Portal:History of science/Article/2006 archive
This is an archive of article summaries that have appeared in the Selected article section of Portal:History of science in 2006. For past archives, see the Portal:History of science/Article.
February 8 - February 17, 2006
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The Voyage of the Beagle is a title commonly given to the book written by Charles Darwin published in 1839 as his Journal and Remarks, which brought him considerable fame and respect. The title refers to the second survey expedition of the ship HMS Beagle which set out on 27 December 1831 under the command of captain Robert FitzRoy. While the expedition was originally planned to last two years, it lasted almost five—the Beagle did not return until 2 October 1836. Darwin spent most of this time exploring on land (three years and three months on land; 18 months at sea).
Darwin's account of the voyage is a vivid and exciting travel memoir as well as a detailed scientific field journal covering biology, geology and anthropology that demonstrates Darwin's keen powers of observation, written at a time when the West were still discovering and exploring much of the rest of the world. With hindsight, one can find hints of the ideas Darwin would later develop into the theory of evolution.
February 17 - March 3, 2006
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The Great Chain of Being is a classical and western medieval conception of the order of the universe, whose chief characteristic is a strict hierarchal system.
It is a conception of the world's structure that was accepted, and unquestioned, by most educated men from the time of Lucretius until the Copernican revolution and the ultimate flowering of the Renaissance. The Chain of Being is composed of a great number of hierarchal links, from the most base and foundational elements up to the very highest perfection - in other words, God, or the Prime Mover.
Moving on up the chain, each succeeding link contains the positive attributes of the previous link, and adds (at least) one other. Rocks possess only existence; the next link up, plants, possess life and existence. Beasts add not only motion, but appetite as well. Man is a special instance in this conception. He is both mortal flesh, as those below him, and also spirit, like the angels and God above.
The Great Chain of Being was central to work in natural history before the time of Linnaeus and Buffon.
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 10, 2006
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 12, 2006
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 14, 2006
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 16, 2006
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 18, 2006
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 20, 2006
A paradigm shift, a concept identified by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Kuhn contrasts paradigm shifts, which characterize a scientific revolution, to the activity of normal science, which he describes as scientific work done within a prevailing framework (or paradigm). In this context, the word "paradigm" is used in its original Greek meaning, as "example".
The nature of scientific revolutions has been studied by modern philosophy since Immanuel Kant used the phrase in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787). Kant used the phrase "revolution of the way of thinking" (Revolution der Denkart) to refer to Greek mathematics and Newtonian physics. In the 20th century, new developments in the basic concepts of mathematics, physics, and biology revitalized interest in the question among scholars.
Kuhn presented his notion of a paradigm shift in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Even though Kuhn restricted the use of the term to the natural sciences, the concept of a paradigm shift has also been used in numerous non-scientific contexts to describe a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events.
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 24, 2006
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 26, 2006
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 28, 2006
Lysenkoism (Russian: Лысе́нковщина, romanized: Lysenkovshchina) was a political campaign conducted by Trofim Lysenko, his followers and Soviet authorities against genetics and science-based agriculture. Lysenko served as the director of the Soviet Union's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenkoism began in the late 1920s and formally ended in 1964.
The pseudoscientific ideas of Lysenkoism assumed the heritability of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism). Lysenko's theory rejected Mendelian inheritance and the concept of the "gene"; it departed from Darwinian evolutionary theory by rejecting natural selection. Proponents falsely claimed to have discovered, among many other things, that rye could transform into wheat and wheat into barley, that weeds could spontaneously transmute into food grains, and that "natural cooperation" was observed in nature as opposed to "natural selection". Lysenkoism promised extraordinary advances in breeding and in agriculture that never came about.
Joseph Stalin supported the campaign. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were fired or even sent to prison, and numerous scientists were executed as part of a campaign instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents. The president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was sent to prison and died there, while scientific research in the field of genetics was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines was also negatively affected or banned.
In modern usage, the term lysenkoism has become distinct from normal pseudoscience. Where pseudoscience pretends to be science, lysenkoism aims at attacking the legitimacy of science itself, usually for political reasons. It is the rejection of the universality of scientific truth, and the deliberate defamation of the scientific method to the level of politics.
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 32, 2006
- Weeks 34 & 35
- August 20-September 2
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 34, 2006
- Weeks 36 & 37
- September 3-September 16
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 36, 2006
- Weeks 38 & 39
- September 17-September 30
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 38, 2006
- Weeks 40 & 41
- October 1-October 14
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 40, 2006
- Weeks 42 & 43
- October 15-October 28
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 42, 2006
- Weeks 44 & 45
- October 29-November 11
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 44, 2006
- Weeks 46 & 47
- November 12-November 25
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 46, 2006
- Weeks 48 & 49
- November 26-December 9
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 48, 2006
- Weeks 50 & 51
- December 10-December 23
Portal:History of science/Article/Week 50, 2006
- Weeks 52 & 53
- December 24-January 6, 2007