Bridging Science and Society,” and calls on all scientists and engineers to make their work both beneficial and understandable.

A PDF of the program as it appears in this issue is available here; for more information on the meeting (including registration forms and information on accommodations), please visit www.aaas.org/meetings/.

The New York Review of Books (Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009) has published a review of by H. Allen Orr of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 468 pp., $29.00). The full review is not available online, but the magazine provides the following excerpt:

Since science is the defining intellectual enterprise of our age, it would seem worth understanding who the scientist is. This is the task Steven Shapin takes on in his latest book, The Scientific Life. Shapin’s book represents something of a departure from his previous efforts. The Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, Shapin is perhaps best known for two works on seventeenth-century science, A Social History of Truth (1994) and The Scientific Revolution (1996). He is also coauthor, with Simon Schaffer, of Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), a fascinating account of debates between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over the legitimacy and proper interpretation of experimental manipulation in science. In his new book, Shapin ventures beyond the strict boundaries of the history of science. While he spends some time on the evolution of the scientific vocation, he’s also concerned with how scientists live and work now.