Abstracts Archive

Using data from the General Embryological Information Service, we describe and analyze global trends in organism use during the 1950s and 1960s, visualized with topographic landscape diagrams. While the overall trend for developmental biology has been toward greater use of mammalian and avian system...

In 1714, the Irish physician and respected member of the Dublin Philosophical Society, Thomas Molyneux published an intriguing account of fossil teeth found in Ireland in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It argued that these specimens were the remains of prehistoric elephants and...

The common names of insects in use in Europe from the late Middle Ages through the middle of the eighteenth century did a poor job of capturing their immense diversity. While folk names for culturally relevant plants and vertebrates generally name a Linnaean genus, many insect folk names designate a...

This paper examines the shifting semantic cadences of the soybean as global economic conditions re-shaped Chinese scientific and medical enthusiasm for the soybean. Older associations as a famine crop, base for fertilizer, a source for cooking, lubrication, and lighting joined newer, techno-scientif...

Over the past decades, our comprehension of the structures of 18th-and 19th-century natural history has exponentially grown. Several seminal studies have been published on the quantitative practices initiated in these centuries, thus completely redrawing our image of natural history as a descriptive...

Every member of the species Cyprinodon diabolis, the Devils Hole pupfish, lives and reproduces in a desert pool ten-feet across by sixty-feet long. In recent years, managers from Death Valley National Park have observed as few as thirty-five individual fish in this habitat. The whole species could...

Science is regarded by many as unique among human endeavors in its inherent ability to correct its own errors. Many cases, such as those involving N-rays or cold fusion, are offered to exemplify the process. These episodes are uncontroversial and make attractive illustrations, but there are less wel...

Before sexologists taxonomized human sexual differences, studies of non-human animals served as an important site for explorations of the meaning and manifestation of sex. But if scientists looked to the animal world for evidence that a clear distinction between male and female was the norm, they di...

In the late 1940s and 1950s the emerging field of cybernetics raised the possibility that machines might match humans in their cognitive abilities. Especially in Britain, where cybernetics enjoyed a close institutional relationship with neurology, figures like William Grey Walter constructed machine...