In Controlling Life (1987), Philip Pauly explores how scientists have sought to manipulate life for the sake of human benefit through a biographical account of the enigmatic biologist-engineer Jacques Loeb. Pauly’s motivation is to point out that the drive for biotechnology in the 1960s was not borne from a vacuum. The lack of historical context, he...

The cover of the 2011 second edition. A couple months ago I had the pleasure of reading the classic history of science text by Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. It examines a dispute in the 1600s between Robert Boyle – “the father of modern chemistry” – and Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher...

In the United States this week we will be celebrating Thanksgiving, and as its icon is the turkey, I thought I would do a little tracing of the turkey through the history of science. I found some rather old pictures! In case you forgot what a wild one looks like: Gary M. Stolz, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons  When...

The American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchus) are in the midst of their southerly migration from their breeding grounds in the Dakotas and Minnesota. I saw some myself at Long Meadow Lake near the Mall of America two weekends ago, in which 15-20 were participating in this slightly discomforting but elegant synchronized fishing/swimming activity: Seeing...

As discussed in my last post, the mutationist/Mendelians (defined below) have mostly been sidelined in the history of biology. The claims used to justify this argument make up what Arlin Stoltzfus and I call “The Mutationism Story.” While Arlin first discovered this in the scientific literature, we found that scientists were getting many of these mistaken...

tl;dr: I am published! What did early geneticists such as William Bateson, Hugo de Vries, Thomas Hunt Morgan and R.C. Punnett contribute to evolutionary thought? Nothing, according to many scientific sources. They aren’t included in various timelines of the history of evolutionary biology and most are not included in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Evolution....