SummaryAccording to Ernst Mayr, most geneticists were not particularly interested in or well informed about macro-evolutionary processes and thus did not make major contributions to the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s. Although this characterization applies to many American geneticists of the period, it does not fit their German counterparts. German geneticists' active interest in evolutionary mechanisms can be clearly seen in the German debates of the 1920s and 1930s over the significance of cytoplasmic inheritance. While morphologists celebrated the (...) evidence for cytoplasmic heredity as a basis for neo-Lamarckian mechanisms, those geneticists who actually studied cytoplasmic inheritance regarded it as a way of strengthening the case for natural selection. This German-American contrast suggests that our understanding of the evolutionary synthesis would benefit from an analysis of the institutional circumstances of the various contributing disciplines. (shrink)

The first major collection of Boyle’s writings to be published since Thomas Birch’s eighteenth-century edition of his works presents material hitherto available only in the archives of the Royal Society. This edition of Boyle’s _Aretology _ and other moral essays from the late 1640s offers the intellectual and religious origins of Boyle’s most vital themes. John T. Harwood also includes two essays on moral topics, "Of Sin" and "Of Piety"; a sample of Boyle’s private meditations, "Joseph’s Mistress"; a short essay, (...) "Of Time and Idleness"; and two guides to private meditation, "The Dayly Reflection" and "Of Thoughts." Harwood concludes the volume with a previously unpublished account of about seven hundred books in Boyle’s library at the time of his death. (shrink)

: Though many are agreed that "technoscience" is a significant phenomenon, little systematic attention has yet been paid to the circumstances under which it has emerged. Technoscience is conceptualized here as the outcome of a process of convergence in which technological knowledge acquires many of the characteristics of scientific knowledge while the latter shifts in the opposite direction. The analytical problem is then a matter of understanding why such "drift" has occurred at particular times and places. The drift of higher (...) technical education toward science has been observed in a variety of domains including engineering and medicine, but in this paper I identify such a trend in late nineteenth and early twentieth century agricultural education, with particular reference to Bavaria. The process is interpreted using a model of institutional dynamics loosely based upon Bourdieu's concept of the academic "field.". (shrink)

From philosophy's founding fathers - Thales, Socrates, Plato... to great minds of the post-modern era - Satre, Ayer, Feyerabend... this concise new guide presents 100 of the world's most influential thinkers. Arranged from the ancient world to the present day, each philosopher's key ideas, notable works and pronouncements are encapsulated in a series of succinct biographies, accompanied by illustrations, at-a-glance fact panels and thought-provoking quotations. Philosophy: A Beginner's Guide uncovers the fundamental concepts of this fascinating discipline, explaining the diverging schools (...) of thought and revealing the universal aim of philosophy throughout the ages - to push back the boundaries of human knowledge in order to understand the fundamental nature of human existence. THE ANCIENT WORLD: Thales (c.635-c.543 BCE); Buddha (c.563-483 BCE); Confucius (c.55-479 BCE); Socrates (470-399 BCE); Plato (427-347 BCE); Aristotle (384-322 BCE). THE MIDDLE AGES: Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980-1037); Peter Lombard (c1100-1160); Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 1126-1198); Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274); William of Ockham (1285- 1349). THE EARLY MODERN ERA: Machiavelli (1469-1527); Hobbes (1588-1679); Descartes (1596-1650); Locke (1632-1704); Voltaire (1694-1778). THE MODERN ERA: Fichte (1762-1814); G W F Hegel (1770-1831); Schopenhauer (1788-1860); Marx (1818-1883); Engels (1820-1895); Nietzsche (1844-1900); Dewy (1859-1952); Max Weber (1864-1920); Gasset (1883-1955); Heidegger (1889-1976). THE POST-MODERN ERA: Marcuse (1898-1979); Karl Popper (1902-1994); Sartre (1905-1980); Arendt (1906-1975); de Beauvoir (1908-1986); A J Ayer (1910-1989); Feyerabend (1924-1994); Rorty (1931-2007). And many more... (shrink)

From philosophy's founding fathers like Thales, Socrates or Plato to great minds of the post-modern era, including Sartre, Ayer and Feyerabend, this concise new guide presents 100 of the world's most influential thinkers. Arranged from the ancient world to the present day, each philosopher's key ideas, notable works and pronouncements are encapsulated in a series of succinct biographies, accompanied by illustrations, at-a-glance fact panels and thought-provoking quotations.

This research draws from three distinct lines of research on the link between emotions and intergroup bias as springboard to integrative, new hypotheses. Past research suggests that emotions extrinsic to the outgroup (or “incidental”), and intrinsic to the outgroup (or “integral”), produce valence-congruent effects on intergroup bias when relevant or “applicable” to the outgroup (e.g., incidental/integral anger and ethnic outgroups). These emotions produce valenceincongruent effects when irrelevant or “non-applicable” to the outgroup (e.g., incidental/integral sadness and happiness, and ethnic outgroups). Internally (...) valid and ecologically sound tests of these contrasting effects are missing; hence we examined them experimentally in meaningful settings of interethnic contact. To this end, we hybridized established research paradigms in mood and intergroup contact research; this approach enabled us to use same materials and induction methods to instigate incidental and integral emotions in a single research design. In Experiment 1, White Australian students (N= 93) inin vivoreal face-to-face contact with an ethnic tutor in their classroom displayed less interethnic bias when incidentally sad (vs. happy) or integrally happy (vs. sad). In Experiment 2, White American males' (N= 492) anti-Arab bias displayed divergent effects under incidental vs. integral (non-applicable) sadness/happiness and similar effects under incidental vs. integral (applicable) anger. The role of perceptions of agency in the emotion-inducing situation is also explored, tested, and explained drawing from mainstream emotion theory. As expected, integral and incidentalapplicableemotions caused valence congruent effects, at the opposite sides of the subjective agency spectrum, by encouraging the generalization of dislike from the outgroup contact partner to the outgroup as a whole. On the other hand, incidental-non-applicable emotions caused valence-incongruent effects on bias, under high agency conditions, by encouraging (non-partner-centered) heuristic processing. Because of the improved methodology, these effects can be regarded as genuine and not the byproduct of methodological artifacts. This theory-driven and empirically sound analysis of the interplay between emotion source, emotion applicability and subjective agency in intergroup contact can increase the precision of emotion-based bias reduction strategies by deepening understanding of the emotion conditions that lead to intergroup bias attenuation vs. exacerbation. (shrink)

‘Academic drift’ is a term sometimes used to describe the process whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. Drift in this sense has been a common phenomenon in agriculture, engineering, medicine and management sciences in several countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Understanding drift is obviously important, both to practitioners concerned that higher education should be relevant to practice, but (...) also to historians who seek to make sense of long-term trends in knowledge-production. It is surprising, therefore, that although the existence of drift has been widely documented, remarkably little attention has been given so far to explaining it. In this paper I argue that drift is not an invariant universal tendency but a historically specific one which arises under particular circumstances. I outline a model of institutional dynamics which seeks to explain why drift has occurred at some institutions but not others. In the second section I explore the implications of the model for educationists and policy-makers concerned with the reform of higher education in these areas. (shrink)