From Design to Dissolution: Thomas Chalmers' Debt to John Robison

1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crosbie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Present Note ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Major Transition ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Design In Nature

The claim that the nineteenth century was a period of major transition for the relation between theology and natural science has become a historical truism. With its implications for the design argument and the doctrines of divine providence, Darwin's theory of evolution has rightly attracted the attention of scholars of Victorian science. Yet so much emphasis not only on Darwin himself, but on the life sciences generally, has tended to obscure some important issues concerning the relation of theology to natural science in the first half of the nineteenth century. As John Brooke has argued recently, natural theology in this pre-Darwinian period was far from being an essentially static, autonomous, and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, but was, for various reasons, in a fragmented and disordered state. The general aim of the present note is to suggest some further dimensions to historical debates about the nature of natural theology, and in particular to emphasize the need for an examination of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences in this period.

The Science of Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donovan O. Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Christian Thought

This chapter examines broad transformations in Christian thought that came to pass over the course of the nineteenth century through exposure to new developments in the life sciences. Taking William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) as a starting point, it shows how a conception of an unchanging God that could be demonstrated through rational proof was affected by the new emphasis on change in the biological sciences, especially in the aftermath of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Rather than suggesting that these new themes weakened Christian faith, however, a close examination of Christian thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century shows that encounters with science energized Christian theology, philosophy, and practice. This trajectory culminated with the development of the psychology of religion, as exhibited by the American pragmatists William James and Charles S. Peirce. George Eliot’s Middlemarch serves as a guide to the complexity of these transformations.

Locating Rods and Cones: Microscopic Investigations of the Retina in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Berlin and Würzburg

2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jutta Schickore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physiological Function ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Rods And Cones ◽  
Morphological Studies ◽  
The Common ◽  
And Function ◽  
Microscopic Investigations

The ArgumentThis paper is concerned with the diversity of microscopic research in nineteenth-century life sciences. It examines how two researchers, Ernst Wilhelm Brücke and Heinrich Müller, investigated the structure and function of the retina. They did so in significantly different ways, thereby developing quite different accounts of this organ and its role in the process of vision. Both investigators were carrying out microscopic investigations, both were particularly concerned with interpreting their findings in terms of physiological function, and both employed the physical sciences in their microscopic research. Their approaches differed, however, with respect to the manner of handling and preparing the tissues, as well as with respect to the conceptual tools they applied to their findings.The cases indicate that the common tendency to associate microscopic research mainly with morphological studies of organic material is not appropriate. To understand nineteenth-century microscopy and its place in the sciences of life, close attention should be paid to the manner in which microscopic investigations were performed. It is only then that the flexibility and versatility of microscopic research comes into view.

Re-inventing the Ashmolean. Natural history and natural theology at Oxford in the 1820s to 1850s

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARTHUR MACGREGOR ◽  
ABIGAIL HEADON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Research Priorities ◽  
Science Museum ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extensive Body ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Almost All

During the period of the successive keeperships of John Shute Duncan (1823–1829) and his brother Philip Bury Duncan (1829–1854), the collections of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford were comprehensively redisplayed as a physical exposition of the doctrines of natural theology, specifically as propounded by William Paley. The displays assembled by the Duncans, overwhelmingly dominated by natural history specimens, were swept away with the opening of the University's new Natural Science Museum and with them went almost all recollection of an extraordinary chapter in museum history. From largely unpublished records in the Ashmolean, the Duncans' achievement is here reconstructed. The primary evidence is provided by contemporary reports prepared for the Visitors of the Museum and by surviving texts from the Duncans' museum labels. Additional perspectives are provided by an extensive body of correspondence from the collectors, explorers and others who contributed specimens to the new displays: their texts illuminate aspects of contemporary preoccupations with classification, broader research priorities, and problems associated with collecting, preserving and transporting specimens, as well as shedding light on individual exhibits which they contributed to the Museum. These correspondents include a number of significant figures in the nineteenth century history of natural history, including Andrew Bloxam, N. A. Vigors and William Burchell.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore

2015 ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Amy M. King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Victorian Period

Victorian natural science is not something separate from culture and social life, but integral to Victorian literary culture broadly defined. This is particularly important to the Victorian period because it was during the nineteenth century that the professionalization of science occurred; at the same time a vibrant popular science existed. Natural history is part of a broader landscape of scientific culture in the nineteenth century beyond the poles of the ‘scientific naturalists’ such as Charles Darwin and the Anglican ‘gentlemen of science’. A particular nineteenth-century version of natural theology persisted at least until mid-century and even as late as the 1870s, manifesting especially in popular natural histories. One specific genre was the seashore natural history, in which there is a blend of empirical observation and theology, especially in the work of Philip Henry Gosse.

scholarly journals Defining a discovery: priority and methodological controversy in early nineteenth-century anatomy

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carin Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Small Schools ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Sensory Nerves ◽  
The Other ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Practitioners

In the early nineteenth century, Charles Bell and François Magendie engaged in a decades-long priority dispute over the discovery of the roots of motor and sensory nerves. The constantly recalibrated arguments of its participants illuminate changes in the life sciences during that period. When Bell first wrote about the nerves in 1811, surgeon-anatomists ran small schools out of their homes, natural theology was in vogue, exchanges between British and French medical practitioners were limited by the Napoleonic Wars, and British practitioners typically rejected experimental physiology and vivisection. By the end of Magendie's career, medical science was produced in the laboratory, taught through artfully produced performances of the sort at which Magendie excelled, and disseminated through journals. It is not entirely clear which historical character, Bell or Magendie, ‘won’ the dispute, nor that they even had clear and consistent positions in it, but what is clear is that one style of science had won out over the other, and over the course of the dispute, pedagogy lost pride of place in medical science.

The archives of Sir Edward Frankland: Resources, Problems and Methods

1990 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin A. Russell ◽  
Shirley P. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Century Science ◽  
Printed Sources

The periodical History of Science opened auspiciously in 1962 with an article by L. Pearce Williams on ‘The physical sciences in the first half of the nineteenth century: problems and sources’. He criticized the nearly exclusive reliance on printed sources then quite common in studies of Victorian science, concluded that much remained to be discovered and closed his paper with these words: What papers exist in private hands can only be guessed. I know of a trunk in an attic containing unpublished letters from Darwin, Huxley, Kolbe, Pasteur and a host of others. They are, unfortunately, not available to the scholar and there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of such boxes scattered through America and Europe. As they are discovered, catalogued and made available to scholars, the shape of nineteenth-century science will gradually lose its blurred outlines and the origins of modern science will become clear.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

Evolution, genetics, and systematics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco J. Ayala ◽  
Camilo J. Cela-Conde
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Sexual Selection ◽  
Fossil Record ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Altruistic Behavior ◽  
Synthetic Theory ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Evolution By Natural Selection ◽  
Current Paradigm ◽  
Epigenetic Processes

This chapter starts with the general principles of the theory of evolution by natural selection advanced by Darwin and the Mendelian theory of heredity. Next comes consideration of the “new-Darwinian synthesis” or “synthetic theory,” which integrates both precedents into what has become the current paradigm of the life sciences. Molecular evolution and population genetics follow, including epigenetic processes. Next, special models of selection are considered, such as sexual selection and the models that account for altruistic behavior. After the mechanisms of speciation, the main concepts of systematics are explored, which facilitate understanding of different traits. The chapter finally explores the fundamental concepts of taxonomy and the methods from phenetics to cladistics, that makes it possible to evaluate the diversity of organisms and the methods for dating the fossil record.

Cooperation and Competition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Peach
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Particle Physics ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Groups ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Multidisciplinary Research ◽  
Common Goal ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Research Sector

This chapter discusses the need for cooperation (or collaboration) to be balanced with competition, including between research groups, within a university or laboratory and between the academic research sector and industry. Healthy competition is a great motivator but unhealthy competition can be disastrous. While it is still possible for an individual scientist working alone or with a couple of graduate students or postdocs to make ground-breaking discoveries, today much experimental science requires large teams working collaboratively on a common goal or set of goals. While this trend is most evident in particle physics and astronomy, it is also present in the other physical sciences and the life sciences. Collaboration brings together more resources–physical, financial and intellectual–to address major challenges that would otherwise be beyond the scope of any individual or group. Multidisciplinary research and interdisciplinary research are examples of cooperation between different disciplines.

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