al-mofhariz

The Library of Congress now hosts a fascinating set of photographs taken by University of Chicago ecologists (and their students), most prominently Henry C. Cowles (no relation to our dear Hank). On a personal note, I love the images of Lake Michigan dunes. As an undergraduate at Michigan State, I did my best to escape every year to explore these enormous white-sand oddities and feel a bit of wonder. I did not realize at the time that those same dunes had inspired Cowles' theory of ecological succession, beginning with his 1898 dissertation "The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan." In that seminal work, Cowles explained: "Ecology, therefore, is a study in dynamics. For its most ready application, plants should be found whose tissues and organs are actually changing at the present time in response to varying conditions. Plant formations should be found which are rapidly passing into other types by reason of a chan...

Paul Greenberg recently reviewed D. Graham Burnett's The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century in the New York Times . Greenberg traces the arc, as told by Burnett, of the cetacean scientist from standing knee-deep in whale innards at the turn of the century to being newly enlightened by whale-ish complexity in the interwar years to fighting alongside other frustrated technocrats at the dawn of an age of international conservation to expanding the human and Cete mind in groovy ways amidst a backdrop of Cold War science. He comes away fascinated by the experience, but also wonders if the reading public wouldn't benefit from something less that 793 pages, with footnotes for the footnotes (almost) ---or actually, he wonders if the public wouldn't benefit from more: a shortened version to accompany the encyclopedic one. Read the review. You'll encounter the characters who most capture Greenberg's imagination: A. Remington Kellogg (the P...

A few weeks ago, Henry, Lukas, and I all traveled to New Haven for the 46th meeting of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology. Many of today’s leading scholars in the field gave their first papers at the conference and it continues to be a welcoming forum for junior scholars to share works-in-progress. It has become a tradition to include a citation on the back of the program to a short essay on the history of the meeting by Mary P. Winsor, published in Isis in 1999. In that piece Winsor points out that the spirit upon which the conference was founded and perpetuated in the early years was not, in fact, professionalization. It was to provide a “stimulating day of friendly intellectual exchange.” What makes the JAS-BIO an important gathering is that it serves as a space where people from many generations can think together about why and how we do what we do. In my own experience, it has been a particularly important opportunity for me to learn from my peers....