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The following book review appears in Isis 101 (September 2010): 671-672.

© 2010 by The History of Science Society, and reprinted here according to the guidelines of the University of Chicago Press.

Randall T. Wakelam.
The Science of Bombing: Operational Research in RAF Bomber Command. ix + 347 pp., illus., apps., index. Toronto/London: University of Toronto Press, 2009. $55 (paper). William Thomas

During World War II, scientists worked for the British, Canadian, and American military services to study plans, tactics, training, and procedures to see whether military practices made sense in light of up‐to‐date information from the field. The manner of this work varied from conducting special investigations, to parsing statistics, to building sophisticated mathematical models of such military operations as hunting for U‐boats. This work was known in Britain as “operational research” (OR) and was later established as its own profession.

Immediately following the war, the embryologist C. H. Waddington helped record the activities of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Coastal Command’s OR Section (ORS), which he had led for a time. He published this history decades later as OR in World War II (Elek, 1973). As Waddington put it when that book was published, the “essential nature” of wartime OR “cannot be conveyed except through discussion of many particulars” (p. xiv). Whatever the merits of any individual study, OR’s main impact was in the knowledge acquired through the accumulated study of military operations over time. Thus, to convey the character and value of wartime OR, Waddington felt it necessary to reconstruct the history of the section’s work.

In The Science of Bombing, the military historian Randall Wakelam has done Waddington one better, recounting in detail the work of RAF Bomber Command’s ORS and intertwining it with a study of the planning done by the command’s senior officers. The result is a highly detailed account of the evolution of the intellectual anatomy of bombing. Whereas typical military histories focus on the bird’s‐eye view of grand strategy or the ground‐level view of the soldier, or present a roster of technologies used, Wakelam uses the section’s view to reconstruct the long string of procedural deliberations at headquarters that determined how well bombs were aimed and how many crews returned from missions alive.

This study is important, primarily because it is able to demonstrate the ways in which policy‐oriented research could impact executive decisions. Such impacts are difficult to trace in terms of a clear acceptance or rejection of researchers’ recommendations. Instead, one must track executive deliberations over time in order to determine the often more oblique ways in which research helps executives articulate and weigh their options. Doing so, Wakelam concludes that the ORS played a key role in Bomber Command planning—a point that he admits he was predisposed not to accept, given his own more recent experiences with OR in the Canadian military.

Wakelam uses this conclusion to revise the historical picture of decision making in Bomber Command, particularly that of its commander‐in‐chief, Arthur Harris. Harris has often been portrayed as having a rigid and brutal mentality in order to explain his commitment to Britain’s policy of targeting the German civilian population, which was strategically ineffectual into 1944 and cost many RAF crews their lives. Importantly, this perspective has been reinforced by prominent scientists associated with wartime OR, including Patrick Blackett, Solly Zuckerman, and Freeman Dyson (who joined the Bomber Command ORS in 1943, at nineteen years of age). All these scientists have likewise implicated the ORS and its allegedly servile leader, civil service researcher Basil Dickins, in Harris’s intellectual shortcomings.

Wakelam takes pains to distinguish the policy of strategic bombing from operational planning, correctly pointing out (as has the historian Maurice Kirby) that the ORS was not generally tasked with justifying or questioning Britain’s strategic policy and that its activities deserve historical scrutiny beyond that issue. (Wakelam does note that the ORS was drawn into debates between Harris and those who wanted to divert effort to tactical bombing in support of the D‐Day invasion—including Zuckerman, who did not forget it.) He argues that neither Harris nor Dickins deserves his intellectual reputation.

Few historians of science will have much use for the detailed narrative of The Science of Bombing, but some may find its depiction of the relationship between policy research and executive decision illuminating. Some detail might have been sacrificed to expand on how groups such as intelligence analysts and the command’s Bombing Development Unit similarly contributed to headquarters deliberations. ORS methodology is not extensively surveyed. Nevertheless, the book lends a new and sophisticated perspective to our knowledge of scientific work in the war.

Today, Patrick and I headed over again to Tryon Creek State Park (what can I say, we love it there!) and we spotted this:

That’s a Coastal Giant Salamander, Dicamptodon tenebrosus.

Graduate students are highly encouraged to volunteer at the HSS/PSA conferences! You will get your registration fees waived in exchange for 4.5 hours for packet stuffing, working the registration desk, or other necessary tasks. For more info, please click here to see the flyer or contact Manuela Fernandez (manuela at hssonline.org).

The September 2010 issues of The British Journal for the History of Science and Isis each contain an article on the history of psychology. The former journal features an article by Michael Pettit on the history of the raccoon as a psychological research subject and why the animal failed to attain prominence in the discipline in the way of rats and pigeons. In Isis historian of science Michael Sokal uses the case of early American psychologist James McKeen Cattell to argue that scientific biography can be enhanced if one puts to use the insights derived from modern psychology. Also in this issue of Isis is a review of Alexandra Rutherford’s book Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner’s Technology of Behaviour from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s by Jill Morawski. AHP has previously discussed Beyond the Box here, here, and here. Titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“The problem of raccoon intelligence in behaviourist America” by Michael Pettit. The abstract reads:

Even during its heyday, American behaviourist psychology was repeatedly criticized for the lack of diversity in its experimental subjects, with its almost exclusive focus on rats and pigeons. This paper revisits this debate by examining the rise and fall of a once promising alternative laboratory animal and model of intelligence, the raccoon. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychological investigations of the raccoon existed on the borderlands between laboratory experimentation, natural history and pet-keeping. Moreover, its chief advocate, Lawrence W. Cole, inhabited the institutional and geographic borderlands of the discipline. This liminality ultimately worked against the raccoon’s selection as a standardized model during the behaviourist era. The question of raccoon intelligence was also a prominent topic in the contemporaneous debates over the place of sentiment in popular nature writing. Although Cole and others argued that the raccoon provided unique opportunities to study mental attributes such as curiosity and attention, others accused the animal’s advocates of sentimentalism, anthropomorphism and nature faking. The paper examines the making and unmaking of this hybrid scientific culture as the lives of experimenters and animals became entangled.

“Scientific Biography, Cognitive Deficits, and Laboratory Practice: James McKeen Cattell and Early American Experimental Psychology, 1880–1904″ by Michael Sokal. The abstract reads:

Despite widespread interest in individual life histories, few biographies of scientists make use of insights derived from psychology, another discipline that studies people, their thoughts, and their actions. This essay argues that recent theoretical work in psychology and tools developed for clinical psychological practice can help biographical historians of science create and present fuller portraits of their subjects’ characters and temperaments and more nuanced analyses of how these traits helped shape their subjects’ scientific work. To illustrate this thesis, the essay examines the early career of James McKeen Cattell—an influential late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experimental psychologist— through a lens offered by psychology and argues that Cattell’s actual laboratory practices derived from an “accommodation” to a long-standing “cognitive deficit.” These practices in turn enabled Cattell to achieve more precise experimental results than could any of his contemporaries; and their students readily adopted them, along with their behavioral implications. The essay concludes that, in some ways, American psychology’s early twentieth-century move toward a behavioral understanding of psychological phenomena can be traced to Cattell’s personal cognitive deficit. It closes by reviewing several “remaining general questions” that this thesis suggests

History of Science departments have a record of abject failure when it comes to maintaining a thriving presence in online discussion.  University of Pennsylvania’s Logan Lounge was a pioneering departmental effort, but soon sank into posting semesterly updates of upcoming colloquia, and, after 2008, stopped doing even that.  The University of Minnesota program has also given it a go, but never got things going very well (I expect more from my hometown Golden Gophers!).  University College London apparently could not secure state funding and the support of local workers for the construction and maintenance of its STS Observatory.  The University of Oklahoma’s Hydra journal died quietly soon after creating a site with professional-looking graphics.  Ostensibly having an entire department dedicated to the task of maintaining a blog should make it easier for everyone — I know I wish I had more backup! — but this is apparently not so.  Tragedy of the commons, or something, I guess.

Libraries, archives, and museums have a much more impressive record.  Oregon State’s Pauling Blog continues to amaze me in its ability to churn out quality material on a single person week after week.  The Copenhagen Medical Museion keeps a steady hand on the wheel of its discussions of material culture and public presentation in the biomedical domain.  The Wellcome Library blog is excellent, and the Royal Society is off to a good start as well.  My employers, for lack of planning, did not fare so well.

Now there is blogging fever at the University of Toronto.  Three students have started blogs: Jai Virdi, Aaron Sidney Wright, and Jonathan Turner.  In addition, there is a new group blog, The Bubble Chamber, which aims to address a broader audience about matters of public interest.  EWP wishes this new cauldron of effort well, but will observe that keeping a consistent blog requires either a deep well of subject matter to make public, or a willingness to grow in one’s ideas with time.  History of Science scholarship encourages us to think that, by our capacity as people dedicated to the study of science and technology, we have the additional capacity to see-and-commentate at will, and that this ensures both good historiography and our value to the public sphere.  A line of dead blogs (and declining blogs that will remain nameless) suggests we think we have more ideas than we really have.  (Also: no whining about work loads — blogging should always augment your work, not distract you from it.  Blogs should maintain an individualized pace and format appropriate to that task.)  Toronto: the spotlight is on you.

More pics from another visit to Tryon Creek State Park in Portland (previous), full set here:

Website: Darwin & Gender / Blog: Darwin and Gender: The Blog / Twitter: @DarwinWomen

Some items of interest from the October 2010 issue of Archives of Natural History:

Darwin’s historical sketch – an American predecessor: C. S. Rafinesque, C. T. Ambrose

Edward Forbes (1815–1854) and the exhibition of natural order in Edinburgh, Geoffrey N. Swinney

Early copies of the first edition of Origin of species in Australia, A. M. Lucas

Alfred Russel Wallace notes 2: the spelling “Russel”, and Wallace’s date of birth, Charles H. Smith, James Williams, Jonathan Stephens, and George Beccaloni

If you need a roommate for the 2010 HSS Annual Meeting, try posting a comment on our roommates page or use our Facebook group to find someone. Please check back for more info coming soon!

The blog H-madness has been posting the syllabi for courses related to madness, mental illness, and psychiatry for the past week or so now. As of today there are 12 syllabi available on their site from professors around the globe. The postings include not only a copy of the syllabus from each course but also some background information about the research interests of the particular professor and how the course came to be developed.

The courses range in focus from survey courses on the history of madness to the history of patients/consumers/survivors to the history of asylums to courses that combine the histories of psychiatry and psychology.

Just a quick note to say that I will now be doing some new entries, as well as some cross-posting and re-posting from EWP at the new Whewell’s Ghost blog, which has been set up by John Lynch, evolvingthoughts.net’s John Wilkins, and Rebekah Higgit of the National Maritime Museum in London.  It is meant as a clearing-house for high-quality posts on history and philosophy of science, and already seems to be dwarfing readership here after about one day on the internet.

I’ve been adding new blogs and twitter accounts to my big list of history of science blogs, and I am happy to have just added Whewell’s Ghost:

This is a group blog for collecting blog posts on the history and philosophy of science, and for posting new ones too. It is named after William Whewell (pronounced “hew-ell”), whose works History of the Inductive Sciences and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in the mid 19th century set off both the proper and separate history of science, and the philosophy of science, respectively. It’s no accident that Whewell coined the term “scientist”. It was said of him that he had read a great many prefaces, which is a bit unfair as scientists tended to lay out their philosophy in the prefaces to their technical books.

We aim to collect as many authors who write decent and accurate history and philosophy of science as we can. So if you are inclined to post something either on your own blog or are looking for a place to do so, please contact John Lynch or John Wilkins to be added, and let us raise Whewell’s Ghost.

Mentioned in a post by @Rebekah Higgitt is her new annex blog, Reading the History of Science, spawned by her interest in popular books about the history of science:

I few days ago, I sent a question out on Twitter: ”Could you send me e.g.s of GOOD popular history of science, any format? Ones that wd please academic historians & general readers #histsci” and went on to explain that the ”Reason for request is I’m realising how easy it is to criticise bad #histsci but how hard to point to good stuff aimed at wide audience”.

Glad to see more blogging about the history of science!

From Stages of Succession:

What is even more depressing is how easy it is for religious topics to sneak into the National Curriculum. This is the specification for Edexcel GCSE Science, the qualification UK students take at age 16:

Students will be assessed on their ability to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the principles of natural selection, to include:
  - How individuals within a species can have characteristics that promote more successful reproduction (survival of the fittest)
  - How, over generations, the effects of natural selection result in changes within species and the formation of new species from genetic variants or mutants that are better adapted to their environment
  - How species that are less well-adapted to a changing environment can become extinct
• Explain how fossils provide evidence for evolution
• Discuss why Charles Darwin experienced difficulty in getting his theory of evolution through natural selection accepted by the scientific community in the 19th century

Is that last point a bad thing? Surely there were scientific critiques of Darwin’s theory – on the age of the earth and the time needed for evolution to occur, on Darwin not having an answer for the mechanism for inheritance, etc. Not sure that having students “Discuss why Charles Darwin experienced difficulty in getting his theory of evolution through natural selection accepted by the scientific community in the 19th century” is sneaking religious topics into the National Curriculum. There is a history to Darwin and his theory, one that should definitely be part of the teaching of the science part of it. Darwin’s theory was not accepted by all, based on scientific and religious grounds. Students should learn that, as well as that evolution is accepted by a vast majority of scientists today, and the dissent comes from largely religious groups, some of which masquerade their critiques as “science.”

In historiographical discussions, a key concern is whether certain problematics prejudice historical portraiture.  By “problematics” I mean the dialectical process that determines what topics are researched, how they are investigated, and how the results of investigations are presented.  By “portraiture” I mean the sum total availability of information about the various aspects of history, apart from any analytical statements made about it and from our ability to navigate within the resulting historiography.  In other words, how do the questions we want to ask about the historical record both expand and limit our summary and publication of the record’s contents?

For at least a half a century, one way that professional history of science (and history more generally) has consistently attempted to distinguish itself is by pointing to its ability to recognize and correct for earlier historians’ and non-professionals’ prejudicial limitations in their portraiture.  Hagiographic biographies discount major historical actors’ flaws.  Positivistic accumulations of scientific contributions discount scientific “wrong turns” and the importance of theoretical frameworks.  Intellectual histories of science discount the culture of science.  Philosophical accounts of the historical establishment of claims discount the sociological work necessary to secure assent around them.

Invisibility

Initially, criticisms of prejudicial portraiture emphasized that important constituencies have been rendered invisible through various forms of bias.  Social history in the vein of E. P. Thompson emphasized bias against histories of common people in favor of interest in political figures, cultural leaders, and other heroic or otherwise individually influential figures identified through what we might think of as a problematic that emphasizes concerted action.  Along these lines, portraiture of disempowered and marginal constituencies has flourished (although sometimes these retain a concerted-action problematic, choosing to emphasize actors who are on the fringe but who, within the confines of their particular sphere, are influential nonetheless).  Historians who discover new classes of invisible things stand to gain significant cachet.

In the historiography of science, scientists, historians, sociologists, and, indeed, many philosophers, have been noting for an exceedingly long time that the motivation behind scientific work, and the actual processes of that work, are often expunged or rearranged when work is distilled into a finished product.  There is a strong tradition, therefore, of offering a supplementary, informal portraiture to demonstrate the “human side” of science, the craftsmanship of scientific work, or the social and political context and implications of that work, for example.

In the last 30-40 years, however, an influential socio-epistemological point has made the rounds that scientific work actually depends on rendering the socio-cultural content of science “invisible”, because, it is argued, maintenance of the authority of scientific claims requires that they be regarded as the product of a purely epistemological process.  This strategy is said to break down when assent is not successfully secured, and socio-cultural content is rendered visible.  Notable here is Steven Shapin’s chapter, “Invisible Technicians: Masters, Servants, and the Making of Experimental Knowledge” in his Social History of Truth (1994), but the whole train of objectivity studies in the mid-’90s takes this to be a key point, and it is crucial to the claims to relevance and cogency in the commentary of Bruno Latour on “science”, “nature”, and “modernity” from the late 1980s on.

Various criticisms of prejudicial portraiture and resulting invisibility have often been confounded.  Thus, discussions of historiographical craft often segue effortlessly into discussions of scientific epistemology and, for example, the nature of this epistemology’s relationship with public ideas.  I gather this is because epistemological misconceptions are taken to be a generic cause of systematic invisibilities in historiographical craft.  It is not clear to me that this is so, nor is it clear to me that scientific legitimacy has actually depended on sweeping cultural content under the rug, exactly.  More on these suspicions in follow-up posts.

For the time being, I want to suggest that there is a pressing need for an alternative posture to assumptions that a prejudicial historical portraiture is grounded in a particular kind of epistemological bias.

Positive Portraiture

The criticism of David Edgerton provides an interesting variation on the problem of historiographical invisibility.  This blog regularly promotes Edgerton’s critical observations on historiography (speaking of, see his most recent essay in the July Technology and Culture).  To date, I have paid less attention to his craftsmanship.  Edgerton’s history-writing is characterized by his assembly of inchoate sets of portraits, which typically highlight points that are “of importance”, for example, in assessing the history of British state sponsorship of R&D, he has noted the importance of the postwar Ministry of Supply.

The unity of Edgerton’s assemblages is to be found in their presentation of an amalgamated portrait that is invisible to, and at odds with, existing historiographical narratives and portraits.  The power of his work is in this strategy.  Among his recent works, Warfare State (2006) challenges the signal importance of the welfare state in British history and the search for explanations for British military vulnerability and weakness in science and technology.  Such narratives fail to discuss Britain as the major military and scientific and technological nation that it was.  Similarly, The Shock of the Old (also 2006) challenges the traditional historiographical bias toward novel technologies, arguing that even histories challenging the hype surrounding novel technologies simply “invert” the narrative to show the failures and problems associated with novel technologies.  To escape the narrative, the point is that it is important to study non-novel technologies as well (as well as related issues of technology use, like maintenance).

The difficulty here is that Edgerton’s criticism can be mistaken as claims to the discovery of new forms of invisibility, which historians can help make visible.  In cases where I have seen him cited, he is often regarded as simply calling for studies of “old” technologies, or of state scientific bodies (see Melissa Smith’s article on the Home Office’s Scientific Advisers’ Branch in the June BJHS).  Such studies are certainly a step in the right direction, but I think these do not capture the full point of Edgerton’s critique, which revolves more around the historiographical riches to be mined through what I call “positive portraiture”.

Positive portraiture relates to the historiographical effort to arrive at useful and extensive depictions of what existed in history, putting individual entities (events, people, technologies) in the context of comparable entities.

Edgerton’s work is interesting in that retains existing historiography’s interest in remedying persistent invisibilities, but, unlike that historiography, it finds a way forward not by arguing with that historiography’s conclusions, but by using positive portraiture to build an alternative vision of the past that undermines the historiography’s key assumptions about what issues need to be addressed and how.

I think a crucial aspect of positive portraiture, is its emphasis on the fact that vast aspects of the past are undocumented.  Undocumented history differs from invisible history in that the assumption is that the primary task of the historian is not to diagnose and undo past concealment, though that may be a useful secondary task.  Diagnosis and remedy too often adheres to that historiography’s investigatory agenda by engaging in a dialectic with it — what Edgerton calls “inversion”.

Instead, the primary task should be to extend portraiture as best as we can, and to build new argumentation on the basis of this portraiture.  How to move forward in this vein is an open question.  We know that undirected empiricism can produce exceedingly tedious and unilluminating history, but there is not much historiographical thought laying out what constitutes the most useful methods of portraiture.  The more inchoate qualities in Edgerton’s oeuvre suggests the need for an explicit new set of problematics, and some overarching means of navigating through our portraiture and the arguments associated with it, rather than engaging with various arguments in the historiography pell mell.  Once we have a better handle on how to do this and how to make historians and others interested in it (I suspect we may actually provoke more interest from outsiders already interested in specific topics), it will be correspondingly easier to engage with the historical record in more open-ended, exploratory, and productive ways.

Due in December:

In the Light of Evolution: Essays from the Laboratory and Field

Edited by Jonathan Losos

Summary: In the Light of Evolution is a collection of essays by leading scientists, including Edmund Brodie III, James Curtsinger, Ted Daeschler, Douglas Emlen, Harry Greene, Luke Harmon, Hopi Hoekstra, Daniel Lieberman, Jonathan Losos, Axel Meyer, Teri J. Orr, Naomi Pierce, David C. Queller, Neil Shubin, David Reznick, Michael Ryan, and Marlene Zuk. The book also includes essays by science writers Carl Zimmer, Andrew Berry, historian Janet Browne, and a foreword by journalist David Quammen. As David Quammen says in his foreword, the book collects “reports from the field, plainspoken descriptions of lifetime obsessions, hard-earned bits of wisdom, and works in progress, pried loose from some of the most interesting, eminent researchers in evolutionary biology….” It is a book “for readers who are fascinated by evolutionary biology and who desire to understand better the day-by-day, speciesby-species, ecosystem-by-ecosystem texture of its practice as a scientific profession.”

The Amazon listing is calling it In the Light of Evolution: Essays from Leading Evolutionary Biologists for whatever reason…

Henry Sidgwick (May 31, 1838–August 28, 1900)

From the journal Biology and Philosophy (June 2010):

Methods of ethics and the descent of man: Darwin and Sidgwick on ethics and evolution

Lillehammer, Hallvard

Abstract Darwin’s treatment of morality in The Descent of Man has generated a wide variety of responses among moral philosophers. Among these is the dismissal of evolution as irrelevant to ethics by Darwin’s contemporary Henry Sidgwick; the last, and arguably the greatest, of the Nineteenth Century British Utilitarians. This paper offers a re-examination of Sidgwick’s response to evolutionary considerations as irrelevant to ethics and the absence of any engagement with Darwin’s work in Sidgwick’s main ethical treatise, The Methods of Ethics. This assessment of Sidgwick’s response to Darwin’s work is shown to have significance for a number of ongoing controversies in contemporary metaethics.

The September 2010 issue of Biology and Philosophy looks at the Tree of Life:

The tree of life: introduction to an evolutionary debate
Author(s): Maureen A. O’Malley, William Martin & John Dupré
PP: 441 – 453

The attempt on the life of the Tree of Life: science, philosophy and politics
Author: W. Ford Doolittle
PP: 455 – 473

The series, the network, and the tree: changing metaphors of order in nature
Author: Olivier Rieppel
PP: 475 – 496

Why was Darwin’s view of species rejected by twentieth century biologists?
Author: James Mallet
PP: 497 – 527

Ernst Mayr, the tree of life, and philosophy of biology
Author: Maureen A. O’Malley
PP: 529 – 552

Microbiology and the species problem
Author: Marc Ereshefsky
PP: 553 – 568

The myth of bacterial species and speciation
Author(s): Jeffrey G. Lawrence & Adam C. Retchless
PP: 569 – 588

Natural taxonomy in light of horizontal gene transfer
Author(s): Cheryl P. Andam, David Williams & J. Peter Gogarten
PP: 589 – 602

Evaluating Maclaurin and Sterelny’s conception of biodiversity in cases of frequent, promiscuous lateral gene transfer
Author: Gregory J. Morgan
PP: 603 – 621

Symbiosis, lateral function transfer and the (many) saplings of life
Author: Frédéric Bouchard
PP: 623 – 641

Lifeness signatures and the roots of the tree of life
Author: Christophe Malaterre
PP: 643 – 658

Gene sharing and genome evolution: networks in trees and trees in networks
Author: Robert G. Beiko
PP: 659 – 673

Testing for treeness: lateral gene transfer, phylogenetic inference, and model selection
Author(s): Joel D. Velasco & Elliott Sober
PP: 675 – 687

Trashing life’s tree
Author: L. R. Franklin-Hall
PP: 689 – 709

On the need for integrative phylogenomics, and some steps toward its creation
Author(s): Eric Bapteste & Richard M. Burian
PP: 711 – 736

For the sake of getting these links out there, I’m just copying my tweets here:

#1 – Hey, Discovery Institute, he’s referring to you when he says “stupid people’s brains”: http://bit.ly/9VBS6p #Darwin #evolution

#2 – Re: my last tweet, more: http://bit.ly/av9Hls & http://bit.ly/bmz8v6 / @PZMyers has his say: http://bit.ly/b0LtEE #Darwin #evolution

And so what if this crazy guy was obsessed with Darwin, does that discredit the science. Absolutely not. This is really getting old.

Piers Hale, an historian of science at the University of Oklahoma, taught over the summer a month-long Study Abroad course in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands: HSCI 4970/5970 Charles Darwin and Galapagos: Solving the “mystery of mysteries.” Undergraduate students took both a zoology course in evolutionary ecology and a course on the history of evolutionary thought. Plus, exploring the places and following in the footsteps… not a bad way to get some credits! Piers hopes this can become a regularly offered course.

He has been posting pictures on his Facebook page, so I share here some Darwin-specific shots with his permission.

Here’s a shot from the University of San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador, of Darwin and Wallace (George will like this one):

Darwin bust:

Darwin bust:

Darwin statue:

Charles Darwin:

The bay where the Beagle dropped anchor 15 September 1835:

The bay where the Beagle dropped anchor 15 September 1835:

Avenue 12th February, San Cristobal:

An iguana for Darwin:

That Darwin bust again, nice sunset:

Convention center named after Darwin:

On the grounds of the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island:

I’m jealous…

Adrian Brock of University College Dublin has set up a website full of the writings of the noted historian of psychology Kurt Danziger. Though he is now long-retired from York University (Toronto), and is no longer attending conferences, Danziger has continued to write and conduct research. His most recent book, Marking the Mind: A History of Memory was just published in October 2008. Many of his essays and talks, however, have not been easily accessible. Brock, a former student of Danziger’s, has established www.kurtdanziger.com to collect these “lost” writings together and make them available to the general public.

Brock writes in his announcement:

One of the highlights [of the website] is a new web book that Kurt has put together:

“Problematic Encounter: Talks on Psychology and History”

It contains 12 talks which, for the most part, have never been
published or were published in outlets with a limited readership, such
as newsletters and conference proceedings. Kurt has revised some of
these talks, grouped them together according to common themes, and
written a new introduction to them. Access is completely free.

The web site is still under construction and I will be adding more
material to it over the next few months, including other previously
unpublished work.