Jorg Matthias Determann‘s new book looks at the history of modern biology in the Arab Gulf monarchies, focusing on the treatment of evolution and related concepts in the publications of biologists who worked in the Gulf states. Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2015) begins by describing a fatwa against Pokemon and opens out into an introduction of the sensitive nature of discussions related to evolution and creation in the Gulf. The ensuing chapters approach and answer a major question: given this sensitivity, what enabled scientists to nevertheless employ evolution in the political, religious, social, and natural environments of the Gulf? At least part of the answer lies in the importance of networks between scientists, plants, princes, local tribes, European businesses, animals, and other historical actors. The history of those networks – and the botanical, zoological, ornithological, and paleontological research they enabled – is a transnational and transregional one, and looks carefully at concerns with conservation, climate change, and economies at multiple levels. Determann’s book avoids telling this story in terms of the common tropes of decline and stagnation, and seeks instead to “go beyond the wholesale and often negative views of scientific production in the contemporary Arab world.” Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead body to sites of dissection across the city, after which we are introduced to four anatomists – charter members of the Paris Academy of Sciences – who will act as focal points for the rest of the story.The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2015) opens up Parisian bodies – human and animal, dead and alive – to argue that dissection played a major role in the development of experimental methods in seventeenth century science. In Guerrini’s hands, the history of science and medicine in early modern Paris was simultaneously a history of fairy tales and opera, dogs and chameleons, artists and knife-makers, labyrinth-making and oratory. It is a fascinating book that is a must-read for historians of anatomy and of early modern science and medicine, and will be accessible and gripping for readers well beyond those fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A “midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s” who was famed for his work on the science of orgasm, was widely maligned as a charlatan and pseudoscientist, did extensive work on the science of cancer, had his books and instruments publicly burned by the US government, and died in prison: it’s hard not to find Wilhelm Reich fascinating. In his new book, James E. Strick reminds us that Reich was also a diligent and accomplished laboratory scientist whose work has potentially important implications for the modern biosciences. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard University Press, 2015) takes readers into the making of this modern scientist, from his early relationships with Freud and dialectical materialism, to his work on the orgasm as a kind of “electrophysiological discharge,” to his research into potential treatments for cancer. The book concludes by considering why understanding Reich’s scientific work matters for us today, including a brief introduction to some recent experimental work related to Reich’s research. It is an absorbing story that’s also a pleasure to read, and pays careful attention to Reich’s scientific work while still translating it in clear terms for non-specialist readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces practices and practitioners of natural knowledge from the late-sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: “a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state.” That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were waged that challenged participants to rethink the most basic elements of a notion of society: What were the “needs” that must be fulfilled in order to keep persons productive? Were those needs physical and/or psychological? What were the characteristics of a model “person,” anyway? The chapters of the book narrate the traces that these debates left on the bodies of workers, the pages of history, and the basic notions (like “minimum wage,” like “citizen”) that make up modern conceptions of civil society. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were “enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally.” As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer’s account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we study the history of a famous scientific figure – especially one that has gone on to become a cultural icon – we are dealing not just with a person, but also with an identity or series of identities that have been constructed over time. Eva Hemmungs Wirten‘s new book looks carefully at the work that has gone into the making of Marie Curie (1867-1934) as an individual, a celebrity, an icon, and ultimately a brand. Three motifs that thread through the narrative of Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and they each form the basis for one of its chapters: the impact of intellectual property on science and research; the role of celebrity culture in shaping the image of the scientist; and the “question of how to organize scientific information as part of the modern infrastructure of knowledge.” It’s a compellingly argued book that’s also a pleasure to read. For videos of two of the duels discussed in the book, check out the following links!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QlUw1k0ItE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rElNQuBvFeQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this oversight, turning our attention to the importance of biological field stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in generating new scientific practices, theories, and networks. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the German- and French-speaking scientific community in Europe, looking at a number of influential case studies that collectively embody what de Bont calls a “station movement” in this period. Exploring the relationship between these field stations and a notion of “experimentalism” embraced therein, de Bont usefully undermines a tendency to focus on laboratories as sites of experimentation in the history of science. The stations ranged in kind from very technologically sophisticated marine labs to cabins in the woods, from urban Naples to the isolated beaches of France to the birdlands of East Prussia. Some of the practices cultivated at these sites spread into a wider political and intellectual economy, transforming disciplines and spaces of inquiry and education in the process. It’s a fascinating study that offers readers a more robust and complex understanding of the spaces of modern science and their entangled histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredible women, Meredith K. Ray‘s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks both at women’s practical engagements with science and with their literary engagements with natural philosophy. Ch. 1 brings us to the Romagna, and to the formidable Caterina Sforza’s experiments with alchemical recipes as compiled in a manuscript that exists today in only a single manuscript copy. Both recipes and secrets were forms of currency in this context, and Ch. 2 looks at the vogue for printed “books of secrets” in sixteenth century Italy. This chapter pays special attention to the influential Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont (1555) and the Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese, while also exploring the influence of books of secrets on other early modern literary genres including vernacular treatises, dialogues, and letter collections. Ch. 3 look at the literature of debate over women, or querelle des femmes that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looking particularly closely at the intertwining discourses about women and science in Moderata Fonte’s writing of chivalric romance and dialogue, and in Lucrezia Marinella’s epic poetry and pastoral writing. Ch. 4 moves us to Padua and Rome, where women had begun, by the early seventeenth century, to participate in scientific discourse in more formal ways. Here, Ray looks closely at Camilla Erculiani’s letters on natural philosophy (1584) that defended women’s aptitude for science, and at her networking with scientific communities in Poland and her eventual questioning by the Inquisition. The chapter then turns to Margherita Sarrocchi’s work, her epic poem Scanderbeide, and her fascinating relationship with Galileo. It is a fascinating book that will be of interest to readers eager to learn more about the history of science, literature, and/or women in early modernity. If you listen closely to the interview, you’ll also hear me comparing Caterina Sforza to Doritos. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000 (De Gruyter, 2014), Kocku von Stuckrad, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, demonstrates how the construction of what constitutes ‘religion’ and ‘science’ was a relational process that emerged with the competition between various systems of knowledge. In this book, von Stuckrad traces the transformation and perpetuation of religious discourses as a result of their entanglement with secular academic discourses. In the first half of the book, he presents the discursive constructions of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ through the disciplines of astrology, astronomy, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, and scientific experimentation more generally. The second half of the book explores the power of academic legitimization of knowledge in emerging European modernities. Here, the discursive entanglements of professional and participant explanations of modern practices shaped and solidified those realities. Key figures in the history of the field of Religious Studies, such as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, played instrumental roles in legitimizing the authority of mysticism, goddess worship, and shamanism. Ultimately, what we discover is that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are not so much distinctive spheres but elastic systems that arise within the particular circumstances of secular modernity. In our conversation we discussed discursive approaches to the study of religion, the Theosophical Society, marginalized forms of knowledge, the occult sciences, Jewish mysticism, secularization, nature-focused spiritualities, experiential knowledge, pagan religious practices, and ‘modern’ science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) is a fascinating exploration of books and their readers during a moment of intense transformation in British society. Secord brings us into a period of the nineteenth century when transformations in publishing and an expanded reading public helped create a wide-ranging conversation about science and its possible futures. Out of this utopian moment several works emerged that reflected on the practices and prospects of science, and Secord guides us through seven of them in turn: the dialogues of Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel, the polemic of Charles Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, John Herschel’s moralizing Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Mary Somerville’s mathematical On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, George Combe’s phrenological The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, and Thomas Carlyle’s bizarre and wonderful Sartor Resartus. In each case, Secord pays careful attention to the physicality of books and the ways that their readers create and transform them. In addition to being great fun to read, the book will also be helpful for teachers putting together material for undergraduate lecture courses on the history of science and/or book history, and will find a happy home on syllabi for upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminars in the history of books and reading, the sciences and modernity, and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science? In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. Alper Yalcinkaya‘s new book Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015) introduces the history of science as discussed and debated by nineteenth-century Turkish-speaking Muslim Ottomans in Istanbul. The book compellingly argues that these discussions and debates were not so much about the nature of science than the characteristics of the “man of science” and his relationship to Ottoman identity. In the course of Yalçinkaya’s study, readers also learn about the economic and political transformations of nineteenth century Ottoman society, the changes wrought by the gradual integration of the Ottoman Empire into the world capitalist system, and the consequences of those changes for the Ottoman state and its relationship to education and the press. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the entangled histories of science and modernity, and the ways that particular forms of identity and subjectivity emerged from inscriptions of that entanglement. I especially recommend it to readers paying special attention to the histories of the press, language, and the state as they are bound up with nineteenth century science and technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch ateliers in which exotic geography was produced by bookmakers, paying special attention to frontispieces and other paratexts through which these editor-printer-booksellers created a new way of looking at the world. Picturing, here, was a kind of performance. Schmidt considers how the exotic, non-European body was produced not just in texts and pictures but also in a range of material arts that depicted the body experiencing pleasure and pain. The book concludes by looking ahead to the middle of the eighteenth century, when there was a backlash against exotic geography, and a call for more “order and method” in the geographical description of the world. Inventing Exoticism is a focused, gorgeously illustrated multi-media exploration of a topic of crucial importance to the history of the early modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher J. Phillips‘ new book is a political history of the “New Math,” a collection of curriculum reform projects in the 1950s & 1960s that were partially sponsored by the NSF and involved hundreds of mathematicians, teachers, professors, administrators, parents, and students. The New Math: A Political History (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores the formation of an idea of the “American subject” in an environment where math was considered to be a component of intelligent citizenship. As classrooms became sites shaped by Cold War politics, efforts to reform mathematics curricula were bound up in ideas of subjectivity and discipline. Phillips pays special attention to the work of the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) in this context, looking closely at the textbooks that the SMSG produced for children studying at a range of levels. Importantly, The New Math explores not just the production of these textbooks but also what happened when they were actually brought into American classrooms and engaged by teachers, students, and parents. As a result, in addition to being a fascinating political history it’s also a model of how we can treat the archaeology of the classroom as a way to approach the history of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) suggests that the transition from ancient toward modern optics was accompanied by a turn in optical studies from a concern with explaining sight to a focus on light by optical scholars. The book argues that Kepler’s theory of retinal imaging was instrumental in this turn. In the course of an amazingly comprehensive narrative of optical studies from Aristotle through the seventeenth century, From Sight to Light offers clear and persuasive discussions of the historical understanding of color and of visual illusions, the use of mirrors as optical devices, the relationships between physical and psychological theories of visual perception, and the study of reflection and refraction. Smith pays special attention to explaining the mathematical bases of optical theories, and he highlights the formative role that Arabic scientists and translation played in the history of optics. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sight, vision, light, and the study thereof Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo's 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian's role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family's mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a "rich, old, slightly batty widow" in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of "intermediaries and go-betweens" in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits. There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Wilding‘s new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo’s 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian’s role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family’s mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a “rich, old, slightly batty widow” in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of “intermediaries and go-betweens” in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits. There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) is an in-depth and detailed study of Kinsey’s scientific approach. The book examines his career and method of gathering vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and interpretation that was critical to his most influential works Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Beginning with Kinsey’s study of the animal world, Drucker examines how he transferred natural science methods to sex education in his Marriage Course at Indiana University, and ultimately to the massive study of human sexual behavior. He brought into the interdisciplinary science of sexology a thoroughly naturalist approach and believed that taxonomy – collecting, classifying and describing patterns, revealed truths about the natural world and worked against what he considered the prejudice of misclassification. Kinsey was committed to scientific objectivity, free of moral judgment he believed possible through unprejudiced observation, the recording of mass data sets, and the application of biometrics. Nevertheless, Kinsey sex research had significant implications for understanding sexual difference between men and women, sexual preference tied to economic class, and the consideration of normal sexual behavior against standing societal norms. Drucker’s work brings attention to the historical contingency of the social and technological process, which produces, encodes and relays information over time. Drucker’s close attention to method and the role of data gathering technology again raises the question regarding the role of science in value formation and recovers Kinsey’s contribution to scientific practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book traces the emergence of the “communicative objectivity” that resulted from this shift and produced new forms of observation, rationality, and economy. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2014) beautifully accomplishes this by creating a dialogue between fields that don’t often speak to one another in our scholarship: the history of science and knowledge, and the study of design, planning, and aesthetics. The result is a fascinating history of the construction of vision and cognition after WWII that looks carefully at the impact of early cybernetics on American design, urban planning, psychology, political science, management, and governmentality. Along the way, readers are treated to explorations of the “smart city” of Songdo Korea, the 1964-65 World’s Fair, labs at MIT, tricks played on porpoises, images of Marilyn Monroe, experiments on frog eyes, gardens designed by Isamu Noguchi, and much more. It’s a deeply thoughtful, wonderfully trans-disciplinary book that’s also a lot of fun to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women’s rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to answer the eternal “woman question.” Hamlin’s fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women’s rights in the home and society. Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women’s equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin’s theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As “reform Darwinists,” Hamlin’s subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women’s subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of “woman’s experience” against claims of scientific men.Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95), on the other hand, busied himself at “delivering sermons from tree stumps” as a young boy, before joining the navy, studying jellyfish, eventually launching an assault against the Anglican Church and gaining world renown as the biologist who was “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Matthew Stanley’s wonderful new book introduces us to Maxwell and Huxley as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice of science that began to diverge relatively late and in very particular historical circumstances. Beginning at a point when Maxwell’s theistic science was the “standard” and Huxley was the “challenger,” and ending at the point when Huxley “won,” Stanley goes on to guide readers through some of the major topics of debate that characterized Victorian science (including the nature of miracles and of consciousness, the limits of science, the origin of the universe, the question of intellectual freedom, the morality of education, the possibility of free will) to show the gradual divergence of perspectives that were always rooted in concerns about scientific practice, and to consider the ramifications of this history for how we understand and conduct debates over Intelligent Design and related issues today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) takes readers into the fascinating world of entrepreneur-biologists as they developed five of the first products of genetic engineering. Based on a documentary archive that includes oral history interviews and corporate documents resulting from patent litigation, Rasmussen’s book emphasizes the agency of the biologists in in driving the development of first-generation recombinant DNA drugs like insulin, human growth hormone, and interferon. After an introduction to the development of basic molecular biology in a Cold War context – and paying special attention to the ways that Kuhn’s notion of “normal science” helped shape the discipline – the ensuing chapters each present a case study that illustrates an important aspect of the history of biotech’s rise as manifest in laboratories, courtrooms, universities, freezers, markets, and the public arena. Gene Jockeys closes with a chapter that considers the policy lessons that can be taken from this story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain‘s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. Life on Display: Revolutionizing U. S. Museums of Science & Natural History in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) guides readers through a transformation in American science and nature museums as museums moved from a nineteenth-century focus on research and specimen collections to a twentieth-century emphasis on public engagement and display. Written collaboratively over nearly a decade, Life on Display simultaneously develops an argument for a “renegotiation of the relationship between display, research, and education in American museums of nature and science,” and opens up an archive of fascinating (and at times hilarious and moving) stories of members of the museum-going public (some of who gifted dog fleas and dead pets to their local museums), non-human inhabitants of interactive museum displays (including an owl with a penchant for riding in cars and “trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches”), and museum professionals who painted, debated, made dioramas, invented “Exploratoria,” and occasionally wrote limericks. This is a book for anyone interested in American history, museum studies, visual culture, science studies, the history of education, grasshopper surgery, or Jurassic Park (among many, many other fields it contributes to). It’s a wonderfully engaging history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of “objectivity,” and the concept of the public sphere. Don’t miss the beautiful color plates nestled in the midst of the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism. John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Wright‘s 2011 book Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), offers readers a history that stretches far beyond the strictly defined genetic disorder that is its namesake. Wright shows us how the condition that came to be known as Down’s syndrome has as much to do with the social history of what was called ‘idiocy’ in Early Modern times and reform movements to integrate the disabled beginning in the 1960s as it does with the rise of asylums or the disputed discovery of “trisomie vingt-et-un.” Even the legacy of the condition’s name is a telling narrative about the modernization of medicine, from the use of the term ‘mongoloid’ to justify the (progressive for the time) anthropological theory of racial reversion to debates over whether to rename the disease in honor of John Langdon Down or place it within a more rigid taxonomy of congenital mental disorders. On their own, all of these stories are compelling windows into different dimensions of medicine, and as a whole they comprise a book that shows readers just how contested the process of ‘medicalizing’ a condition has always been. The book’s chapters progress both chronologically and thematically. We begin with the legal definition of idiocy in the English Common Law as a way for the state to regulate the inheritance of property, and a glance at different contemporary philosophical understandings of mental handicap. Then, Wright discusses John Langdon Down’s work at the Earlswood Asylum and the influence of both education reforms and genetic studies on the definition of mental handicap. Proceeding through Jérôme Lejeune’s disputed discovery of trisomy 21 and the role of genetic screening in abortion debates, the book concludes by discussing how social movements in the late twentieth century have profoundly affected the ethical and political dimensions of Down’s syndrome. Winner of the British Society for the History of Science’s 2013 Dingle Prize, awarded biennially to a book exemplifying critical focus and a novel perspective while remaining accessible to the public, Downs is a great read for specialists and non-specialists alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where can the the boundaries of science, philosophy, and religion be drawn? Questioning the nature of the universe is an excellent place to rethink how these categories have been deployed across time. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor Religious Studies at Wesleyan University, offers a genealogy of multiple-world cosmologies that demonstrates these terms pliability and the debated relationship between 'Science' and 'Religion.' In Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press, 2014), Rubenstein wonders why there is a proliferation of multiverse theoretical cosmologies by contemporary scientists. While the cosmos are generally considered to be singular and finite many well-respected physicists explain the universe's complexities as evidence of a multiverse. These explanations argue that our world is just one of the infinite number of universes existing simultaneously. Worlds Without End shows that multiple-world cosmologies have had currency among many thinkers for over 2500 years. What draws philosophers, religious practitioners, and scientists together on these questions is there appeal to metaphysical postulates, which serve as pseudo-theologies for the contemporary age. In our conversation we discuss the Greek philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle, the Atomists, and the Stoics, medieval Christian interpreters such as Thomas Aquinas, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, the Telescopic discoveries of Galileo, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, the Big Bang debate, cosmic shredding, the fine-tuning problem, dark energy, Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Quantum Mechanics, and Intelligent Design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-European or Anglo-centric models of the history of colonial medicine, Osborne’s book focuses on the centrality, transformations, and ultimate demise of naval medicine in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Motivating the central arguments and narrative of the book is a concern with place, places, and emplacement, and Osborne explores maritime medical practices and the ecology of disease in French provincial port cities, on ships, in prisons, in hospitals and schools, and beyond. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France pays special attention to how the study and conception of race, and its connection with health and disease, was formed and reformed in these settings. Readers with a special interest in the relationship between medicine and the military will find much to enjoy here, as will those who come to the book wanting to know more about the maritime history of diseases like Yellow Fever, lead poisoning, and Malaria. There’s also some wonderful storytelling here, including a fascinating account of a book-bomber in Chapter 4. It is a beautifully written account, and it should be required reading for those interested in the history of medicine and healing, of France, of the colonial medical past, and of place and locality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a fascinating account of the co-production of facts and worlds, taking readers into the sciences of Rome from the first century BC to the second century AD. Masterfully blending approaches from the history and philosophy of science, Lehoux traces the significance of the “threefold cord” of nature, law, and the gods in making up the early Roman world. The chapters use the works of Cicero, Seneca, Galen, Ptolemy, and others to explore topics making up the foundation of a history of Roman science, including the importance of divination to Roman politics and natural knowledge, the relationship between optics and ethics in the Roman world, and the entanglements of law, nature, and witnessing. What Did the Romans Know? also contributes to philosophical debates over the theory-ladenness of observation, scientific and historical realism, and relativism. Lehoux ends his account as an “epistemological coherentist,” suggesting a model for thinking about and with the sciences in history and beyond. On top of all of this, the language of the text sparkles. It’s a wonderfully enjoyable read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013) is a deeply contextualized study of the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinians in different local contexts. Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) locates evolutionary debates in particular sites and situations as a way of understanding the history of science in terms of “geographies of reading” and “speech spaces.” The chapters introduce episodes that bring us into specific localities of reading and talking about Darwin, from Edinburgh in the 1870s, to Belfast during the “Winter of Discontent” following John Tyndall’s “Belfast Address,” to Toronto, to South Carolina, and finally to Princeton, NJ. These episodes collectively move readers away from understanding Darwin and his histories in terms of “isms,” instead looking carefully at the roles of three interrelated factors in shaping public encounters with Darwin’s ideas: place, politics, and rhetoric. The book concludes with a look at the ways that these factors continue to be pervasive in more recent dealings with Darwin. With its vibrant language, careful research, and compelling argument, Dealing with Darwin will be a must-read for historians of science, especially those interested in evolution, religion, Darwin, and/or locality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as this neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. In Memphis, and in America generally, we remain haunted by the history of “race” as a concept, and racism as a set of social practices. To gain some perspective on our local history, it is useful to take a step back, both in time and place. Alice Conklin‘s newest book, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2013), tells the story of how the discipline of anthropology and Paris’ ethnographic museum par excellence, the Museum of Man, are wound into the history of racial science and colonial conquest, but also ultimately played an important part in undoing scientific racism. The book offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as recovers a neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. Alice Conklin is a professor in the Department of History at Ohio State University. Her first book, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997) examined the ways in which France’s liberal Third Republic produced a consensus on the legitimacy of imperialism through the notion of a special “mission to civilize” – highlighting the racist and republican elements that together influenced French policy-making. The book won the 1998 Book Prize of the Berskshire Conference of Women’s Historians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Based on a close reading of a staggering array of primary sources, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) in turn subverts several assumptions about the connection between Aristotelian thought and the emergence of the new sciences in early modernity. The book argues that we ought to understand the seventeenth century decline of Aristotle and Aristotelians as an authority in natural philosophy in its relation to the contemporaneous religious readings of Aristotelian texts. In a series of chapters that each look carefully at a particular temporal and philosophical context of debate over the readings of Aristotle, Averroes, and their interlocutors by various religious communities, Martin’s book offers a compelling and deeply textured account of arguments over the piety, language, translation, and other aspects of the Aristotelian corpus. This is a book that beautifully shows the interrelationships of the histories of science and religion, while taking readings on a journey through the philosophical corpora of some of the most foundational thinkers on the nature of the cosmos and the soul; through transformations in the craft of historical analysis; and through an important period when translation (and debates about it) helped shape the intellectual histories of the medieval and early modern worlds. It is a fascinating book, and an especially important study for anyone interested in the history of early modern science and/or the relationships between the early histories of science and religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies and opinions. Jane Maienschein‘s new book is a model of the kind of careful, balanced, and beautifully written history of science that makes a significant contribution not just to the historiography of science, but also to the public understanding of science and its lived consequences. Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life (Harvard University Press, 2014) traces the historical transformations in the observation and observability of the earliest stages of developing life. Maienschein’s account is a focused and thoughtfully organized book that gradually reveals aspects of the history of early stages of life, carefully curating the elements of her narrative such that they collectively inform broader debates over embryo-related policy in the contemporary United States. Readers follow animal and human embryos in their metamorphoses from hypothetical to observed entities, seeing them sequentially transform into experimental, computational, and engineered objects. The final chapter considers the implications of the story in light of recent debates on topics such as fetal pain, paying special attention to the distinction between making policy decisions based on metaphysics vs. science. Embryos Under the Microscope is equally well-suited to academic historians of science wanting a clear introduction to the history of developmental biology, general readers seeking an introduction to a crucial topic of social and political debate, and teachers interested in assigning one or more of the chapters in relevant undergraduate courses. Enjoy! You can find the related Embryo Project Encyclopedia, a wonderful digital and open access resource, here. Listeners might also be interested in this recent article on slate.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. Observing by Hand treats not just published images, but also argues for the centrality of “working images” to the histories of science and observation, paying special attention to personal drawings in private notebooks as instruments of individual and collective observation. Nasim’s approach blends the history and philosophy of science in a study that informs the histories of astronomy, images, and paperwork, and that emphasizes the importance of the philosophy of mind and its history in shaping this heavenly narrative. His transdisciplinary approach spans several media that include maps and portraits, oil paintings and etchings, private drawings and collectively-produced published images. The book helped me see Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and the starry night above, with new eyes and a new appreciation for the vision and visioning of nineteenth century astronomical observers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that this work was read and rendered in modern Arabic-language contexts. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) invites us into a late nineteenth-century moment when the notions of “science” and “civilization” mutually transformed one another, and offers a thoughtful and nuanced account of the ways that this played out for scholars working and writing in Syria and Egypt. The early chapters of Elshakry’s book focus on the central role played by popular science journals like Al-Muqtataf (The Digest) in translating and disseminating Darwin’s ideas. We meet Ya’qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr, young teachers at the Syrian Protestant College who were instrumental in translating scientific works into Arabic there and, later, in Egypt. An entire chapter looks closely at Isma’il Mazhar’s work producing the first verbatim translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic, but the book also looks well beyond Darwin to consider broader Arabic discourses on the relationship between science and society, as those discourses were shaped by engagements with the work of Herbert Spencer, and many others. Elshakry pays special attention to the ways that this story is embedded in the histories of print culture, the politics of empire, and debates over educational reform, materialism, and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and concludes with a consideration of the continuing reverberations of these issues into late twentieth century Egypt and beyond. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the entanglements of science, translation, and empire in the modern world, and it will change the way we understand the place of Arabic interlocutors in the history of modern science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know this thanks to a diary in which he recorded these burnings and burials. In his new book, Richard Yeo contextualizes the diary-keeping and document-organizing practices of men like Pepys within a rich, detailed account of notes and note-taking among early modern English virtuosi. Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a fascinating glimpse into practices of information management as they allowed English scholars to bridge text and memory, print media and manuscripts, journals and commonplace books, reading and observation, the individual and the collective. Yeo’s book explores the relationship between early modern methods of collecting and storing information and the larger project of Baconian natural history, paying special attention to the ways that Bacon and several Fellows of the Royal Society used notebooks and other note-keeping technologies. Beyond this, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science is also deeply embedded in the history of memory and its (dis)contents, and engages (especially in a chapter on Samuel Hartlib and his circle) the historiography of epistolary networks and early modern histories of correspondence. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of dry ice. In Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Mitchell argues that we are in the midst of a vitalist turn in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and that this is only the latest in a series of eras of what he calls “experimental vitalism.” Experimental Life is largely devoted to exploring the first of those eras by tracing an experimental vitalism through a wide range of Romantic textual worlds from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After a wonderful discussion of the meanings of the “experimental” in the arts and sciences, Mitchell’s book proceeds to look at a series of cases through which we can understand how Romantic thinkers sought out the points of perplexity in vital phenomena, encouraged that perplexity, and often did so by exploring “altered states” that seemed to confuse life and death. These altered states included suspended animation, disorientation, digestion and collapsurgence, mediality, and encounters with the uncanniness of plant life, and Mitchell’s treatment of each case is both beautifully articulated and full of unusual and illuminating juxtapositions. Ultimately, Experimental Life offers readers not just a way of understanding these Romantic contexts, but also engages each case in a way that informs how we think about contemporary biomedical sciences and biopolitics. Experimental Life has also just won the annual book prize for the British Society for Literature and Science. Congratulations, Rob! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Kaiser‘s recent book is one of the most enjoyable and informative books on the history of science that you’ll read, full-stop. The deservedly award-winning How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W.W. Norton, 2012) takes readers into the “hazy, bong-filled excesses of the 1970s New Age movement” in order to explain and reveal the origins of some of the most transformative breakthroughs in twentieth-century quantum physics. Kaiser shows how the roots of quantum information science, a field that has given us the technology behind electronic bank transfers and information encryption systems, emerged from a rich soil made up of equal parts playful speculation, sophisticated calculation, and philosophical reflection, all entwined in the practices of the Fundamental Fysiks Group in the 1970s. It is a story that pays careful tribute to Einstein andThe Dancing Wu Li Masters, psychedelic mushrooms and the double-slit experiment, opera and Bell’s Theorem, quantum entanglement and Uri Geller. It is also a story of transformations in what it has looked, meant, and felt like to be a physicist since World War II. Whether you come to How the Hippies Saved Physics primarily for the hippies or the physics, you will come away with a sense of awe both for the brilliance of these tricksters and for the deft hand that Kaiser has brought to creating a thoroughly enjoyable account of their lives, work, and legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as a pseudoscience. And indeed it is. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when practitioners and advocates of parapsychology abounded. William James, one of the very founders of modern psychological science, was a fan. Most of the founders of modern psychology, of course, weren’t fans. They considered the parapsychologists frauds peddling cheap tricks to gullible people. These con-men, they said, gave true psychological science a bad name. There was only one thing to do: unmask them. As Michael Pettit shows in his fascinating book The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), that is precisely what the scientific psychologists did, or at least tried to do. They worked hard to create a firm boundary between their legitimate practice and what they considered illegitimate trickery. In so doing, they developed a science of deception, one that had far reaching implications for science, the law, and commerce in the United States. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), include reflections on Darwin’s theories of natural selection and divergence, Ernst Haeckel’s life and work, the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer, the linguistic theories of August Schleicher, and the historical tendency to relate Hitler’s Nazism to Darwinian evolutionary theory. Individually, the essays are models of close and careful reading of the documentary traces of the life and work of Darwin, Haeckel, and others, and include some exceptionally affecting and tragic moments. Many of them touch on evolutionary theory’s moral character, its roots in Romanticism, and its conception of mankind. In addition to offering a fascinating set of case studies in the history of biology, the essays and appendices also collectively raise some important questions about how historians understand the past and bring it into narrative existence. What kind of thing is the past? What sets the history of science apart from other historical disciplines? Is it reasonable to use contemporary science to help construe the past? What is a scientific theory and where is it located? What does it mean to ask (and what might it look like to carefully answer) a question like, Was Hitler a Darwinian? The essays in Richards’ collection are wonderfully reflective considerations that reward the time and attention of both specialists in the history of biology and thoughtful general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electricity, but also in a series of public lectures that generated very strong, furious responses, du Bois-Reymond galvanized (ha! see what I did there? galvanized? electricity?) nineteenth century publics of all sorts. In Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany (MIT Press, 2013), Finkelstein considers how someone so famous and so important could end up so forgotten, and he does a masterful job in rectifying that situation. The book traces du Bois-Reymond’s life and work, from a childhood in Berlin, to an early life and schooling in Bonn, and then back to Berlin and beyond in the course of a mature career in laboratories and lecture halls. We meet the scientist as teacher, as writer, and as public and university intellectual, and follow his transformation from Romantic to Lucretian and his dual existence as simultaneously staunch individual and product of his class and culture. The chapters are beautifully written, and range from exploring diary pages and love letters to laboratory equipment, with stopovers to consider frog pistols and hopping dances of joy along the way. Whether du Bois-Reymond was accepting the advice of his friends (as offered above) or avoiding his underwear-proffering mother-in-law (of which you’ll hear more in the conversation), he emerges here as not just an important historical figure, but also a fascinating person who’s a joy to read about. Enjoy! The author suggests the following links for interested listeners who would like to learn more: * A short description of the book on the MIT Press website. * A Q & A that goes into more detail about the book that John Horgan published on “Cross-Check,” his blog for Scientific American. * Another Q & A with Andreas Sommer at Cambridge University for his blog “Forbidden Histories“. * Du Bois-Reymond’s “frog pistol,” as featured in the current exhibition “Mind Maps” at the Science Museum in London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2013) traces a history of radioisotopes as military and civilian objects, for experimentation and therapeutic use, from the 1930s through the late twentieth century. Creager follows the emergence of a political and economic market for radioisotopes, looking carefully at their use as controversial political instruments, as representations of the benefits of atomic energy for US citizens, and as commodities. After six chapters that trace these broader contexts of the production and circulation of radioisotopes, the second half of the book offers a set of fascinating case studies that explore representative users and uses of the technology in biochemistry, molecular biology, medicine, and ecology. Aspects of the story touch on the history of scientific and medical research using human and animal subjects, the early history of radiation therapy, and the history of ecology and environmental science. Not only is it a historiographically important and meticulously crafted work based on exhaustive research, but it’s also a great set of stories. The pages of Life Atomic are full of guinea pigs, scientific vaudeville, and stories and characters from many different fields of the modern life sciences, expertly weaving them together into a compelling set of arguments. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Before the beginning of the twentieth century, most answers to this question were rather unsatisfying, unless of course you like your answers religio-mythical or pseudo-scientific. Then scientists discovered a genetic difference that seemed to correspond to sexual dimorphism: the 23rd pair of chromosomes was XX in (almost all) human females and XY in (almost all) human males. Thus was a research program born, one prefect for the age of molecular genetics: the search for “sex itself.” In her fascinating book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Sarah S. Richardson explores the ways in which molecular geneticists pursued this program and, just as importantly, the ways in which their “findings” were molded by contemporary attitudes toward sex and gender. The science we see in Sex Itself is not just about “the facts”; it’s about facts embedded in culture. She shows how the two–sexual science and culture–did a sort of dance, each leading the other about the floor of public discourse. Sometimes the dance is beautiful; other times the dancers stumble all over each other. Listen in to our lively discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, you may be a monist too and not even know it. Do you believe that there is really only one kind of stuff and that everything we observe–and our powers of observation themselves–are made of that stuff? If so, you’re a monist. But what kind? As Todd explains, the history of monism is not monistic: since its birth in the nineteenth century, there have been multiple monisms (which, you must admit, is a diverting irony). You can read about many of them in Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview (Palgrave, 2012), the edited volume Todd and I discuss in the interview. Despite their differences, all the monisms were radical, for they implied that there was no God and that religion was essentially an evolved superstition. This being so, monism was always controversial. It still is. Stephen J. Gould didn’t like it, but his colleague E.O. Wilson and most of the “New Atheists” do. Listen in and see where you stand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mikhail Lomonosov is a well known Russian figure. As poet, geographer, and physicist, Lomonosov enjoyed access to the best resources that 18th century Russia had to offer. As a result, his contributions to Russian arts and sciences were immeasurable. The source and shape of his celebrity, however, is as interesting... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What followed has become one of the most well-known accounts in the history of science and one of the most famous trials of twentieth-century America. In Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Adam R. Shapiro urges us to look beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both. The story begins with a pair of Pinkerton detectives spying on a pair of textbook salesmen in the Edwards Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. Shapiro brings us from that hotel room into a series of classrooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms while exploring the battle over textbook reform in the twentieth-century US. Based on a close reading of high school curricular materials around the discipline of botany, with special attention to the emergence of “civic botany” as a pedagogical field, Shapiro’s book uses the debates over pedagogy, evolution, and the textbook industry to explore a number of issues that are of central importance to the history of science: the construction of authorship, the histories of reading practices, the co-emergence of economies and technologies, and the ways that urban and rural localities shape the nature of sciences and their publics. It is a gripping, moving, and enlightening story. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices