Time to Eat the Dogs
On Science, History, and ExplorationArchive for October, 2008
A Blog of One’s Own
I have tried to avoid the question “why blog?” here at Time to Eat the Dogs. It’s not a bad question. But it’s one that academic bloggers seem to be drawn to like seals to herring. Most non-academic bloggers do not feel so compelled. Why the obsessive interest?
The kind answer: academic bloggers, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, spend much of their time in the Academy scrutinizing the mysterious ways of human culture. As blogs become part of culture, it’s almost instinctive for the academic to ask “why are we doing this?”
Less kind: self-interest, or more accurately self-protection, compels academics to explain their bloggish ways. As much as the Academy is a place of learning and critical debate, it is also a place steeped (some might say stratified) in tradition. Nowhere is this more true that in writing and publishing. From their first days as graduate students, academics are trained to understand the intricacies of publishing: the hierarchy of peer-review journals, the differences between academic and trade presses, the proper format of query letters, the dilemmas of annotated footnoting. Blogs have no place (yet) in this universe of words.
Indeed, in the great publishing chain-of-being, blogs rank near the bottom, somewhere between Mad Magazine and the Hallmark card. Not that blogs inspire anger or animosity. After all, why get worked up over something that doesn’t matter? No, for the unblogged academic majority, I suspect, the “web log” connotes something trendy, frivolous, and self-absorbed (and indeed, these connotations sometimes apply). When I mention to colleagues that “I blog,” I am met with patient smiles, as if I said “I cross-dress.” Nothing illegal or suspect, just a too little outré.
In short, I think academic bloggers answer the question “Why blog?” more for the benefit of their disbelieving academic colleagues than the general public. This is why authors asking “Why I blog?” sound as if they are answering the question “Why am I a Bolshevik?”
So what inspires me to wade into this issue now, after having avoided it for six months? I just read two excellent discussions of the “why blog” question from fellow historians of science Ben Cohen and Will Thomas. Both pieces take the question to new, interesting places.
In “Why Blog the History of Science?” Cohen maintains that academics find many motives to blog, but that they ultimately fall somewhere on an axis with broad communication on one end and novel contribution on the other:
Those who write a Web-log (“blog”) find themselves somewhere along that axis, either with the belief that they are generating and/or influencing public conversation or with the motivation to explore a given subject in depth.
Cohen concludes that his own motives are not fixed, that he slides back and forth along the axis depending on the topic and intended audience. As such, Cohen blogs with a number of different goals in mind: pedegogical, civic, and intellectual.
In Blogging as Scholarship Thomas uses Cohen’s piece as the starting point to further examine “the insider blog” which Thomas sees as a “laboratory of scholarship.” Over the centuries, universities have developed a number of ways for scholars to communicate with each other (via journals, seminars, and conferences) which do not require logging into WordPress or Blogger. But Thomas points out some of the ways that blogs extend or amplify the useful functions of scholarly communication (which he identifies as articulation, speculation, recovery, and criticism).
Time to Eat the Dogs probably rests somewhere between Cohen’s cabinet of curiosity blog The World’s Fair and Thomas’s more inside-baseball blog Ether Wave Propaganda.
Cohen and Thomas nicely cover the spectrum of academic blogs as tools of public and professional communication. Yet there is also a personal dimension to academic blogging, one that keeps me posting even when the other objectives seem abstract or distant.
1. The Blog as Writers’ Workshop. I credit graduate school with honing my critical faculties as a scholar, teaching me a great deal about historical subjects, and giving me various methods for studying them. I also credit it with distorting my voice as a writer. Not to blame it all on graduate school. In truth, my professors valued good writing and pushed me to deliver solid, jargon-free prose. Yet even this wasn’t enough to keep me from becoming assimilated into the collective, Borg-ian voice of the discipline, a voice that academics integrate into their own writings almost unconsciously.
Learning the Discipline
Blog writing, even within the disciplines, seems to follows looser conventions. Some of this, perhaps, comes from the expectation that blogs are supposed to be more free-wheeling. I think it also comes from the pacing of blog writing. I try to write about three posts a week. This has made it easier to keep limber as a writer, especially during the semester when the demands of teaching shut down bigger projects. It also makes it difficult to over-write (as was often my problem in graduate school). My blog has forced me to write faster, to speak more plainly, and to get to the point more quickly.
2. A Blog of One’s Own. Virginia Woolfe lamented the restrictions placed upon women writers, restrictions which kept them away from the writer’s table to attend the demands of spouse and family. We live in a different world than Woolfe’s, yet the dilemma of writing vs. family remain. I wrote most of my dissertation without kids. I have three kids now and it seems impossible to think of my next book unfolding in the same way as my first one. There will be no more obsessive twelve hour days in the archives, no six-month writing fellowships far from home. But blog writing takes place in the corners of the over-stuffed life, an hour at lunch or in the late evening. These scraps of time always feel insufficient to take on the leviathan book projects that sit on my shelf, but they are enough to write 300 words about an item of interest.
3. The Great Uncoiling. As the items of interest pile up, I feel like my work is taking on a breadth that I have long sacrificed for depth. I entered graduate school with a surfeit of interests. But after taking a master’s degree, I began the long, slow spiraling-in on the subject that would become my thesis, the monograph that would eventually make me an expert in the narrow and the arcane. Blogging has offered me a way of unwinding the process, of venturing outward, testing the ground, roaming somewhere else, and testing it again. Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve taken on issues that fall outside of my areas of expertise. In a sense, it feels like I am returning to 1995 and 1996, years when I read far, wide, and ecumenically as a masters student. Even then, I thought of this peripatetic reading as the means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. Still the journey was thrilling and, in retrospect, necessary. So here I am again, spiraling out, with blog as muse, dilettante, co-pilot.
Darwin in Four Minutes
Charles Charles Darwin, 1855, courtesy of Darwin Online http://darwin-online.org.uk/
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), expert in barnacle taxonomy, lived his life as an omnivorous reader, letter-writer, and pack-rat. He attended college and traveled abroad, married his cousin Emma, and settled at Down House. There he wrote books, doted on his many children, and suffered bouts of chronic dyspepsia.
We don’t remember Darwin much for these details, eclipsed as they are by his work on evolution. But they are worth noticing if only to make a simple point. Darwin did not live life in anticipation of becoming the father of modern evolutionary biology, a status that seems almost inevitable when we read about Darwin’s life now. Despite the distance of time and culture which separates us from Darwin, he went about his business much as we do: working too much, getting sick and getting better, fretting about others’ opinions, and seeking solace among his friends and family.
In spite of the scrutiny paid to evolution, or perhaps because of it, we continue to see Darwin through a glass darkly, distorted by a body of literature that, despite sophisticated analysis and a Homeric attention to details, reduces his life to the prelude and post-script of the modern era’s most important scientific theory. This is not to beat up on the “Darwin Industry” which has produced a number of superbly researched, balanced portraits of Darwin. But the nuance of such works cannot overcome the weight of Darwin as a mythic figure in the popular imagination.
So what should we remember about Darwin?
He was not the “father” of evolution. The idea that species could change over time had a long history that predates Darwin. “Transformism,” as evolution was called, had many adherents including French naturalists Comte de Buffon and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Even Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, took up the cause, defending the idea in his book Zoonomia (1794-96). But by the mid 19th century, transformism carried with it the whiff of quack science and radicalism. For the empirically-minded European naturalist, accepting transmutation of species was akin to believing in Sasquatch, an idea made all the more unpalatable because it brought with it an uncomfortable proximity to lower social classes and leftist political causes.
Darwin’s reputation rested on different grounds. He did not become the buzz of London because he supported transformism. Rather, he brought to the defense of transformism a stunning, almost overwhelming, body of evidence. In Origin of Species, published in 1859, Darwin gathered his data from a number of different fields: comparative anatomy, taxonomy, biogeography, geology, and embryology. Darwin had come to the idea of evolution relatively early in his scientific career. A sketch of an evolutionary tree appears in Darwin’s notebook in 1837. But Darwin kept his views close to his chest, amassing arguments and pieces of evidence over the next twenty years.
Darwin's 1837 sketch of an evolutionary tree. Courtesy of Darwin Online
But this wasn’t the only reason why Darwin’s monograph flew off bookshelves faster than The Da Vinci Code. Origin of Species posited an entirely novel mechanism of evolution, natural selection, which explained why species change over time. According to Darwin, all populations quickly outgrow the ability of their environments to sustain them. Ultimately individuals of a species are forced to compete with one other for limited resources, winnowing the ranks of survivors to those who are best adapted to the conditions around them. These survivors pass on their successful traits to their offspring and change the constitution of the population accordingly.
Sounds tidy enough, but natural selection had to compete with a number of other possible mechanisms for evolution. For Buffon, species “degenerated” over time, moving away from their original form. For Lamarck, species changed when individual organisms become modified during their lifetimes and passed down these modifications to their offspring (also known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics). For others, evolution showed the handiwork of the Creator who nudged species, humans in particular, up the ladder of perfection.
In today’s world of creationist parks, polarized school boards, and dueling fish decals, the battle line has been drawn over the idea of evolution. Do species change over time? This is the question that sends evolutionists and biblical literalists charging down the hill at each other like the kilt-clad armies of Mel Gibson. But this was not always the case. In Darwin’s day, evolution had broad (though not universal) support from naturalists as well as liberal members of the clergy.
A meeting of the Kansas Schoolboard
It was not evolution but natural selection which ruffled feathers. For many nineteenth-century Britons, natural selection seemed Deist at best and nihilist at worst. After all, what room did Darwin allow for God if nature was doing all of the selecting? As a result, many chose to believe in a theistic or “teleological” version of evolution which accepted Darwin’s evidence for evolution but rejected the mechanism he thought lay behind it.
To be fair, even Darwin had his doubts about whether natural selection could explain all aspects of species change. Later editions of Origin of Species left the door open to other mechanisms of evolution, particularly the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Only in the early twentieth century did natural selection finally win the day among professional scientists.
All of this had led some modern critics of Darwin to point out that his work falls short of certainty, that gaps in the evidence, particularly in the existence of intermediate fossils, doom the ideas of Origin of Species to the status of theory. Nothing about this charge would have upset Darwin. Indeed, he said as much himself in Origin of Species, devoting sections of the book to “Difficulties on Theory,” and “The Imperfection of the Geological Record.”
Where critics see lemons, Darwin saw lemon meringue pie (recipe circa 1847). While Renaissance scholars once aspired to certainty in the study of nature, this had changed by the 19th century as naturalists realized that the “see it with my own eyes” standard of proof worked poorly in trying to understand phenomena that took place far away or in the deep past. Indirect evidence could never yield certainty, but it could be used to develop provisional ideas that gained or lost strength on their ability to account for new data. By this standard, Darwin’s two theories, evolution and natural selection, have held up amazingly well over the past 150 years. That Darwin was comfortable in accepting his work as “theory” may seem like evolution’s Achilles heel to Creation Scientists and Intelligent Designers, but it is exactly this feature which places his research firmly within the era of modern science.
Thanks to Dr John van Wyhe, Director of The Complete Works of Darwin Online, for permission to use Darwin Online images for this post.
Other posts on Darwin:
Digital Archive: Charles Darwin
Darwin Sites and Blogs:
History of Science in the 19th Century:
Less is More
NASA officials petition Congress, 2009
No one can predict what next year’s federal budget will hold in store for NASA. A medium-term recession will put pressure on Congress and the next president to make cuts in the space program. Neither John McCain nor Barak Obama have spent any political capital embracing President Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, though McCain’s on the record as supporting it. Obama has made sounds about delaying it, diverting funds into science and engineering education. Whether there is any money left to divert, cuts at NASA are now a likely scenario. After all, it’s hard to imagine a trillion-dollar program for space exploration holding up during a prolonged economic downturn. Meanwhile, reports from the Ares rocket research and development program have not been promising. The shuttle fleet is scheduled to go into retirement by 2010 and American astronauts will become dependent upon third parties to get them into space.
But perhaps there is something positive to be gleaned in all of this bad news. As the Mars rovers and Phoenix lander have proven, unmanned exploration is comparatively cheap. Moreover it has been productive to space science. Relying upon the Russians Soyuz to shuttle Americans to the International Space Station may not be in the best interests of the United States long-term, but it has paid off in other ways already. As John Schwartz wrote in the New York Times last week:
Those who work side by side with their Russian counterparts say that strong relationships and mutual respect have resulted from the many years of collaboration. And they say that whatever the broader geopolitical concerns about relying on Russia for space transportation during the five years when the United States cannot get to the space station on its own rockets, they believe that the multinational partnership that built the station will hold.
A Russian Soyuz transport in low earth orbit
Among many free-market thinkers, economic downturns are useful insofar as they eliminate, albeit painfully, failing or inefficient businesses and modes of production. If this is a viable model for business, might not it also hold true for the U.S. space program? Forced to downsize and become more efficient, NASA would turn its attention to those lower cost projects that had been secondary priorities during the boom years. Perhaps with all of this talk of international space collaboration, depleted budgets will finally provide the incentive for long-term collaboration. I do not know enough about economics or NASA politics to know if this will happen, but it’s good to have sunny moments when the forecast is calling for so much rain.
Digital Archive: James Cook
Captain James Cook
In his book New Lands, New Men, William Goetzmann describes the 18th and 19th centuries as the “Second Age of Discovery.” The First Age of Discovery, kicked off by the Mediterranean powers of the 15th century, developed maritime routes to Africa, Asia and the Americas. Best known of these early discoverers is Christopher Columbus who sought to extend Spanish dominion, proselytize natives, and bring home piles of loot, objectives followed by his 16th and 17th century successors.
By the 18th century, however, the goals of exploration had changed. Empire and commerce still had their place in voyages of discovery, but they increasingly made room for other, secular objectives such as natural history, ethnography, and natural philosophy, changes that reflected new attitudes about knowledge and learning back home in Europe.
Captain James Cook, who led three expeditions to the Pacific in the 1760s and 1770s, became the poster-child of Enlightenment voyaging. Of modest birth and education, Cook was not himself a philosopher of nature. But his command of three discovery expeditions – to study the transit of Venus, discover the extent of the Antarctic continent, and investigate the possibility of a Northwest Passage – set the benchmark for scientific expeditions to come over the next century. Cook’s chronicles and those of his men of science (Joseph Banks and Johann Forster) provided models for the expeditions of Jean-Francois de la Perouse (France), Alessandro Malaspina (Spain), and Charles Wilkes (United States) among others.
Cook’s serendipitous discovery of the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 (which he named the Sandwich Islands) was also, ultimately, the cause of his demise. After a series of quarrels with Hawaiians of the Big Island, Cook was killed in a skirmish with islanders on the beach of Kealakekua Bay.
The Death of Cook
The National Library of Australia and the Center for Cross-Cultural Research have developed an impressive website on Cook’s legacy, South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific. Focusing on Cook’s first voyage, South Seas offers accounts from Cook, Joseph Banks, Sydney Parkinson, and John Hawkesworth. A world map of Cook’s route allows the viewer to zoom in features of interest, identifying the dates of Cook’s passage, landfalls, as well as diary entries for dates mentioned. A set of four “Cultural Atlases” offer maps and descriptions of the native peoples which Cook visited in Tierra Del Fuego, the Society Islands, Botany Bay, and Endeavour River. South Seas also offers some indigenous histories and European reactions to Cook’s voyage.
Cook welcomes visitors to Waimea, West Kauai
There are a few “links to nowhere” on South Seas. Perhaps the project ran out of funding before it was fully completed. But even in its unfinished form, there are gems here for the student of Enlightenment voyaging.
Also on Cook see:
The Mariner Museum’s Age of Exploration
The Historical Record of New South Wales on Google Books
Many of the full text books on South Seas are also available on Google Books for viewing or download
The Secular Mountain
Mount Ventoux
In 1336, Italian poet Francesco Petrarcha climbed Mount Ventoux in southern France. Mt Ventoux is not very challenging as summits go and Petrarch, as he would later be known, had plenty of help. He traveled with his brother Gherardo, servants, and I would imagine, a light-bodied Chianti. But what stands out about his ascent, or more precisely his writing about his ascent, is the fact that he climbed Mt Ventoux for no practical purpose at all. Petrarch climbed Ventoux because he wanted to “see what so great an elevation had to offer.”
Scholars have their doubts about whether Petrarch made it anywhere near Ventoux. This is beside the point. His writings about his ascent, whether real or fiction, express a new attitude towards travel, mountains, and the process of enlightenment. After a long day, Petrarch tells us that his party reached the summit of Ventoux where he looked down upon the clouds, the distant Alps, and “stood like one dazed.” For Renaissance scholars, the ascent of Mt. Ventoux represented a critical moment in the development of humanism, a desire to access truths about the world through secular experience, rather than rely upon prayer, church teachings, or the reading of Scripture. In Petrarch’s “seeing what the mountain had to offer” the modern ear hears an echo of George Mallory’s 1923 statement to the New York Times explaining that he wanted to climb Everest “Because its there.”
George Mallory
This secular vision of the mountain – a place for human achievement and perhaps self-enlightenment- is a modern thing as historical processes go. For most of recorded history, mountains were landscapes for the supernatural. Roman, Celtic, and Hindu cultures (among others) placed their gods in the mountains. I was struck, as I read Isserman and Weaver’s Fallen Giants this week, that the first Western descriptions of the Himalaya were not from climbers but from Christian missionaries who trekked through Nepal and China.
But I think we read too much into the secular nature of Petrarch’s ascent. After enjoying the view for a few minutes, Petrarch tells us that he pulled out his copy of St Augustine’s Confessions (not the secularist’s obvious choice for mountain literature) where it opened, miraculously, to a passage about mountains:
Now it chanced that the tenth book presented itself. My brother, waiting to hear something of St. Augustine’s from my lips, stood attentively by. I call him, and God too, to witness that where I first fixed my eyes it was written: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” I was abashed, and, asking my brother (who was anxious to hear more), not to annoy me, I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again.
As I see it, the lesson Petrarch gleans from his mountain experience is the opposite of Romantic or modern notions about climbing: he tells us that one cannot find truth on the mountain through exertion and sublime experience. Indeed such spectacular landscapes present dangers to the pilgrim seeking real enlightenment. The true path, Petrarch tells us, is an inward path, one without the distractions offered by the wonders of the natural world.
It seems now that the world’s highest mountains have been shorn of their status as places of secular enlightenment and are now merely secular. Richard Salisbury and Elizabeth Hawley’s stunning piece of statistical work on Himalayan climbing makes clear that the 8000 meter peaks of South Asia are sought after more than ever before. Yet increasingly only a few peaks (Ama Dablam, Cho Ayu, and Everest) see increased traffic, mostly by commercial climbing companies which outfit expeditions for high-paying clients, a conveyor belt of climbers who don’t seem much interested in the process of climbing, the view, or anything much else except for the summit. Meanwhile, the other peaks of the Himalayas see fewer and fewer climbers, even “sacred” mountains such as Kangchenjunga. What thoughts goes through the hypoxic climber’s mind when he gets to Mallory’s “there” ? Does he see a vision of God? A warning from Augustine? Or only a picture for his blog site?
Read Petrarch’s Ascent of Mount Ventoux
Look at Salisbury and Hawley’s Himalayan Database
