Summer Light Reading #2: Moby-Dick as a history of sciece

This summer, I read Moby Dick for the first time.  While I knew the novel dealt with whales (spoiler alert!), I did not realize how much great history of science material Melville's novel contains.  Moby-Dick is obviously worth studying as a work of literature, but is also worth reading to get a glimpse a popular natural history circa 1850.  Of course, the internet is a great check on one's ego; a quick Wikipedia search brings up an entire article on the "Cetology of Moby-Dick".   The wikipedia article refers to chapter XXXII (which you can read here), in which Melville proposes his own taxonomy of whales.  I will not try and analyze this chapter in-depth without first brushing up on my 19th century natural history and knowledge of whale taxonomy.  Instead, what I find striking is the fact that such a technical digression was included in a novel.  I am curious how the average reader in 1851 reacted to this chapter; from what I can remember from a history of modern biology course I took, natural history in Victorian England became a past-time for a newly minted middle-class with too much time on its hands.  Just as many science literate laypeople today know the basics of evolutionary biology, I'm assuming that a science literate reader then would have known something about Linnean taxonomy.  These are interesting questions to pursue, and despite the wikipedia article, it seems to be an area open for exploration (though a search of an EBSCOhost HSMT database does yield a dissertation on "Melville in the Age of Darwin and Paley").  While this chapter is the most striking example of natural history working its way into the novel, other examples abound.  For historians of technology, the book offers lots as well-- Melville provides rich descriptions of naval technology and everyday life on a whaling vessel.  Given Moby Dick's length, the whole text would not fit into a college course, but long excerpts, such as chapter XXXII might fit nicely into a history of biology course.  Incorporating fiction into history of science seems to be an increasingly hot idea; Romantic literature (think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) abounds with descriptions and discussions of science.  Moby Dick seems to fit nicely into these studies.

The Goal of this Blog

My plan is to use this blog as something of a public journal of my thoughts on the history of science and related fields (e.g. STS, philosophy of science, science and politics, etc).  For me, the blog will be a kind of summer exercise: a way to avoid letting my shaky writing and critical thinking skills from atrophying completely over the summer.  Given the journal format, I won't promise completely polished posts, just sketches of different ideas--hopefully a few will actually be interesting.

To give you a sense of where my interests lie, here's a brief academic sketch.  I am currently fourth year undergraduate studying the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Like a lot of students who stumbled across the program, my interests are all over the place; my attraction to the field was partially based on the flexibility of the course-work--in the same semester I could study both Greek and Roman medicine alongside the history of classical physics.  Currently, my interests have narrowed slightly to two very different foci.  First, I am very interested in the history of biology and the related life sciences.  Reliving my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, great apes, and cave men has led me to hone in on the historical development of paleontology and anthropology.  I completed my capstone research paper on the challenges of making museum displays about human evolution encountered by anthropologists and artists at the Chicago Field Museum in the 1930s (more on that later?).  At the same time, I find myself equally drawn to the history of medieval science.  Part of this fascination comes from how unsung the medieval period remains.  There is so much wide-open territory to explore: the development of natural philosophy at medieval universities, the transmission and appropriation of ancient Greek science by Islamic civilization, the interaction between science and the Church, etc.  The more you dig, the more the middle ages deserve study as a time of intellectual achievement on par with the Renaissance or Enlightenment.  While these interests currently provide some guidance to my coursework and reading, my blog will probably go beyond them.  Anything related to the cross-section of science and the humanities will be fair game.

Summer Light Reading #1: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

As a currently unemployed/unemployable history of science undergrad with time to kill, I decided to read the 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  The book is arguably one of the foundational texts in both the History and Philosophy of Science, a must read for anyone with even vague interests in how science "really" works.  Of course, pretty much everything that needs to be said about the book seems to have been said; as an undergraduate, I won't even attempt to pretend like my opinion on the book's philosophical worth or historical utility matters.  Instead, I want to record my own reactions to the book as an undergrad reading it for the first time.  As someone familiar with the history of science, much of the books central claims barely raised an eyebrow.  For example, I was not shaken by Kuhn's claim that scientists choose new theories based on persuasion and future promise rather than on a careful comparison of that theory to nature or through logical analysis.  Nor did I find it hard to swallow Kuhn's denial that science constantly progresses closer to a single, underlying truth about nature.  I think my reaction reflects the fact that Kuhn's approach has been incorporated, debated, rejected, and reevaluated so thoroughly by historians of science that many historians no longer really see the book as all that revolutionary.  Instead, Kuhn's approach represents merely one of many ways to view the history of science.  Indeed, many historians--take for example the historian of medicine Harold Cook--view Kuhn's approach as outdated, reflecting the skewed values of logical positivism, which elevated theory over experiment and held physics as the model for all of science.  As a history text, Structure is still worth reading, but more as an example of one of many approaches to the history of science.