EDITORIAL.

Abstract

You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Marsden Ben 2015EditorialNotes Rec.69357–359http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2015.0054SectionYou have accessEditorialEditorial Ben Marsden Ben Marsden Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Ben Marsden Ben Marsden Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:07 October 2015https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2015.0054This is the latest version of the article – see previous versions. January 1, 2015: Previous Version 1 This issue of Notes and Records covers, in different ways, episodes in the ‘life-cycle’ of modern science, from its purported gestation and ‘birth’ during the Scientific Revolution, through its maturation and fragmentation in the nineteenth century, and onwards to its transfiguration into the forms of ‘techno-science’ that have been closely oriented towards the fulfilment of the demands of a military–industrial complex. Historians of science have repeatedly grappled with the question of how to position episodes in scientific ‘lives' within their institutional, social and cultural contexts. Historians have of course long been interested in life-writing, a genre revived by projects such as the invaluable Oxford dictionary of national biography and, more recently, by the British Library project on the Oral History of British Science.1 The papers presented in this issue of Notes and Records might be read collectively as commentaries on key transitions in the lives of past scientific practitioners. How were scientific identities formed and fashioned? How did men and women of science exploit, or how were they constrained by, institutions and associations? How, and to what purpose, were scientific practitioners evaluated or commemorated after death? It is not always easy to discover, however intriguing it might be to know, precisely what men and women of science made of their peers in life or how they reacted to their demise. What purposes did scientific biography, eulogy and obituary serve as vehicles for the drawing of morals or the pursuit of scientific campaigns?2Geoffrey Cantor paints a vivid picture of the early religious background and responses of the young John Tyndall, a figure later central to metropolitan British science in the Victorian period. Cantor's paper is part of the harvest associated with the ongoing John Tyndall Correspondence Project.3 The paper reminds us not to view individuals as fixed in their ideas. In 1874 the mature self-confident polymath Tyndall delivered his infamous ‘Belfast Address’ to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. That provocative speech has been read as promoting atheism and calling for science to be freed from the scaffolding of religion (although it has also been argued that Tyndall there betrayed a residual pantheism). Cantor, J. H. Brooke and others have shown convincingly that the continued engagement of science and religion has, however, rarely been reducible to a simple matter of ‘conflict’ between forces inherently opposed. Cantor shows us that although Tyndall is conventionally presented as being at odds with organized religion, he was in fact well informed about the varieties of religious and spiritual culture, including Methodism, in early nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland and North America.4Historians of science used to argue that there were distinctive national styles of science; increasingly, however, they have restricted their focus to other kinds of spaces and places and the ways in which they might shape the scientific work produced and disseminated by different sorts of scientific scholar.5 Anna Marie Roos and Victor Boantza here situate and connect two rather different figures, Samuel Duclos and Martin Lister, who were active on either side of the English Channel and who were allied to the early Paris Academy of Sciences and the early Royal Society of London respectively. Powerful figures connected with those associations espoused different views on the support properly due to speculative research—or to work carried out for curiosity's sake without utility in mind. Was grand theorizing to be encouraged—or quashed—especially when little new empirical, natural historical, evidence was adduced? In the late seventeenth century, when scientific endeavour had yet to attain its commanding authority, concerns over the utility of science were intense. But space and place had an impact on what individuals might do, and whether they might be heard or censored: speculative parts of Duclos's work deemed unpublishable in Paris might find a more receptive audience once transmitted to London.‘What if’ or ‘counterfactual history’ can be a risky business, but one cannot help wondering what might have happened to well-known scientific figures had key opportunities not arisen. Who might Darwin have been without the Beagle voyage? What course might evolutionary theory have taken had Darwin been ‘deleted’, in Peter Bowler's pithy phrase?6 One paper in this issue reviews a myth concerning the appointment of a professor to an entirely new chair of ‘social biology’, designed, as it were, to create and explore an interface between social and scientific disciplines. Standard accounts of the appointment at the London School of Economics in 1930 make two rivals in science, the eugenicist R. A. Fisher and the anti-eugenicist Lancelot Hogben, protagonists in hot competition for a position from which they could promulgate either view. ‘What if’ the evolutionary geneticist Fisher had triumphed instead of Hogben? And yet our current authors suggest that, far from coming second place in a carefully regulated search process, Fisher probably never applied, his scientific ambitions lying elsewhere and requiring better facilities for sustained experiments. Even Hogben's appointment came after the suspension of the formal process. History is rarely as neat as we might like, even in presenting counterfactual alternatives. Scientific careers mattered; but their courses were highly contingent.Thomas Kuhn once claimed that new scientific paradigms triumph not merely, and perhaps not primarily, from the powers of rational persuasion—but as scientists wedded to old forms, still unpersuaded of the virtues of the new, gradually but inevitably shuffled off. Yet very many scientific views have outlived their originators and their first advocates. Cantor's paper speaks about personal formation and individuation. Leigh Penman's paper considers the first announcement in England in 1650 of the philosopher Descartes's demise. We learn here about the death and immediate re-evaluation of one of the most controversial innovators of the Scientific Revolution. The letter at the core of this paper, hitherto known only as it was printed in an 1831 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine, is placed securely within the sequence of correspondence of the prolific, polemical ‘intelligencer’ Samuel Hartlib and the at times lukewarm recipient of his letters the Platonist scholar Henry More. When, in 1650, Hartlib communicated the death of Descartes, his report provided an opportunity to urge upon More a campaign in favour of the useful arts, a campaign in which, on Hartlib's reading, Descartes had fallen woefully short. The dead Descartes certainly had his uses.Notes and Records would be pleased to consider for publication further studies covering these and similar themes: scientific lives and careers in context; the relationship of science and religion; the relationship of scholars to societies; the guidance given to or constraints placed upon scientific work by those in political power; the significance of work behind the scenes in guiding scientific careers; and studies of scientific reputation and commemoration. Furthermore, a long-standing aim of Notes and Records has been to provide a platform for the discussion of rare or newly unearthed sources from archival repositories, including—but not restricted to—the Royal Society's own world-class collections. The fifth paper in the December 2015 issue, by Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb, Márcia Helena Mendes Ferraz and Piyo M. Rattansi, contains just such a discussion.FootnotesNotes1 http://sounds.bl.uk/oral-history/science2 Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (eds), Telling lives in science: essays in scientific biography (Cambridge University Press, 1996).3 http://www.yorku.ca/tyndall/project.html4 John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing nature: the engagement of science and religion (T&T Clarke Ltd, Edinburgh, 1998).5 David N. Livingstone, Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003).6 Peter A. Bowler, Darwin deleted: imagining a world without Darwin (University of Chicago Press, 2013).© 2015 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society. 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