Darwin's bawdy: the popular, gendered and radical reception of the Descent of Man in the US, 1871–1910

Most studies of the American reception of Darwin have focused on the Origin. The Descent of Man, however, was even more widely read and discussed, especially by those outside the emerging scientific establishment. This essay maps the varied, popular and radical responses to the Descent and suggests that these unauthorized readers helped shape the formation of American scientific institutions (by encouraging scientists to close ranks), as well as ordinary Americans’ perceptions of gender and sex. I argue that the radical – freethinkers, socialists and feminists – embrace of sexual selection theory provides one explanation for naturalists’ scepticism of the theory.

Crowdfunding Conservation Science: Tracing the Participatory Dynamics of Native Parrot Genome Sequencing

Who gets to practice and participate in science? Research teams in Puerto Rico and New Zealand have each sequenced the genomes of parrot populations native to these locales: the iguaca and kākāpō, respectively. In both cases, crowdfunding and social media were instrumental in garnering public interest and funding. These forms of Internet-mediated participation impacted how conservation science was practiced in these cases and shaped emergent social roles and relations. As citizens “follow,” fund, and “like” the labor of conservation, they create new relational possibilities for and with science. For example, the researchers became newly engaged and engaging by narrating and displaying the parrots via an Internet-inflected aesthetic. The visibility of online modalities shifted accountabilities as researchers considered whom this crowdfunded work answered to and how to communicate their progress and results. The affordances of the Internet allowed researchers from the peripheries of the scientific establishment to produce genomic knowledge for globally dispersed audiences. The convergence of genomic and Internet technology here shaped scientific practice by facilitating new modes of participation—for laypeople in science but also for scientists in society.

Prana – The Vital Energy in Different Cultures: Review on Knowledge and Practice

The subtle energy or <em>Prana</em> is essential for keeping our body healthy and alive. This article aims at analyzing the existence of subtle energy and the development of people’s perception of this concept across different cultures. The review is made on understanding the influence of this vital energy on people’s lives, health, spirituality, customs, and traditions. This article has reviewed, how the eastern and western cultures seemed to differ and are also alike in interpreting and utilizing the benefit of vital force. It also has addressed the need for perceiving vital force to get the desired outcome in one’s wellbeing. It can be summarised that the concepts of subtle energy may be innate, widespread, and in general, proved to be a pathway for reaching into the spiritual realm. Despite varying in the schematic illustration of the subtle energy from distinct cultures, however, the different perceptions and understandings have a common rationale on its application. Further theoretical and experimental research is essential for the scientific establishment of this area of implication.

“Yes, he is, at least, entertaining”

This paper investigates facework and identity construction on a pro-community water fluoridation Facebook page, drawing on rapport management (Spencer-Oatey 2000) and Culpeper’s (1996, 2010, 2011) taxonomy of impoliteness in English. In contrast to previous work on conflictual political talk on social media, which focuses largely on right/left or socially conservative/progressive polarised topics, it addresses discourse on a topic where conflict is between factions aligned with or against the scientific establishment. The paper shows members of an activist group engaging in face-aggravating behaviour against an ideologically opposed commenter. Even when they profess to be educating the commenter, the core goals of their behaviour are enhancing their own quality and identity face within the group by antagonising the outsider; participants construct an expert identity through performing superior intelligence and education, expressed through displays of scientific knowledge and creative forms of linguistic impoliteness.

Painlevé, Jean (1902–1989)

Jean Painlevé was a French scientist who was particularly well known for his documentary films about science and the natural world. He was the only son of French prime minister Paul Painlevé, himself a respected scientist. The younger Painlevé studied physics, chemistry, and biology at the Sorbonne, but he turned to filmmaking as a way of capturing aspects of scientific study that were other wise invisible. His films were criticized by the French scientific establishment, which distrusted the medium as a whole, but beginning with Œufs d’épinoche [The Stickleback’s Eggs: From Fertilization to Hatching] (1928), Painlevé built a corpus of documentary films that attracted attention from intellectuals in other fields, including Marc Chagall, Man Ray, and Georges Bataille. Painlevé’s films found resonances between science and Surrealism through a panoply of "trick" shots, using slow motion, whimsical music, and the patterns of nature to render the natural world strange. Painlevé was politically progressive throughout his life, and despite their ostensibly apolitical nature, Painlevé’s films are often perceived to be commentaries on the human world in which he lived. Painlevé claimed that he chose the subject of L’Hippocampe [The Seahorse] (1934) because the male of the species bears the eggs, while Les Assassins d’eau douce [Freshwater Assassins] (1947) depicts the brutality of life in a pond that mirrors the brutality of the war France had just endured. Painlevé was active in the creation and promotion of the Institute of Scientific Cinema (ICS), which worked to promote science films, and he continued to produce films into the 1980s.

Vaccines

Immunization is regarded by many as one of the greatest advances in modern civilization. The widespread use of vaccines has led to increases in life expectancy, reductions in the occurrence of childhood diseases, and is generally credited with saving millions of lives annually. But since their discovery two centuries ago, vaccines have been dogged by pockets of persistent distrust among those who are skeptical of their science or who find compulsory immunization at odds with personal liberty. The rise of these voices in contemporary culture has contributed to trends of vaccine delay and vaccine hesitancy in some communities -- a chasm between the general population and the scientific establishment that has persisted and grown at times across the last several decades. VACCINES: What Everyone Needs to Know® offers a scientifically grounded overview of the science, manufacture, and culture of vaccines in the United States and internationally. Aiming to offer an unbiased resource on this hotly debated subject, it provides accessible, authoritative overviews of the following: · How vaccines work · The history of vaccines · Vaccine policy -- who writes it, and does it matter? · The contents and manufacture of vaccines · Vaccine injury · The alleged link between vaccines and autism · Vaccines and new outbreaks Written by a leading authority in both infectious disease and vaccine education, this book offers a clear-eyed resource for parents or anyone with an interest in the use, efficacy, and controversy surrounding vaccines. In a subject area defined by partisanship, it offers reliable resource for what everyone needs to know.

Performing Gender

This chapter deals with individuals' performance of gendered characters in more recent debates about vaccines and autism. Mothers engaged in these debates perform traditional feminine characters in order to claim epistemic authority over their children's diagnosis and treatment and to argue against the scientific establishment, using character as an element of conformation, or as support for a cause. Thus, mothers who actively argue for increased research funding or for specific theories of autism's etiology draw on topoi of experiential knowledge, caregiving, and maternal instinct, sometimes embracing the character of mother warrior or autism mother. They are countered by experts, most often males, who take on the character of the good doctor or father figure to argue against the vaccine theory.

I bet on Borsboom

This chapter presents a commentary on the reification of mental illness, as discussed in the previous chapter. It explores the major reasons why there is a monolithic scientific establishment and isolated communities of intellectual dissidents, and there exists no meaningful debate about the nature of psychopathology or the best methods to study it.

Complexity

This chapter focuses on Stephen Wolfram, an early advocate of the importance of complexity science. He founded the Journal of Complex Systems back in 1987, and saw the transformational aspect of computer analysis long before it was generally understood. But his ego and his disdain for standard scientific conventions kept him and the complexity science he favored outside the mainstream scientific establishment that discourages such grandiose claims. In 2002, his self-published book A New Kind of Science was seen by the scientific community as the delusions of a former wunderkind. It is argued that Wolfram’s book represents the insights of a brilliant visionary about “a new tool of science”—computational tools that earlier scientists could hardly have imagined. These computational tools provide not only new tools for analysis, but also a new vision of how to frame thinking about complex processes. It is the blending of the computational tools and the vision that makes up complexity science.