I’m a historian of science. This category is for posts covering material in this subject area.
First published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was a book at the very heart of Charles Darwin‘s research interests – a central pillar of his ‘human’ series. This book More…
Every scientific discipline has inside jokes. Why? Because they perform social or intellectual work. In this post, Professor Joe Cain links jokelore to his project on one of biology’s most famous jokes, the Rhinogradentia, or More…
When asked about the Origin of Species and the theory of natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley told friends, “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that”. This is well-known folklore, and much has been More…
This page provides information about this pro-evolution magazine, otherwise lost, from the 1920s and 1930s. It was devoted to promoting the teaching of evolution in US public schools. It was titled, Evolution: A Journal of More…
A series of oral history interviews in 1996 with Professor Robert Evan Sloan (Bob) (1929-2019) regarding his career, the recent history of paleontology, and the life of an American scientist in the second half of the twentieth More…
UNESCO was created “to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science, and culture.” No one spoke with greater authority about the plan for UNESCO than Julian Huxley. This facsimile More…
In 1907, London medical students protested over a statue raised to a little brown dog. Bonfires burned late into the night. Large groups marched through the streets clashing with police. Gangs were arrested trying to More…
Meet Eoörnis (Eoornis), the woofen-poof. As the author explains, ‘Through countless ages and successive civilizations this remarkable bird has been the symbol of speed, stamina, grace of line, proportion of members, and beauty of motion.’ More…
The famous essay by John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic, first appeared as a chapter in his 1853 The Stones of Venice. This chapter proved immensely popular and took on a life of its own. More…
Protests were sure to follow the unveiling of the brown dog statue in Battersea, London, in 1906 in Latchmere Recreation Ground. The little terrier had become the focus of an anti-vivisection campaign directed against Professor William Bayliss More…
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