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You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Fox Robert 2010EditorialNotes Rec. R. Soc.641–3http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2009.0076SectionYou have accessEditorialEditorial Robert Fox Robert Fox [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Robert Fox Robert Fox [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:13 January 2010https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2009.0076This is the latest version of the article – see previous versions. January 1, 2010: Previous Version 1 This is the first issue of Notes and Records in a year of special importance for the Royal Society. As the Society celebrates the 350th anniversary of its foundation, it will reaffirm its role in the promotion of science in the twenty-first century but will also look back over a long and distinguished history. Since its launch in December 2009, the Trailblazing website (http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/) has drawn attention to the Royal Society's contribution to some of the greatest achievements in science since the seventeenth century and given online access to 60 classic papers in which these achievements have been announced. Encouragingly, as Phil Hurst reports in his account of the project, Trailblazing has received favourable attention in the media, demonstrating not just a keen public interest in the history of science but also history's capacity to speak meaningfully to the present.Although, as an international journal, Notes and Records of the Royal Society could not, and does not, limit its coverage to the work of the Royal Society and its Fellows, it too will play its part in the 2010 celebrations. A special supernumerary issue on the Society's role in science since 1900 is planned for September 2010, and the present issue brings together five main articles on work in which Fellows have been especially prominent.Bernard Lightman's study of the popularization of Darwin's ideas in Britain and the USA between 1860 and 1900 brings out the importance of popular books and journals in fashioning public perceptions of scientific theories. As Lightman observes, in the nineteenth century non-scientific readers tended to assimilate their Darwinism from popularizations rather than from the Origin of species itself. And popularizers, for their part, often injected into their accounts religious and metaphysical concerns that had no sanction in Darwin's theory. Those concerns (sometimes overt but more often dissembled and hard to uncover) do much to explain the contrast between the relatively easy acceptance of evolution and the anxiety that many felt with regard to natural selection, an anxiety that amounted in some notable cases to the rejection of Darwin's version of evolution.Lightman's article contributes to the continuing interest in the history of evolutionary thought stimulated by the bicentenary of Darwin's birth in 2009. So too does the article on Alfred Russel Wallace by Jeremy Vetter. It is well known that Wallace's interests, focused primarily on human evolution, were informed by his experiences during the eight years he spent as a field naturalist in the East Indies. But Vetter focuses on the subsequent development of Wallace's anthropological views after his return to England in 1862. The result is a fascinating study in the importance of place in Wallace's passage from the field to a metropolitan scientific world in which science and politics were inextricably related, notably on matters of race and slavery. Wallace was keenly aware of the contrasting approaches to the study of man in the Ethnographic Society of London and the breakaway Anthropological Society in the 1860s. However, neither approach suited his belief in the possibility and desirability of progress among the peoples he had observed in the East Indies. The result was a gradual withdrawal from the formal institutional structures of British anthropology, amounting to the ‘un-making’ of Wallace as an anthropologist.Darwin's observations and collecting in South America and Wallace's in the Malay Archipelago lie at the heart of any analysis of their achievements. Both as travellers and as participants in far-flung corresponding networks, they were pre-eminently international figures in the best traditions of the Royal Society, of which both were Fellows. As Luciano Boschiero reminds us, internationalism and corresponding networks had been central features of the Royal Society's work since its earliest days. Boschiero makes the point in tackling the long-recognized conundrum of the delay in the translation of Saggi di naturali esperienze, an account of experiments conducted in the Accademia del Cimento that the Royal Society received soon after its publication in Florence in 1667. Boschiero's argument rests on the contrast between the initial lack of interest in the Tuscan experiments within the Royal Society and the quite sudden recognition of their importance in the early 1680s, when Richard Waller published his English translation as Essayes of Natural Experiments (1683). Boschiero presents Robert Boyle and the Royal Society's temporary curator of experiments, Denis Papin, as the key figures in this change of perception. Both men, he argues, saw the pneumatic experiments of Saggi as relevant to their mechanistic views in natural philosophy.The experiments that John Rowlinson discusses in his account of early observations of the Joule–Thomson effect were masterpieces in the best tradition of the Accademia del Cimento. As he shows, experimental dexterity in the measurement of the drop in temperature of a gas passing through a porous plug or other narrow orifice went hand in hand with errors in calculation on the part of Joule and Thomson and a striking degree of misunderstanding within the broader community: William Hampson, in particular, confused the cooling with that of a gas doing external work. But this did not prevent the effect from assuming an important role in techniques for the liquefaction of gases and of refrigeration techniques on into the twentieth century. Another experimental masterpiece, also dating from the nineteenth century, is discussed in Melvin Santer's contribution. This was Joseph Lister's procedure for obtaining a pure clonal population of Bacterium lactis, a microscopic living entity, smaller than a yeast cell, capable of causing fermentation. The experimental work involved was original and fine, and here again painstaking laboratory work of an ‘academic’ nature led on to long-term applications, built on Lister's inference that infectious diseases in human beings were caused by the growth of specific microscopic organisms in the body.The business of Notes and Records is history. But history ends only with the constantly moving present. And in that present and the foreseeable future, science faces new challenges, not least in a period of economic recession and at a time when the suspicion of the non-scientific lay public with regard to science seems to be growing; the recent tide of scepticism about the reality of anthropogenic global warming has been a recent straw in that particular wind. In such circumstances, how is science to maintain not just its funding but also its vitality? How are original thoughts to be bred and nurtured? Not by such measuring devices as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) or its successor the Research Excellence Framework (REF), is Denis Noble's answer. Noble elaborates his argument in an essay review of Donald Gillies's trenchant study of the way in which past cases of groundbreaking intellectual activity might have been viewed by the criteria employed by the RAE and REF panels. How would Ludwig Wittgenstein or Gottlob Frege have fared in the eyes of one of today's panels? A university anxious to obtain a top RAE rating might not even have entered their names, because for long periods Wittgenstein wrote nothing, and Frege's pioneering work in mathematical logic received rough treatment in contemporary reviews. And the example of Einstein is too well known to require elaboration. As Noble argues, the present system of evaluation may have borne fruit, as measured by improved impact factors and the like. But it has done so by placing increasing pressure on authors to place their work in highly rated journals whose editors and publishers measure success in terms of the number of rapidly cited articles. In that world, the publication of a zero-cited article is a mark of editorial failure. And that, as Noble argues, can only encourage editors to play safe by favouring good work in a familiar mould.Noble's review stands as a plea for both the community and funding bodies to retain a place, a very special place at that, for unconventional, ‘cranky’ science. Thomas Kuhn taught us almost half a century ago that ‘revolutionary’ science can and does exist alongside the ‘normal’ science of everyday practice. And that must be so, since history suggests that the most productive heresies of science almost invariably emerge from minds thoroughly immersed in received scientific opinion. It is all a question of balance. We live in an age of metrics, as was acknowledged in last year's protest against the plan for a classification of journals, signed by the editors of more than 60 journals of the history of science.1 Perhaps that is something we have to live with. But Noble's position is clear: once the process of measuring science becomes a substitute for judgement, all of us stand to lose. And that is the spectre that currently looms over creative work across the disciplines, whether in the sciences, the social sciences or the humanities. Concern is growing,2 and Gillies and Noble have added their voices to the call for further debate.FootnotesNotes1 ‘Journals under threat: a joint response from history of science, technology and medicine editors’, Notes Rec. R. Soc.63, 1–3 (2009).2 See, for example, the recent plea for a reassertion of quality over quantity in the peer review process, in Philippe Baveye, ‘Sticker shock and looming tsunami: the high cost of academic serials in perspective’, J. Scholarly Publ.41, 190–214 (2010).© 2010 The Royal Society Previous ArticleNext Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This Issue20 March 2010Volume 64Issue 1 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2009.0076Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0035-9149Online ISSN:1743-0178History: Published online13/01/2010Published in print20/03/2010 License:© 2010 The Royal Society Citations and impact PDF Download