History of Science and Technology Colloquium

Spring Science Studies Symposium of McKnight Summer Fellows, University of Minnesota

Alan C. Love, Department of Philosophy
"Temporal Dimensions of Reductionism in Biology"
Although reduction clearly concerns spatial dimensions, such as relations between macroscale and microscale properties, at least three relevant temporal dimensions can be distinguished: historical, iterated compositional, and emergent process. The first two are prevalent in prior philosophical discussions but the third is surprisingly absent given its centrality in experimental biology. This neglected dimension is shown to be more appropriate for the representation of time in reductive explanations of development. My analysis uncovers an array of previously unrecognized questions about reductionism that revolve around potentially competing explanatory preferences and the diversity of temporal measures available to investigators.

Arun Saldanha, Department of Geography
"Cartographic Knowledge and Emerging Dutch Colonialism: the View from Population Biology"
There has been a comeback in understanding human migration through biogeography, as can be seen in popular authors like Jared Diamond. This paper will tentatively suggest some ways that the concept of population in Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky can aid in studying shifts in the patterns of settlement and long-distance control in our species. For instance, there was a rapid change in the ways that populations around the Indian Ocean world related with Holland around the turn of the seventeenth century. Historians usually attribute this shift to the Dutch accumulation of cartographic and economic information about the region. They find a environmentalist framework such as Diamond's overly reductionist, incapable of explaining forces such as monopoly capitalism or religious zeal. This paper will argue that to properly understand the spatial functioning of colonialism, an adapted biogeographical notion of "population" can still be useful. For humans, however, empirical due needs to be given to factors such as money and maps, as such communication channels are necessary for spurring movement and social organization. Causality does not go one-way from the biophysical to the cultural as in Diamond, but only emerges through and within uneven webs in which culture and biology are already entwined.

J. B. Shank, Department of History
"Galileo without Modernity? Preliminary Reflections on the Project of Writing Galileo Today."
What are the new trends in Galileo studies? None, I would suggest, because work on Galileo remains trapped, as it has been for three quarters of a century, in the modernist narratives of the "Scientific Revolution." These narratives also continue to anchor the modernizing project of mainstream history and philosophy of science (HPS), for ever since the founding fathers of the discipline institutionalized Galileo as the father of modern science by making him a central pillar in the discipline-defining edifice of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution (modernity through the passage From Galileo to Newton in Hall's classic formulation), writing about Galileo has essentially worked to reproduce the discipline of HPS through a continual reenactment of these founding stories of origin. Is it possible to liberate Galileo studies from the echo chamber of this discipline-bound conceptual framework? My paper explores these possibilities by asking whether there are alternatives to the "Galileo, First Modern Scientist" framework, and by exploring the implications of breaking free from this discipline-defining and modernity-enacting hermeneutic.

C. Kenneth Waters, Department of Philosophy
"Getting Real about Genetics and Genomics: An Antirealist Perspective"
Inflated accounts of knowledge in genetics and genomics are reinforced by the epistemological idea that successful research is organized by comprehensive theoretical frameworks that identify fundamental entities and processes. According to this epistemology, the success (or failure) of genetics and genomics depends on a comprehensive, theoretical framework that identifies the fundamentals of heredity and development. In this paper, I advance a deflationary epistemology for understanding genetics and genomics. Research in these sciences, I contend, is organized around investigative strategies involving the manipulation of a broad range of biological processes; it is not structured by comprehensive theorizing about the fundamentals of information, genetic programs, or developmental systems.