Science: History of Science (12)

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Mathematics
• Science: History of Science

Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy

• Karen Attar
• Adrian Rice
• Christopher Stray

When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’ and even as ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan’s life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.

• Anthropology
• Politics and Sociology
• Science: History of Science

The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020

• Marianne Sommer

This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns?

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• History
• Science: History of Science

Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution

• Adrian Desmond

In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.

• Biography
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Science: History of Science

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young

• Andrew Robinson
• Martin Rees

No one has given the polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) the all-round examination he so richly deserves—until now. Celebrated biographer Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never sought fame.

• Information Technology and Computer Science
• Science
• Science: History of Science
• Textbooks and Learning Guides

B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data

• Stephen Robertson

Treading the line between philosophy and technical history, Robertson draws on his extensive technical knowledge to produce a text which is both thought-provoking and accessible to a wide range of readers.

• Politics and Sociology
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Hanging on to the Edges: Essays on Science, Society and the Academic Life

• Daniel Nettle

Pragmatically arguing from the intersection between social and biological sciences, Nettle reappraises the virtues of policy initiatives such as Universal Basic Income and income redistribution, highlighting the traps researchers and politicians are liable to encounter. This provocative, intelligent and self-critical volume is a testament to the possibilities of interdisciplinary study—whose virtues Nettle stridently defends—drawing from and having implications for a wide cross-section of academic inquiry. This will appeal to anybody curious about the implications of social and biological sciences for increasingly topical political concerns. It comes particularly recommended to Sciences and Social Sciences students and to scholars seeking to extend the scope of their field in collaboration with other disciplines.

• Science
• Science: History of Science

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia

• Nikolai Krementsov

In 1865, British polymath Francis Galton published his initial thoughts about the scientific field that would become ‘eugenics.’ The same year, Russian physician Vasilii Florinskii addressed similar issues in a sizeable treatise, entitled Human Perfection and Degeneration. Initially unheralded, Florinskii’s book would go on to have a remarkable afterlife in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia. In this lucid and insightful work, Nikolai Krementsov argues that the concept of eugenics brings together ideas, values, practices, and fears energised by a focus on the future.

• Philosophy
• Politics and Sociology
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

• Jeff Kochan

In this bold and original study, Jeff Kochan constructively combines the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) with Martin Heidegger’s early existential conception of science. Kochan shows convincingly that these apparently quite different approaches to science are, in fact, largely compatible, even mutually reinforcing.

• Philosophy
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Knowledge and the Norm of Assertion: An Essay in Philosophical Science

• John Turri

Concise, comprehensive, non-technical, and thoroughly accessible, this volume quickly brings readers to the cutting edge of a major research program at the intersection of philosophy and science. It presupposes no philosophical or scientific training. It will be of interest to philosophers and scientists, is suitable for use in graduate and undergraduate courses, and will appeal to general readers interested in human nature, social cognition, and communication.

• Science
• Science: History of Science

Animals and Medicine: The Contribution of Animal Experiments to the Control of Disease

• Jack Botting
• Regina Botting

This volume presents the articles Jack Botting wrote for the Research Defence Society News from 1991 to 1996. Collected, they can now reach a wider readership interested in understanding the part of animal experiments in the history of medicine—from the discovery of key vaccines to the advancement of research on a range of diseases, among them hypertension, kidney failure and cancer.

• Politics and Sociology
• Science
• Science: History of Science

The Scientific Revolution Revisited

• Mikuláš Teich

With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.

• Anthropology
• European Studies
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway 1890-1945

• Jon Røyne Kyllingstad

This book investigates the role played by Scandinavian scholars in inventing this so-called superior race, and discusses how this concept put its stamp on Norwegian physical anthropology, prehistory, national identity, and on the Norwegian eugenics movement. It also explores the decline and scientific disputation of these ideas in the 1930s as they came to be associated with the ‘genetic cleansing’ of Nazi Germany. This is the first comprehensive study on Norwegian physical anthropology, and its findings shed new light on current political and scientific debates about race across the globe.