Environmental Sciences Medina, Third Floor Organized Session
03 Nov 2018 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T1600 20181103T1800 America/Vancouver Modeling in Clay: Ecology as the Adhesive between the Cracks of Geological Inference

This session explores the intersection of geology and ecology in the 19th and 20th centuries. The questions we pursue are: How did scientists use information from one time-period or region to infer features of another, distant, time period or region? How did they determine which questions were worth pursuing or prioritizing? Our answers are unified by an emphasis on how ecological considerations delimited what could be learned about a particular time period or region using comparisons with another time or place. Historians have discussed the fit between organisms and their environment, and have focused on the geographical distribution of species. Yet, the manner in which ecological considerations so consistently modified the practices and motivations of scientists has been under-discussed. By collecting three cases in which this occurred, we hope to motivate further research into how ecological frameworks determined the validity of certain inferences. Examples discussed include (a) testing the relatedness of animal forms to their environments to aid with reconstructions of past habitats from fossil data, (b) how Charles Darwin saw the complexity of ecological relations in coral reefs as delimiting predictions regarding their formation in unexplored areas, and (c) how disanalogies between the deep past and the present required paleoecologists to modify how knowledge of the past could be useful for predicting the future. In all cases, scientists were concerned not merely with using known information to predict unknown features (past, present, or future), but with the construction of frameworks which discerned when such inferences were reasonable.

Co-organized by Ali Mirza (Indiana University, Bloomington) and Emma Kitchen (University of Chicago)

Medina, Third Floor History of Science Society 2018 meeting@hssonline.org

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This session explores the intersection of geology and ecology in the 19th and 20th centuries. The questions we pursue are: How did scientists use information from one time-period or region to infer features of another, distant, time period or region? How did they determine which questions were worth pursuing or prioritizing? Our answers are unified by an emphasis on how ecological considerations delimited what could be learned about a particular time period or region using comparisons with another time or place. Historians have discussed the fit between organisms and their environment, and have focused on the geographical distribution of species. Yet, the manner in which ecological considerations so consistently modified the practices and motivations of scientists has been under-discussed. By collecting three cases in which this occurred, we hope to motivate further research into how ecological frameworks determined the validity of certain inferences. Examples discussed include (a) testing the relatedness of animal forms to their environments to aid with reconstructions of past habitats from fossil data, (b) how Charles Darwin saw the complexity of ecological relations in coral reefs as delimiting predictions regarding their formation in unexplored areas, and (c) how disanalogies between the deep past and the present required paleoecologists to modify how knowledge of the past could be useful for predicting the future. In all cases, scientists were concerned not merely with using known information to predict unknown features (past, present, or future), but with the construction of frameworks which discerned when such inferences were reasonable.

Co-organized by Ali Mirza (Indiana University, Bloomington) and Emma Kitchen (University of Chicago)

No Analog Situation: Paleoecology when the Present Doesn't Look Like the PastView Abstract
Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences 04:00 PM - 04:40 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 23:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 23:40:00 UTC
Paleoecology, which studies environmental change through geologic time, often made predictions about ecological change by comparing the changes experienced by vegetation communities in the past with similar changes facing modern communities. The modern analog method, which relied on these comparisons and was developed by G. Evelyn Hutchinson in the 1930s, became the linchpin of the field. But what happened to a scientific field when anthropogenic climate change threatened the main way that paleoecologists understood the past and future? This paper explores this question first by examining Hutchinson's method and then examining how paleoecologists modified the tools of their profession in an era of global change when they encountered “no analog situations,” moments when the present did not look anything like the changes experienced in the past. The crisis that no analog situations presented led to broader discussions about the purpose of deep time in studying environmental change, which I take up in the second half of my paper. With no analog situations, I argue that paleoecologists were forced to admit that “history is better suited to providing cautionary tales rather than specific images of future climate and vegetation change." The predictive power they had claimed by knowing the deep past faded in an era of global change.
Presenters
MC
 Melissa Charenko
Michigan State University
Casting Cow Bones to Retrodict the Past: Nineteenth-Century Reconstructions of India's Geological PastView Abstract
Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences 04:40 PM - 05:20 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 23:40:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 00:20:00 UTC
In the nineteenth century, European savants sought to reconstruct the history of the earth. The character of the evidence was routinely faunal, utilizing ossified organisms. Such methods built upon Georges Cuvier’s concept of a natural hierarchy of animal functions, which designated specific anatomical parts as more effective in determining animal relatedness and identification. Often the highest in the hierarchy were the anatomical structures associated with life-giving processes, and not the more superfluous or external characteristics of an animal. Horns and hoofs were therefore low on the hierarchy. Despite this, naturalists continued to posit the connection between such external characteristics of extinct organisms and their surrounding environments. In Europe and India, naturalists tested the fidelity between external morphological structures of living animals and specific environments in the present, in order to apply those associations to the past, a practice not wholly dissimilar from the modern field of ecomorphology. In this paper I focus on such investigations into the fossil remains of a long-extinct animal – the ancestral taurine cow, or the aurochs. The aurochs featured prominently in attempts to set a global geological clock, and the horns and hoof bones of those extinct beasts aided European naturalists in reconstructing ancient environments, the age of the Himalayas, and bovine evolutionary history.
Presenters Emma Kitchen
University Of Chicago
The Biogeological and Cartographic Dimensions of Darwin’s Coral-Reef TheoryView Abstract
Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences 05:20 PM - 06:00 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 00:20:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 01:00:00 UTC
Darwin's theory of Coral Reefs, developed between 1835 and 1842, is commonly interpreted as subservient to his geology—constructed in order to provide evidence of subsidence contrary to the elevation he witnessed in South America. Recent work has broadened Darwin's motivations to the day-to-day affairs of hydrography and emphasized his reliance on plant biology. 
In this paper, I have two primary goals: (1) to bring out the hydrographical elements to their fullest extension by showing why the features of coral reefs Darwin targets were so critical for the Admiralty at an institutional level, partly due to the work of the its first Hydrographer, Alexander Dalrymple (1737-1808), and to make clear how such programmatic influences determined the earliest articulation of Darwin’s theory. And, (2) to show how solving the hydrographical problems provided by the Admiralty required Darwin to apply and develop a robust, biological notion of a “station” which captured the different kinds of coral along with their ecological role. For the Admiralty coral reefs served as instruments—their structure helping to predict the weather patterns a ship Captain could hope to encounter. Because Darwin’s concept of a station was highly relational and sensitive to ecological perturbations, this led him to repeatedly conclude that the structure of coral-reefs was not always useful in predicting surrounding conditions or where yet unknown coral reefs might lie. Such ecological considerations heavily constrained what could be learned about the geology/hydrology of a particular region from its reefs.
Presenters Ali Mirza
Indiana University, Bloomington
Ali Mirza
Indiana University, Bloomington
Dr. Caitlin Donahue Wylie
University of Virginia
Emma Kitchen
University of Chicago
Melissa Charenko
Michigan State University
Alistair Sponsel
Alistair Sponsel
www.studiesofscience.com
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