al-mofhariz

Hard to believe it has been a year since I reported on the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology, (see here).  This year's meeting, held at Penn, was one of the most well-attended in recent memory and featured a dozen well-crafted and dynamically-presented papers from grad students as local as Philadelphia and as distant as Arizona.




The meeting was kicked off by a plenary from Penn anthropologist Adriana Petryna, who spoke about work-in-progress on the demise of the sick role and the right to recovery.  I am biased (I have worked with Petryna for a number of years), but I appreciated the choice of an anthropologist of bioscience, following on the plenary given by anthropologist Marcia Inhorn last year. Anthropologists' attention to the life sciences have been informed by historians of biology and the methodological insights being generated through conversations across fields is responsible for some truly important work (here, I'm thinking of Hannah Landecker'…

[[Updated on 6 July 2012, to fix a few errors or poor phrasings in my original summary of Lewis et. al.'s paper, following on a productive and private discussion I had with one of the authors. My fixes are in brackets or indicated by strike-throughs.

I encourage historians of science to read this paper. As I wrote in my personal notes on it: “This is a fascinating paper—it makes Gould’s 'summer of 1977' look rather half-hearted and inexact.” And it turns out it was even more interesting than I thought: the authors find that the Morton did in fact mismeasure some of his skulls using his shot method (which Gould, and I, and many others) generally assumed to be accurate, but even those mismeasurements do not appear rooted in bias. I misread this conclusion and misrepresented it in my post.

But my post was never supposed to be a full review of Lewis et. al. --- I intended to talk about the state of the field in science studies and I continue to argue that while Lewis et. al. sho…