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Farish A. Jenkins, Jr. – paleontologist, anatomist, curator, artist, professor, friend – died this past autumn at 72. Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology has collected obituaries from around the web here. Highlights include Nature, the Boston Globe, and the Harvard Gazette.

Famous for fieldwork (including the co-discovery of Tiktaalik in 2004) and beloved as a teacher, Farish loomed large at Harvard for four decades. There's been a certain pattern of reminiscence: suit-vest and pocket-watch, encyclopedic knowledge and blackboard artistry. He was the Indiana Jones of vertebrate paleontology – a scientist and a comedian, a storyteller and a Marine.

I was lucky enough to take his renowned lecture course on vertebrate paleontology—OEB 139—in the fall of 2007, just a few years after the discovery of Tiktaalik and a few before he first got sick, meaning it was one of the few times he got to draw his discovery in 139. Here are a few stray thoughts that came to m…

Chicago's Field Museum is making drastic cuts to basic research in order to meet a constrained budget. Lukas has argued that this should be seen as a blow to scientists, historians of science, and members of the public, even while we acknowledge museums' complex roots in the cultural capital of the Gilded Age.

Both Lukas's analysis and poignancy feel spot on, and I take seriously the idea that we can't cleave them apart. Museums don't just conveniently blur analytical binaries (like public and private, internal and external, expert and lay) for historians of science; they're also sites with which people fall in love, and thus a hook for wider audiences.

People who study museums—like Lukas, Jenna Tonn, and others—know this well. But I think one thing the Field Museum episode reveals is that, even within the academy (indeed, even within history of science), there are some widespread misperceptions about today's museum curation—some will be surprised that curato…

This post concludes my four-part series on the cultural context of contemporary popular science writing. The preceding three parts are here, here, and here. Though there's more to be said, I hope you enjoyed what I managed to get in here!

This past Monday, there were two public lectures given to packed Princeton auditoriums. Both drew on material from the social sciences, but neither of the speakers—New York Times columnist David Brooks and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein—holds an advanced degree from (or is employed by) a social science department.

Academic employment and/or credentials are standard benchmarks for "expertise" in any field, and their absence suggests interesting things about the shifting status of science's relationship to the public. Since that's been one of the main themes of my posts on the fall of Jonah Lehrer, it's a fitting way to start the final post a little closer to home. 

Now, my opening is a little misleading: Cass Sunstein and D…

This is the third installment of a four-part series on the cultural context of contemporary popular science writing. Part I is here, Part II is here, and Part IV will appear next week. 

The first decade of the new millenium put the big—as in big money—in "Big Ideas." From The Tipping Point (2000) to Freakonomics (2005) to Ted Talks (which started streaming in 2006), an intellectual economy emerged that put a premium (and a price) on counterintuitive conclusions.


In many ways, this was what I called "the house that Gladwell built" in my first post. However, my second post suggested a more structural explanation for the sort of popular science peddled by Malcolm Gladwell and what one source has called "the Gladwell clones and wannabes who specialize in writing counterintuitive books that explain the world."

Let's flesh this out a bit further. When people "copy Malcolm Gladwell," what exactly are they copying? Is it different if the person in que…

This is the second installment of a four-part series on the cultural context of contemporary popular science writing. Part I is here, and Parts III and IV will follow in the next two weeks.

In 2010, Jonah Lehrer wrote a widely-read New Yorker piece called "The Truth Wears Off." It began with a provocative question: "Is there something wrong with the scientific method?"

Lehrer's answer, both in the piece and in follow-ups elsewhere, was "yes." He calls the frightening failure of scientists to reproduce one another's results (or even their own) the "decline effect"—an old phrase for a new fear.

However, it's not just science that's in trouble. In the wake of Lehrer's recent travails, something seems wrong with science writing, too—big, bold claims seem unable to weather scrutiny. In what follows, I'll treat the problems facing science and science writing as parallel stories.

So, what is the "decline effect"?

According …

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O [Jonah], thou wast slain in thine high places.  2 Samuel 1:25 (King James, adapted)*
This summer, the meteoric career of pop-science wunderkind, bestselling author, and recently-appointed New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer reached its Icarian zenith–and abruptly ended. In my next few posts, I'll speculate about what went down, starting today with an outline of events and a glimpse ahead.

Though the details are now well-known, here's a brief summary of what happened when:

First came the charges of self-plagiarism. On 19 June, Jim Romanesco called Lehrer out for recycling his own material for his first few blogposts at the New Yorker. Otheroutletshopped on the story, and—with the help of Google—instances of self-plagiarism piled up, including numerous examples from his new book, Imagine. Still, it looked David Remnick and others were willing to forgive him.

Soon, though, the "self-" was dropped. It seemed like Lehrer…

As many of you know, the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science (PACHS) anchors an increasingly rich array of HPS offerings—talks, conferences, fellowships, and even a blog—on offer in Philly. They've got events almost every day of the week, drawn together from institutions spread up and down the Delaware.


In about a fortnight, PACHS is hosting its 2012 Introductory Symposium. This is a chance for scholars from around the area to present brief synopses of their current projects. It should provide a great cross-section of current work in HPS, much of which (by the looks of the program) falls within the purview of AmericanScience.
There are projects spanning from the colonial period, through the Early Republic, the Gilded Age, and across the twentieth century. Lots of comparative work, tons of connections between science and politics, agriculture, and industry, and even a tiny bit on the scientific method. 
The all-day event is being held on Friday, September 28th, at (I b…

More thoughts on beer technologies! These should go down just as smoothly as my post on canning craft beer (written up more fully here). I'll focus on MillerCoors, one of the industry's biggest packaging innovators, and in particular on one of their best-selling beers, Miller Lite. 

The fact that taste isn't the most interesting thing about Miller Lite (as the company itself has basically suggested*) is, I'd argue, not unrelated to the fact that the brand has been on the leading edge of a packaging revolution for the last half-decade. 

Consumers have a lot of trouble telling the difference between "light American lagers" by taste (just listen to these experts!). To distinguish themselves on the marketplace, a lot goes into (big surprise) marketing – but here I think we've got something more. Differences in packaging might in fact be mostly talk, but there's at least a claim to technological superiority – and that's enough to get me interested. 

Much …

Yesterday, I awoke to two announcements. First, Steve Shapin is giving a talk in England at the end of the month called "The Tastes of Wine: Towards a Cultural History." Second, next week is "American Craft Beer Week." Here's the announcement for that:


These two events have more in common than alcohol and my inbox. Shapin's argument that oenophiles constitute an evolving "taste community" is increasingly true for craft beer in the United States. While not amenable to Shapin's longue-durée approach, craft brewing provides an alternative view of technology, economics, and aesthetics – capitalism, you might say! – with a peculiarly American flavor.

Check out that promotional video. It's all flags and amber waves of grain – Benedict Anderson in a pint glass. And the pride is well-placed: as announced at last week's Craft Brewer's Conference, the industry posted a 15% retail spike in 2011, reaching 5% of the domestic market by volume and …

In the wake of yesterday's guest-post, I've been thinking about our ontology discussion (here and here) through a new lens. It's a dual one, framed around the sorts of questions we historians (of science) ask and how we go about answering them – motivations and methods, if you will. 


Don't worry: I'm not diving (all the way) down the rabbit hole again. But I wanted to link this up with a post from long ago on "the science (studies) wars" and specifically to Daston's now-famous question ("Philosophy, anyone?"). Specifically, I wanted to see if I could ground the ontology/epistemology dyad in the issue of reflexivity.

In my dissertation, I examine the ill-defined "field" of American debates over scientific methods between philosophers, psychologists, and scientists at the turn of the twentieth century. And in pursuit of both theory and procrastination, I've also been sifting through subsequent developments in these conversations, p…

A recent dust-up between physicist/author Lawrence Krauss and philosopher of science David Albert should be of interest to anyone who studies science and wonders about how such studies interact with and are perceived by scientists. The controversy started with Albert's NYT review of Krauss's new book, A Universe from Nothing.


The book is part cosmological primer and part anti-religious screed (featuring an afterword by Richard Dawkins!), building on a lecture Krauss gave in 2009 that's had over a million hits on Youtube. I haven't read it, but I have seen the lecture, and based on that I'm not surprised that Krauss is regarded as a lucid and engaging popular science writer.


What Albert took issue with – and where the bickering began – was Krauss's use of the word "nothing." It turns out that Krauss can't explain where things like the laws of quantum mechanics or the fields described by relativistic quantum field theory come from: instead, "noth…