Blog | Page 3 of 8 | Professor Joe Cain

What’s the STSNewsRoom?

Update April 2026: We decided to bring the STSNewsRoom to an end in 2025. Our feeling was this had run its course, and student needs had evolved such that a new approach was needed. I’m […]

The Tzar Nicholas Suspension Bridge under construction in 1853 as photographed by John Cooke Bourne (National Museum of the History of the Ukraine)

John Cooke Bourne’s Flirtation with Russia and Ukraine

Great news: John van Laun’s MPhil 2021 study of John Cooke Bourne’s tinted lithographs of the London and Birmingham Railway is available via UCL Discovery as open access. I hear from John there is an aside […]

George Gaylord Simpson, 1956 (courtesy American Philosophical Society Library).

Patricide in the Repeated Assassination of George Gaylord Simpson

George Gaylord Simpson was the undisputed American heavy-weight in macro-evolutionary theory prior to paleobiology’s disciplinary formation in the 1970s. Memory of Simpson’s intellectual influence on this next generation of thinkers is tied intimately to aggressive […]

Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Penguin Classics), 1890 second edition, edited by Professor Joe Cain and Dr Sharon Messenger ISBN 9780141439440

Reading Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was a book at the very heart of Darwin’s research interests – a central pillar of his ‘human’ series. This book engaged some […]

Biodynamica - Basile J. Luyet from volume 1, 1934-1938

Biodynamica, published by Basile J. Luyet

Historians of the synthesis period in evolutionary studies, aka evolutionary synthesis, are deeply familiar with the Columbia Biological Series. This monograph series included key texts for the American evolutionist community, including Theodosius Dobzhansky’s (1937) Genetics […]

Dunn in Germany 1928, in Dunn Papers, folder: “Photographs #1”. Courtesy of APS Library.

The Situation in Genetics: Leslie Clarence Dunn’s 1927 Russian Tour

In 2003, I co-authored publication of a transcription of Leslie Clarence Dunn‘s 1927 report on genetics research facilities in Russia. This appeared in the Mendel Newsletter, published by the American Philosophical Society Library as Joe Cain […]

Sergei Chetverikkov, Russian population geneticist

Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov (1880-1959) Russian population geneticist

Sergeĭ Sergeevich Chetverikov (=Tschetwerikoff) was a Russian entomologist, an expert on butterflies, and a pioneer of population geneticists. Born into a well-educated, professional family, Chetverikov entered the University of Moscow in 1900, graduating six years […]

Statue from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the British Museum

The statue from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the British Museum is a beautiful, captivating object. It is a “moai”. Its name is Hoa Hakananai’a (loosely translated to “Stolen Friend”, sometimes spelled Hoa Haka Nanai’a). […]

Plesiosaur skeleton (Thalassiodracon hawkinsi) cast at UCL Grant Museum of Zoology.

Thalassiodracon – Plesiosaur at UCL Grant Museum of Zoology

Humans came to understand the significance of fossils only in the early nineteenth century: their extraordinary variety and quantity, forms unlike anything seen in the world today, incomprehensibly vast periods of time for layer upon […]

Portraits of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin. 1840. By George Richmond

Darwin in London – Commemorative Plaques and Family Baptism Records

During research concerning Charles and Emma Darwin’s life at number 12 Upper Gower Street, Bloomsbury, London, I identified several errors and vagaries in biographical material found in standard reference works. This note communicates corrections and […]