Myths I



WALLER - Fabulous science

INTRO 

Until recent decades, the history of science was largely written by those who wished to place their chosen subject in as favourable a light as possible. Their motivations were various. Sometimes they worked at the behest of individual scientists who wanted to make sure that their part in the great drama of discovery did not go unsung. In other cases, the key requirement was a good story. More laudably generations of teachers of scientific subjects have wanted heroes for much the same reason that Livy gave the Romans Horatio: to inspire by example. The chosen ones entered the Pantheon of scientific heroes. Great laboratories and institutes were named in their honour; each new generation of students was given accounts of their travails and ultimate triumphs; and assorted statuary serves as a perpetual memorial to their greatness.

In the last few decades, however, this approach has been rightfully impugned. A new generation of scholars has shown that in many cases what actually happened simply cannot sustain the enormous edifice subsequently built on it. Many of the great luminaries of the past were neither as heroic nor selfless as has been supposed. Seemingly crucial experiments are sometimes found to have been fatally flawed; results were often modified to suit the case being argued; and many were happy to use political influence to advance their cause. Indeed, ample evidence is now available to show that scientific merit is only one of many factors influencing the acceptance of new ideas. Many pre-eminent scientific heroes fell far short of proving the theories for which they are now famous. Men such as Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Alexander Fleming were neither as surefooted nor as scrupulous as they are now thought to have been. Charles Darwin was right at least partly for the wrong reasons. Others, such as Gregor Mendel, have had greatness thrust on them by a highly manipulative posterity. And, not infrequently, individuals now cast as scientific villains prove on closer examination to have been able scientists who just happened, often for very good reasons, to have backed the wrong horse. 

 Above all, what this new research shows is that the conduct of scientific enquiry is often a lot more haphazard than we tend to think. Although the eventual outcome of a research programme may be a fabulously rich collection of well-attested and highly predictive ideas, the route to this happy state is often far more convoluted than subsequent accounts will allow. Revealing what actually happened in some very high-profile cases may help bring our conception of the scientific enterprise into much closer alignment with the actuality. None of this undercuts the status I believe modern science deservedly enjoys as the best way of increasing our understanding of the physical world. But our expectations will be more realistically grounded if we come to appreciate that science is as subject to extraneous influences—including the human ego—as is any other field of human endeavour, past or present. 

 There is another important service that historians of science can render. As in all other branches of history, ‘great man’ approaches massively underplay the contributions made by the myriad individuals who did not achieve this honoured status. Thousands upon thousands of now largely forgotten researchers have contributed to scientific progress. And with very few exceptions, great men or women are cumulatively far less important than these forgotten legions of unsung heroes about whom little is popularly known. Indeed, some mute inglorious scientists were just as insightful and technically ingenious as those whose names have lived on. In many such cases, the differences in historical treatment are best explained in terms of a general preference for attaching major ideas to a limited number of names, coupled with skills, or the want of them, in the arts of self-promotion. The pristine hero, exemplified by brave Horatio, is all too often an elaborate fiction. If we go back and look at the primary sources, few reputations escape entirely unscathed. 6-8

Heroes of sci. squeezed themselves or were squeezed into romantic myths. Sometimes due to the high competitive nature of science, where anything goes ;P. 8

Presentism: reading older ideas out of context to assign them as precursors or anticipations to modern ideas. "A vague affinity between a currently accepted theory and a much earlier set of ideas is often enough to elevate the ancestor into the Pantheon of scientific heroes [...] Put back into the context in which the originators lived out their lives, many ideas are found to be much less clearly aligned with what we now believe to be true. But we are taught to demand much of our founding fathers. Their having been there at the beginning, pointing the way forward, does not seem to be enough. There is also a tendency to expect them, long after they have entered the grave, to remain in the van of progress, their ideas at least broadly anticipating each new development". Contextuallization of these ideas is very important 9

RIGHT FOR THE WRONG REASONS

Manipulação de dados experimentais para se encaixar melhor em uma realidade pré-concebida.

Saber disso diminui a suposta objetividade da cc. Mas Popper distinguiu dois estágios, descoberta e verificação. No primeiro as coisas são menos estruturadas do queue no segundo quando various scientists de juntam para falsear uma teoria.

The initial evidence presented by these scientists was seriously flawed and they were each led more by conviction than empirical data. But had they been unequivocally wrong about the way in which the world operates, then research by other scientists in other laboratories would soon have shown this to be the case. Incorrect but plausible ideas have often been endorsed by sections of the modern scientific community. Almost never, however, have they stuck around for long: a theory must have considerable merits for it to stand a chance of survival in a milieu that thrives on disagreement. [...] Contrary to the traditional view, this critical stage is mediated by a wide range of social and psychological factors that all too easily tempt researchers from the path of righteousness laid down by the rules of the scientific method as conventionally defined. During the verification stage, the prognosis for bad ideas supported by good PR is extremely poor. But when new territory is being opened up, there is far more scope for tactical skills and sheer force of personality to play decisive parts. It is to five such cases that I now turn. 13

Pasteur

Todo experiment que ia contra sua opinião era marcado como errado. os resultados deles eram descartados da apresentação. Mercúrio contaminado era usado como explicação. Se recusava a considerar ou replicar o experiment de pouchet. Pasteur acreditava queue seu experimetno era representative de todo o universe. Não aceitar replicar os expertimetnos de Bastian e Pouchet foi bom para Pastweur, uma vez que produzuria provas contrparias dificeis de exlicar com o ocnehcimento da época. Geração espontanea era ligada ao ateísmo na sociedade da época, part devido a Lamarck, o que enfraquecia Bastian e Pouchet frente a frança católica. Pouchet desistiu de continuar tentando devido ao viés político em favor de Pateur an academia científica francesa. Patour era muito religioso e teísta, era inadimissível para ele aceitar que Deus não intervisse na conversão de matéria inorgânica em orgânica, ele também era bem conservador politicamente, isso influenciou sua conduta científica. 

Millikan

The imprecision of their experiments meant that they could offer a value of e derived only from statistical averages that did not even form a neat statistical distribution. To the atomists this seemed reasonable; to ether theorists the average values thus obtained for e were mere artefacts of the statistical methodology. In their view the highly variable results themselves constituted the key evidence, being precisely what ether theory predicted. Only one thing was going to resolve this impasse in favour of the atomists: outstanding experimental results tightly clustered around a consistent value for e that was itself perfectly divisible into all higher values obtained. Millikan começou os experiments comprometido com a visão atomista. Eletrificar a nuvem de vapor promoveu os primeiros resultados a favor da visão atomista, pois algumas gotículas se mantinham suspensas enquanto outras sumiam, logo as que permaneciam tinha a carga exata necessária para se manterem. Isso resistiu a variação da carga elétrica aplicada, permacendo em valores discretos.Inocência metodológica e retórica por parte de Millikan dando notas para experimetnos e explicando quais havia retirado. Ehrenhaft disse que considerando os valores omitidos a teoria do éter se mantia. Millikan arendeu com as críticas e usou óleo para obter resultados mais exatos. Ele chegou a alegar que absolutamente todos os experimetnos haviam dado certo, mas isso era mentira conformed vemos em seus cadernos. Não constitui fraude pois os resultados poderiam ser explicados, mas era uma tática de apresentação do trabalho que desarmava Ehrenhaft, que entrou na história como o vilão ignorant. Três morais: supressão de dados faz parte da ciencia; é muito difícil separar a teoria prévia da interpretação dos resultados; ignorar críticas fortes pode ser positive para o desenvolvimento de uma teoria. It brings small comfort to the also-rans, but it appears that some degree of what at first glance seems to be irrationality can have an important role in achieving scientific progress.

Eddington

 Problemas: comparações entre estrelas fotografadas em diferentes partes do céu em estações diferentes. Sujeitas a variações de temperatura. As totos do eclipse seriam tiradas de dia e as outras de noite. A turbulência atmosfértica nos trópicos também é considerável. O clima poderia frustar tudo. O transporte poderia desocnfigurar os telescópios. Os mecanismos giratórios dos microscópios contra a rotação terrestre também poderiam influenciar nos resultados. A ideia era calcular esses problemas para isolar as estrelas, mas sem dúvida era um método muito difícil. As duas fotos dos telescópios de sobral diziam 1,98 (muito alto), as 16 fotos ruins dos astrógafos diziam 0,86 (Newton dizia 0,8 e Einstein 1,7), os desvios padrão também eram altíssimos.As fotos de Príncipe utilizáveis chegaram a 1,31 e 1,91, mas as fotos eram ruins e a fórmula de Eddington foi acusada de enviesamento. Contudo, 1,62 foi a média final.

Eddington disse que os resultados dos astrógrafos de sobral provavelmente haviam sido operados de maneira errada. Não havia evidência de que esse n]ao poderia ser seu caso também. Ele favoreceu suas fotos borradas ao invés das fotos mais claras de sobral. Vários cientistas criticaram essa contaminação de teoria nas observações na época. O caso parece ter sido mais alardeado pela mídia do que pela comunidade científica. Aqueles da comunidade científica aceitaram sem querer replicar os experimentos, pois eram muito custosos e complicados. Experimentos independentes posteriores não foram de grande ajuda, formou-se um consenso cultyural. Conclui que o experimenrto não foi tão crucial assim, mas que ganhou fama devido ao RP e a teoria ter sido comprovada melhor décadas depois. Kennefleck [?] lanço um livro recentemente dando mais moral para Eddington.

Taylor

Acusado de embelezar ao longo dos anos os resultados obtidos por experimenetos de produtividade de carregadores de ferro. Taylor também afrmava ter uma seleção científica de trabalhodres, mas isso não se ssutenta ante aos documentos do expermento, já que os experimentadores aceitavam aqueles que consideravam fortes o suficiente para o trabalho, e não levavam em conta suas disposições em serem sugestionados.

Roethlisberger

Outro exemplo de estudo experimental com trabalhadores no qual o exérimento foi mal conduzido, os resultados mal interpretados, mas adotados sem crítica devido a wishful thinking. No caso, queriam demonstrar que uma gerência agradável e amigável com os trabalhadores leva a melhores resultados, mas isso não se confirma nos documentos. Também é dito que esse condução foi influenciada por um sentimento anticomunista interessado em manter o trabalhador feliz para evitar a luta de classes.

Conclusion I

Casos de afirmações muito eloquentes baseadas em pouca coisa. 99

Embora o indutivismo seja celebrado Most scientists begin with hypotheses derived from very limited evidence. If for no other reason than economy of effort, theories usually precede the large-scale accumulation of facts. 100

O autor afirma que preconcepções são filtros úteis para a organização prévia de observações. f preconception is an essential component of rationally conceived scientific investigation, according to many philosophers and scientists so are personal ambition, the periodic exercise of authority, and the suppression of awkward or inexplicable results. Personal ambition is the motor that drives most scientists to come up with new ideas and persist with them even if the first signs are not entirely positive. Pulling rank can be a necessary means of ensuring that debate isn’t derailed by those without the knowledge and experience to offer the best of judgements. And discarding some results can be justified where new and unpredictable technologies are being employed. 101

Os cientistas não deixam de ser racionais, apenas desviam do caminho ideal de ciência que não é praticável. So, if it’s not possible to define precisely what good science is, we must be prepared to judge each case on its merits. To do this we need to adopt an inclusive definition of appropriate scientific behaviour and constantly bear in mind that human factors are as likely to accelerate as to impede scientific advance. In addition, lest we fall into the trap of presentism we must be sure that our judgements in no way conflict with those that would have been made at the time. 102

This is not to say that science need become less rigorous. Nor, as I have already noted, am I proposing the exclusion of either personal ambition or strong emotional commitments to particular ideas. All that is called for is a recognition that leading-edge scientific work justifies being treated rather more indulgently than the vast majority of research that involves consolidating and expanding on existing theoretical frameworks. Seeking to falsify theoretical explanations is essential if science is to be kept free of conceptual detritus. Even so, there is a clear danger that if falsificationism becomes either an end in itself or no more than a defensive strategy deployed by those who fear rival ideas, science, like revolution, will all too frequently consume its own young. 106


TELLING SCIENCE AS IT WAS

Vai criticar hagiografias, o esforço pessoal de certos cientistas em serem bem lembrados e nossa tendência teleológica ao ler a história (whig).

Snow

Se Snow era o gênio que a história fez dele, porque insttiuições científicas e governamentais não o ouviram? Parkers (defensor da teoria dos miasmas) interpretava os dados do mapa em favor da transmissão aérea da cólera. Além disso, porque outras bombas não causavam o mesmo, porque um alcance tão preciso? As evidências não eram tão boas assim [ver exposição da época na p. 121]. A teoria de Snow não necessariamente significava o fim do miasma e muitos miasmistas diziam que os odores poderiam seguir pela água. Seu pensamento não era tão desafiador também, o contágio um-a-um era admitido como possibilidade pelos miasmistas e a insistência na cólera como um agente próprio não dependente da consistência de cada infectado tinha pprecedentes em Henle e outros, o fim do constituismo ajudou o estabelecimento da teoria dos germes e Snow a propor sua tese. Outros também já defendiam a transmissão por água da cólera. Outros lugares já haviam começado a inutilizar bombas, mas sem comprovação de que isso surtia efeito. Além disso, a taxa de mortes em Broad Street já estava em decçinio, por tanto não deve ser atribuído a ele o papel de gênio pioneiro.

Mesmo que a organização do mapa parecesse altamente indutivista, Snow já o interpretava seguindo sua ideia de transmissão por água. Observação influenciada  por teoria prévia não deve ser censurada, ela ajuda a organizar dados que seriam incompreensíveis e ajudam a ligar conceitos aparentemente distantes. Ele identificou a bomba antes de começar o mapa, já que ele não aparece na primeira edição de se livro. É errado, portnarto, considerá-lo como pai da Epidemiologia, existiram miasmistas tão ao mais brilhantes antes dele.

So far the main thrust of the argument has been that the canonization of individuals like Snow makes for bad history and a distorted understanding of the way in which science usually works. There is also another problem. Overstating the importance of a long-dead scientist carries with it the risk  that when the truth is finally revealed there can be what the military call ‘collateral damage’ to the scientific discipline. [conta a história da queda de Cyril Burt que levou junto o campo que fundou (QI e herança de inteligência) quando foi acusado de fraudar seus dados] No one individual—alive or dead—should be elevated to such a degree that their reputation becomes indistinguishable from that of their discipline [...] Surely, then, a fully mature and justifiably self-confident discipline has no need of an irreproachable father/mother figure. Cinetistas caem de pedestais no qual nós os botamos, devemos ser realistas e evitar o endeusamento de cientistas e encarar o que eles realmente fizeram como importante, por menos épico que possa ter sido. 129-130

Mendel

the prevailing accounts of Mendel’s career betray all the classic weaknesses of presentism. It would be hard to imagine a finer demonstration of the cumulative effects of succeeding generations projecting the present back onto the past than is to be found in our current image of Gregor Mendel 135

Mendel pesquisava no paradigma da hibridização de plantas. Ele queria produzir híbridos estáveis não estudar hereditariedade. 141

Claro que pelo próprio padrão descoberto por ele, era impossível que híbridos gerasse apenas híbridos. The huge presentist superstructure removed, we can now see that, in 1865, Mendel was actually reporting unequivocal failure. He had thrown up an interesting statistical pattern that he could not fully explain, but even his practical hopes of finding a way of stabilizing new plant types for the benefit of local farmers had got nowhere. If we assume that many among his audience were aware of this, we could reread their silence as reflecting not incomprehension but sympathetic understanding. 142

Os termos dominante e recessivo são mesmo usados por Mendel, assim como as razões 3:1 e 1:2:1, mas já haviam outros hibridizadores que tinha conciência que certas características passavam incólumes em cruzamentos. 144

This would be unimportant were it not for the fact that Mendel used ‘characters’ only when referring to physical characteristics, and never when discussing the contents of the reproductive cells. Conversely he used the word ‘elements’ only when talking about the discrete particles of hereditary matter that passed from one generation to the next. As in the above passage, when Mendel paired up dominant and recessive traits, as in ‘Aa’, he was always referring to ‘characters’ and never to ‘elements’. Of course, Mendel realized that these ‘characters’ were inherited. But the key point is that he kept his discussion at the level of the physical characteristics themselves: paired characters in Mendel’s terms did not equate to paired genes. Why this should have been the case is obvious: it’s what he could actually see. Observing the offspring of hybrids told Mendel that the parent plants contain the hereditary potential for two different forms of traits, such as size and colour. Yet simply looking at hybrids and their progeny didn’t open his eyes to what was going on within the reproductive cells themselves. 145-6

Não fala de pares de caracteres. 146

This hints at the most fundamental sense in which we have had Gregor Mendel wrong for the past 100 years. For good empirical reasons, Mendel believed hybrids to be a special case of inheritance. This is because all he could see were external, or phenotypical, effects. From these it seemed self-evident that when breeding occurred between pure types (CC and CC or ccand cc), a perfect union took place between the parental elements responsible for any given characteristic. This was why all such unions bred true. But from this perspective, hybrids (Cc) represented some kind of unstable deviation from the norm. This is how Mendel put it: ‘If it chance that an egg cell unites with a dissimilar pollen cell, we must then assume that between those elements of both cells, which determine opposite characters some sort of compromise is effected.’ So unhappy was this compromise, Mendel reasoned, that the two parties took the earliest opportunity to ‘liberate themselves from the enforced union when the fertilizing cells are developed’. Some inner force, he assumed, drove the dissimilar units of heredity apart. This was why, when the next generation appeared, about half the plants reverted to parental forms. The crux of the matter is that Mendel erroneously thought hybrid forms to involve completely different physiological mechanics to pure-type forms. He did refer to opposing units of heredity (though not to pairs) and to segregation. But only for the hybrid. 146

Rather than being a notation for a gene pair, Mendel’s ‘Aa’ was no more than a simple means of indicating hybrid status. In sum, whilst Mendel deserves great credit for teasing out the ratio central to modern genetics, the superficial resemblance between his A  2Aa  a and the modern AA  2Aa  aa should no longer be taken as evidence that he gave both genetics and evolutionary theory the crucial insight encapsulated within ‘his’ Law of Segregation. 147

Os resultados de mendel só fariam sentido após a descoberta dos cromossomos, de que metade deles vão para os gametas e que os genes seguem o mesmo caminho. 147-8

Some readers may feel that this is utterly unjust. Knowing what we do, it seems obvious to the modern mind that Mendel’s word ‘characters’ could have been replaced by his term ‘elements’ to very great advantage. But, as I have stressed, we must put aside what science has learned since 1865. There was absolutely nothing in Mendel’s data to suggest that in every case the hereditary units contributed by each parent remain separate entities, conjoined in a gene pair. Nor was there anything to inspire the idea that single genes make an irreplaceable contribution to the formation of the organism. The likelihood is that Mendel shared the then commonly held view that hundreds or evens thousands of hereditary elements are available to specify any given trait. With ‘like’ elements he therefore felt no need to invoke the principle of segregation. He seems simply to have assumed that there would always be enough passed through to the next generation. In such cases, segregation—in his mind the result of repulsive forces that would not arise between ‘like’ elements—was simply not an issue. 148

 As it happens, Mendel decided entirely to avoid the question of the numbers of elements involved. He could carry out his breeding experiments perfectly well by just calculating the frequency of the different characters themselves. All he needed to do was record the number of greens to yellows, talls to shorts, wrinkled to smoothed, and so on. In this crucial sense Mendel’s was purely a descriptive exercise. It did not matter to him what the genes/elements were doing and how many of them were doing it. This interpretation makes even more sense when we recall that Mendel was not seeking the laws of heredity, but that he was trying to create new species through hybridization. From this point of view the number of elements were of little or no consequence to him. He could quite satisfactorily recognize species by their physical form and this was as close to their genetics as his self-imposed task impelled him to go. 148

Mendel não distinguia caracteres finitos, mas "células". Nos híbridos os elementos mutuamente excludentes de repeliam quando formavam as células germinativas. Indivíduos puros não passariam por essa segregação. had Mendel presented his data in 1865 as clear evidence for allelic inheritance it would have been unsupported speculation: not good science. 149

 Mendel’s great strength lay in observing and tabulating the external effects that would lead others to formulate this law. Mendel carried out a large-scale programme of cross-breeding between hybrids, taking account of a range of different characteristics subject to dominance and recessiveness. What he found enabled him to construct what he called the Law of Combination of Different Characters. Again, note his reference to characters, not elements. As is to be expected, he believed what he had found to be peculiar to hybrids. The underlying principle was that ‘hybrids produce egg cells and pollen cells which in equal numbers represent all constant forms which result from the combination of the characters bought together by fertilization’. 150

Sintese até agora: First, when Mendel spoke of paired characters, he was not thinking of allelic pairing. This is clear from the way in which he referred only to pairings of characters and not of elements. Second, he believed that hybrids are a special case, even a contravention of nature’s laws. This is apparent from his failure to speak of either character or element pairs in relation to pure types and from his description of hybrids as involving an unhappy ‘compromise’ not required of pure types. Third, although he believed that a process of segregation takes place when the sex cells form, he considered it necessary only for the hybrid cells in which has occurred the ‘unnatural’ conjoining of ‘dissimilar’ elements. Pure types are not included in this process because their ‘genetics’ are assumed to be entirely uncomplicated. Finally, it should be noted, all this is fully compatible with the fact that Mendel was interested in the theory of ‘species multiplication through hybridization’ and not heredity by itself. 151

This was not the only time that a ratio close to 3:1 was discovered during the 1860s. Charles Darwin himself recorded a distribution of 2.38:1 from breeding two different varieties of snapdragon. He was unable, however, to make much sense of this recurrent pattern. Mendel had chosen wisely in concentrating for several years on just one species of plant and very few individual characters. Repeatedly encountering the 1:2:1 ratio he could hardly help noticing its importance. And, without doubt, carefully documenting this statistical distribution was the most important legacy Mendel left to the twentieth century. Even on its own it goes a long way to confirming the pivotal role credited to him in the development of what was to become genetics. 151-2

Porque isso não impressiounou? Talvez as ervilhas fosseme speciais nesse caso, não generalizáveis para o resto das plantas. Os experimentos com feijões de Mendel não resultaram em proporções tão claras já que (como sabemos hoje) as características da planta não são determinadas por um único gene, como nas ervilhas. 152

Mendel e Darwin: Darwin havia fechado com a herança por mistura, Mendel mostrava que características discretas ainda poderiam surgir de híbridos. For a start, we have already seen that Mendel was strongly committed to demonstrating a rival form of evolutionism based on the idea of hybridization. During the 1860s, Mendel actually had a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Tellingly, far from seeing its contents as compatible with the findings of his own breeding experiments, his pencilled annotations make clear that he adamantly rejected Darwinism in favour of the Linnaean approach he was himself exploring. Mendel was thinking about the origin of species, but he was doing so as part of a tradition largely confined to Germanspeaking Central Europe. His fascination with hybridization would have made little sense to Darwin whose evolutionary schema (usually) stressed relentless competition, death and non-directionality, rather than the benign, Creation-compatible process of interbreeding that Mendel was striving to demonstrate. 154

Galton propos uma teoria sem herança por mistura, mas que darwin também ignorou, to Darwin, Mendel’s evidence would have seemed either inexplicable or a bizarre exception to the general rule. Comoo visto antes, em situações onde não haviam caracteres discretos, o próprio Mendel tinha problemas 155

Be that as it may, the main point is that pure Mendelism does not, at first glance, fit comfortably with Darwinism: Mendel seemed to have demonstrated the immutability of species, yet Darwinism is predicated on the emergence of new ones. In reality, their much-lamented delayed marriage only became possible well into the twentieth century. A crucial pre-nuptial contribution was made by American work on mutation in the fruit fly and by the evidence gathered by population biologists of the enormous range of variety within single species in nature. The curious notion that Darwinism and Mendelism were kept apart through poor scientific communication alone was devised by Darwinians during the 1930s who wished to counter-attack their critics by belatedly claiming Mendel as one of their own. They were certainly not lacking in effrontery. The realization that Darwinism and Mendelism made a fine matching pair rested on the half-century’s intense scientific effort immediately preceding it. Yet, almost immediately after they ‘saw the light’, some Darwinists began volubly to insist that just given sight of Mendel’s papers, Darwin would have had it in one. Fortunately we are now in a position to be somewhat more circumspect. Once Gregor Mendel is placed back into an intellectual landscape that he would himself recognize, it’s clear that he would always have seen The Origin of Species as a challenge to his own worldview. For his part, Darwin was also being guided by long-since outdated forms of scientific thought. His lifelong commitment to theories of blending heredity would always have precluded his taking Mendel’s results seriously. Seldom can two important scientific thinkers have written at such hopelessly crossed purposes. 155-6

When biologists at the turn of the twentieth century read Mendel’s 1865 ‘Experiments in plant hybridization’, they read into it fundamental ideas that it simply did not contain. This enabled them to wrench Mendel from a milieu that they did not properly understand and dump him into a context in which he did not fit. Over time, however, it became easy to ignore the passages in Mendel’s writings that had looked a little questionable in 1900. Few read Mendel’s own essays and even fewer tried to investigate the obscure context in which he had worked. Instead he was catapulted into stardom on secondary evidence, and terms such as ‘genius’ were used in place of proper historical analysis. The myths that have been allowed to conceal what he was really attempting to do show little sign of vanishing. Mendel’s most recent biographer, Robin Henig, takes much of the standard view at face value despite an awareness of more recent scholarship. Indeed, there seems to be an almost universal willingness to skate over the way in which Mendel actually interpreted his results and to ignore the gulf between his worldview and many of the ideas now central to modern genetics. 

 I have already suggested one reason why Mendel was fashioned into a pioneering genius. Geneticists during the 1930s wished to enrol him as their own prized mascot; a procedure helped by the ease of misinterpreting Mendel’s ‘Experiments in plant hybridization’ as a discussion of genes or ‘elements’ rather than ‘traits’ and ‘character pairs’. It is also important that three other biologists, Carl Correns, Erich Tschermak, and Hugo de Vries, each claimed around the end of the nineteenth century to have discovered the law of the independent segregation of genes at about the same time. One sociologist has incisively argued that hailing Mendel as the real discoverer may have been intended to defuse a potentially explosive and bitter priority dispute between these three men. But whatever the explanation for Mendel’s initial rise to glory, he has maintained his position as a scientific hero because he functions so effectively as a standard bearer for the romantic perception of science. To those who expect their heroes to be unsung in their own time, Mendel stands out as the perfect example. Whereas, for example, Joseph Lister became a Baron and Charles Darwin was awarded the splendour of a state funeral, Mendel died in relative obscurity, his love for science almost entirely unrewarded. 

 Only now can we appreciate that Mendel actually achieved only a fraction of what is generally thought. Discovering the 1:2:1 ratio took skill, patience, imagination, and self-belief. Even if ‘genius’ would be going much too far, this deserves to be celebrated as an important breakthrough. Furthermore, it is no discredit to Mendel that modern Mendelian genetics did not emerge, fully formed, from a monastic garden during the middle of the nineteenth century. To think such a feat possible is to overlook how much prior knowledge was required to reach this level of understanding. And to repeat a point I made in relation to John Snow, believing that single individuals are capable of such tremendous accomplishments is also to ignore the fact that science is best viewed as a neverending, multi-participant marathon, not a series of high-profile relays. 

 The history of science does include some individuals whose personal efforts are of such quality and so revolutionary as to warrant the label ‘genius’. But it is the aggregated contributions of thousands upon thousands of scientific foot-soldiers, junior officers, and men and women of middle rank that account for the great majority of scientific advances. Indeed, understood in his own terms, it is probably fair to conclude that, but for the strategic and tactical objectives of some of those who followed him, Mendel would have remained within this under-appreciated host. His years of admirable dedication were rewarded with posthumous glory but he himself always edged forward with measured steps, remaining blind to where his ideas would one day lead. 156-8

Lister

Lister patenteou métodos de aplicação do ácido carbólico. Cirurgiões da época achavam que o uso em sprays, gazes e pastas demandava muito tempo era inexequível em situação de alta pressão como hospitais de guerra. Muitos outros tinham métodos antissépticos diferentes que estavam surtindo grande efeito e faziam com que os produtos de lister parecessem desnecessários. Lister punha muita enfase no paciente, mas não tanto na limpeza do ambiente. Os resultados de Lister, embora indicativos de sucesso, não eram impressionantes nem imbatíveis por outros métodos que não o dele. O ácido também retardava a regeneração dos pacientes. Contudo, Lister era muito bom em autopromoção, ligado-se a Pasteur ele surfou na mesma onda de prestígio após o desenvolvimento da vacina contra o Antrax pelo francês. Antes de 1880 Lister defendia que infecções só afetam tecidos mortos (putrefação por "germes" aéreos) e que os germes não eram específicos, concepções contrárias a teoria dos germes posterior. Após o sucesso da teoria dos germes ele fez parecer como sempre tivesse estado a frente de seu tempo tanto com relação a isso quanto com relação a limpeza dos ambientas hospitalares. Ele enfiou tudo embaixo do guarda chiva "antisséptico" para incluir as ideias de outros como se tivesse sido a favor desde o início.

Darwin

 Identifica muitas influencias de lamarck nos notebooks.

Comentários sobre as edições a partir da p. 201

Comenta que Darwin não deve ser acusado de retornar ao lamarckismo nas últimas edições porque ele nunca havia não sido lamarckista.

Huxley, Hooker e Wilbeforce

Interessante ver como isso influenciou a revisão do Origin. Ver questão dos gatos mumificados 211-2

Huxley entregou um relato do embate com Wilberforce no qual ele mesmo saia por cima. Esse relato see tornou o official, mas as pessoasa próximas a Wilberforce e o próprio Hooker relatam que Huxley não foi tão bem assim. 208-10

Ciência e religião não eram dissociadas. Wilberforce era "scientists". 210

An important clue to understanding why the event has assumed such symbolic importance lies in the fact that, as several members of the audience commented, ‘The younger men were on the side of Darwin, the older men against him’. Darwin also observed that the success of his theory would depend on ‘young men growing up and replacing the old workers’. This generational divide had little to do with proverbial old dogs and tricks. Instead, Huxley and his allies had a strong vested interest in asserting a sharp distinction between science and religion. 212

Capitalismo e ciencia 213

Coloca que Huxley estava em uma quest para legitimar sua posição como cientista professional sem meios de sustento próprio, portanto deveria traçar uma linha clara entre os amadores religiosos ricos e os profissionais céticos. 214 

From the late 1850s onwards, Huxley set about ‘unmasking’ Establishment science as intellectually bankrupt. His mantra ‘Science versus Parsonism’ encapsulated both the new model of science he was advancing and the means by which this ‘young guard’ would pull off their coup against the traditional scientific elite. Deliberately redefining science in terms inimical to Establishment religion, Huxley even coined the term ‘agnostic’ to describe the only attitude he believed a legitimate scientist could adopt towards religion. Thus, within a few years the radical wing of science had become agnostic, thoroughly anti-scriptural, and a very powerful lever for ousting the amateur from the scientific domain. Happily invoking the fate of Galileo at the hands of the Catholic Church, Huxley warned the public of its duty to ‘cherish’ science and defend it against ‘those who would silence and crush her’. In Huxley’s rhetoric, those with dual loyalties to science and religion were portrayed as representing forces corrosive to the advancement of science, smothering her spirit of free enquiry. And it is in this context that we need to set the Oxford debate. 215

 Where once the scientific community had esteemed the generalist, the new man of science was to be a specialist, entirely unashamed of his ignorance of anything beyond his immediate intellectual frontiers. This new reverence for specialization—still seen by many as essential to scientific advance—first came into being as a stick with which to chase the amateurs out of the yard. Moreover, to the decision by this cabal of reformers to redefine science may be traced much of the rhetoric of the scientific method. Claiming a commitment to the rational apprehension of the truth without ulterior motive and somehow hermetically sealed off from wider influences, these brilliant men changed the way people thought about science and the scientist. The ideal they formulated was deliberately congenial to bright young men who could benefit from the introduction of a salaried career structure. It boded ill, however, for the amateur and the polymath. Over the following years, science became a less and less popular pastime for the cleric and the well-to-do amateur. And, as the field became almost exclusively the preserve of the university and the laboratory, the new men rewrote history to provide the quintessential foundation myth. Hence the yawning gap between what is thought to have happened and what actually happened on the night of 30 June 1860. 216

Também foram feitas alianças com a ala minoritária de anglicanos liberais 217

Turning briefly to the late-Victorian clerics, most of the upper echelons were soon happy to accept ideas of evolution in an attenuated form. They did this, like Lyell, Gray, and Wallace, by writing God back into the story as both designer and overseer. Nor were they alone in feeling that Darwin’s ideas needed something extra. Perhaps the most striking feature of the post-1859 period is that scientists, churchmen, and the educated population at large became increasingly sceptical of the theory of natural selection. As seen in Chapter 9, the idea of evolutionary change driven by blind selective forces was unappealing to a religious society buoyed up with national optimism. In its place, most people preferred an evolutionary model that suggested either a built-in and divinely ordained tendency towards further improvement or an ever-watchful God who supervised the process of ongoing development. These ideas of inevitable progress suited the time and the place: the unregulated roulette wheel implicit in Darwinism—although not fully accepted by Darwin—most certainly did not. Isso levou a uma adoção pela igreja anglicana da ciência em um ato deísta. 218

Best

Mesma situação de Pasteur, Eddington e Millikan. Escolheram os melhores resultados e deixaram de fora outros, contudo um produto estável e eficaz ainda não era possível. Banting e Best see aliaram ao mais habilidoso Collip, juntos sob a tutela de Mcleoud, após percalços e vitórias, eles descobriram a insulin. O prêmio gerou muita intriga entre os quatro. Best, após a more de Banting e Macleod, reescreveu a história see colocando como persongagem principal. Na ocasião do filme, Best inventou um roteiro que o colocava como o heroi da historia, o director Macfarlane notou discrepancies com relação a versão de Macleod e foi investigar, utilizouo os mansucritos de Banting. Macfarlane conseguiu confissões de Best e filmou uma versão mais próxima da realidade, descartando a história de Best. Best impediu a publicação dos manuscritos de Banting. Mesmo com cada vez mais evidências, Best não cedeu frente ao público. A prioridade de Best baseada no control do açucar do sangue de cães caiu por terra quando descobriram que paulesco havia feito o mesmo antes.

. Prolonged campaigns of self-glorification are not uncommon in science, particularly with regard to matters of priority. Collip represents the other side of this coin, showing how easily scientists who have made valuable contributions can be sidelined by those whose determination to achieve immortality is ethically unconstrained. Longevity also plays its part 244

hat the great and the good in Canada wanted was what Best wanted: to milk it for all it was worth. As a fond parent and taking vicarious pride in its stout sons of Empire, Great Britain wasn’t going to cavil much about the contribution of the Scot, Macleod. Collip proved something of a shrinking violet, so, at first, the Canadian Establishment threw all its weight behind Banting and his version of events. Then, on his death, they went for the even more high-profile Best. Whatever he said was fine as long as in aggrandizing himself, he kept Canada’s finest scientific triumph continually to the fore [...]  Perhaps, though, those who follow Livy in subordinating historical truth to the national interest, should learn from the story of Charles Best what a dangerous game they are playing. For in the end, the story of Best’s campaign for recognition is a personal tragedy and a national embarrassment. First, because it concerns a man so desperate for acclamation that he could never rest content with what he had achieved. Second, because the ultimate consequence of his machinations was to place in jeopardy not only his own place in scientific history, but also that of the entire team of which he was privileged to be a member. In the end, his country’s primacy in this major field has only been preserved by that most salutary of experiences, rediscovering the truth. 245

Fleming

Trabalhava previamente com lisossomos bacterianos e como eles poderiam ajudar an medicina. Os experiments após desoberta do fungo não davam certo. Assumia-se que a bactéria tinha vindo primeiro e que o fungo havia matado ela depois, mas isso só acontecia quando o fungo era colocado an placa primeiro. Isso porque a penicilina atrapalha an divisão cellular.Ele não admitia essa inversão de ordem publicamente. Muitos outros já haviam notado as propriedades antibactericidas da Penicillium. Fleming foi sortudo porque uma espécia particularmente antibactericida infectou sua placa. Mais de 10 anos depois da descoberta outro time, o time de Forey, sem ajuda de Fleming, conseguiu desenvolver um método de produção e teste da penicilina. Fleming defendeu que ele era a base de tudo de qualquer jeito. Seus primiros testes não foram promissores porque muita penicilina era necessária, uma quantidade grande e estável que ainda não poderia ser produzida facilmente, mesmo tendo as bases para a produção, o tratamento era imprático segundo eles. Ao contrário do que o mito diz, Fleming não foi ignorado an primeira exposição sobre a penicilina:

During 1929 he presented just one lecture and one article on his penicillin work. His lecture was the one referred to above at the Medical Research Club. In stark contrast to the popular myth, he did not introduce to a pathetically apathetic audience the results of experiments in the use of penicillin as a wonder cure. Instead, his paper was entitled ‘A medium for the isolation of Pfeiffer’s bacillus’ and concentrated on altogether more prosaic themes. Because Pfeiffer’s bacillus was of such enormous interest to clinicians as a potential cause of influenza, it was of profound importance to St Mary’s Inoculation Department as the possible basis for a much sought-after flu vaccine. Expose a Petri dish containing Penicillium mould to a germ-rich atmosphere and in a few hours one can have pure colonies of Pfeiffer’s bacillus with which to produce vaccines. This is because by eliminating almost all other bacteria, penicillin leaves the field clear for Pfeiffer’s bacillus, one of the very few unaffected by it. No doubt this was a very useful innovation. But it was hardly the sort of discovery to win Fleming a standing ovation from a room of highly accomplished medical scientists with very diverse interests. When coupled with his lacklustre lecturing style, a somewhat embarrassed silence hardly seems surprising. 262-3

 Its importance for him was as a laboratory reagent used in isolating Pfeiffer’s bacillus: that was all. (Fleming also used his ‘selective weed-killer’ as a routine diagnostic test: he wiped the sputum of patients with chest or throat infections onto a dish containing penicillin mixed into a culture medium, and waited to see if colonies of Pfeiffer’s bacillus would develop.) 263 

Seu artigo an época também não indicava que a droga poderia ser tão útil e após isso ele quase nunca falou sobre a penicilina novamente até a descoberta do time de Forey. Ele nunca chegou a testá-la em animais e não estimulava outros a pesquisá-la e quando a indicava era para tratamento de infecções tópicas não tão graves. Por ocasião da descoberta de Forey, Fleming see colocou como pioneiro e a imprensa e cientistas acataram, ele foi usado em propaganda para fortalecer o hospital one trabalhava e o UK. Waller parece deixar alguns detalhes de fora como a admissão de Fleming e outros coisas.

Simpson

A luta entre simpson e a igreja para o uso do clrofórmio durante o parto foi fake. In researching this chapter I asked numerous friends and colleagues whether or not they had heard that churchmen had objected to the obstetric use of anaesthesia. Several were familiar with the story. Those who were not replied with striking consistency, ‘I hadn’t heard of that, but I’m not surprised’. Why is it so easy to elicit this inherent cyncism about the motives of the church? Part of the answer may lie in the modern liberal’s angst about the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church, and several less-ancient denominations, towards birth control, homosexuality, single-motherhood, and euthanasia. I suspect, however, that the chief reason is historical and stems from the success of Thomas Huxley, Arnold White, and their equally pugnacious supporters, in promoting their own scientific worldview. Personally I do not doubt that these men were right about the Bible being the work of man. Yet, in presenting religion as anti-science they were playing a rather cynical game in which science was self-consciously cast as the transcendentally rational antithesis of metaphysics and belief. 281 [...] But, however we understand the split between science and religion, it is instructive to remember that only a century and half ago James Young Simpson and Protheroe Smith were more worried about the religious implications of what they were doing than was the Church itself. 283

Conclusion II

A coisa toda.

The cogency of their evidence in their own time has been exaggerated. • Their distinctiveness has been overplayed and contemporaries with similar ideas have been unceremoniously sidelined. • The incremental steps to a new theory, requiring the separate contributions of many individuals over many decades, have been ignored or downplayed. And • Past theories with a vague affinity with modern ideas have been torn out of context and force-fitted to our modern understanding. 291

 ____________________


MARTINEZ - Science Secrets
Preface

Tudo

Galileo

Não há muita evidência de que Galileu tenha feito o experiment an torre, além da biografia póstuma dele escrita por seu assistente onde cita o caso de memória muitas décadas depois do fato e manuscritos onde Galileo descreve experiments sem mencionar a torre de Pisa (onde conclui que a velocidade de queda é relacionada a densidade. Em outra época relacionava com a distância de queda). Outros haviam feito o experiment dos pesos antes de Galileu, alguns na Torre de Pisa indo contra Galileu. A história do secretário foi senod aumentada com o passar do tempo.

Legends about Galileo have propagated partly because people were willing to parrot the claims of specialists, believing authority, rather than evidence. Thus, the irony of this myth is that whereas it purports to criticize philosophers who blindly believed in the authority of Aristotle, in actuality it instead exhibits the gullibility of persons who repeat the tale, their readiness to believe on the basis of authority. exhibits the gullibility of persons who repeat the tale, their readiness to believe on the basis of authority.


Revolução científica

Centuries later, a legend developed: that whenever astronomers found that two circles did not suffice to account for the motion of a particular planet, they added more epicycles. By 1969 the Encyclopedia Britannica claimed that in Ptolemy's system, each planet required forty to sixty epicycles. Yet historian Owen Gingerich has shown that there's no evidence that anyone used more than one epicycle per planet. The story was a myth that grew, making it seem as though Ptolemy's scheme was ridiculously complicated and had collapsed under its encumbrances.

As previsões ptolomaicas deixaram de bater com os calendários, causando problems para os feriados católicos como a páscoa que são calculados de acordo com os equinócios. O desarranjo entre as estações e os calendários fez com que a igreja católica chamasse astronomos para resolver o problems. Copérnico era um deles.

The Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernik, was one of the experts who provided advice on the problem. “Copernicus” was unsatisfied with the structure of Ptolemy's account and its limited precision. He disliked that some of Ptolemy's circular motions were not uniform relative to their centers. Therefore, Copernicus had studied ancient writings to find an alternative. In the works of Cicero and those attributed to Plutarch, he found reference to various Pythagoreans, including Philolaus, who claimed that Earth spins or moves.13 Thus Copernicus came to privately formulate a theory similar to that of Aristarchus, reasoning that it would be preferable to assume that Earth was not at the center of the universe, but that it moved like a planet, and that the planets orbited the sun. Remarkably, by centering the sun, it turns out that the orbital speeds of the planets, including Earth, fall in an ordered sequence: the speed of each planet varies according to its distance from the sun, the closer the planet is to the sun, the faster it moves. Copernicus realized that if indeed Earth circles the sun, then we would observe the apparent retrograde motions of the planets, since Earth sometimes overtakes them as it moves around the sun.

The heavenly bodies circled the sun, the moon circled Earth. All moved in circular paths, as in Ptolemy's account. Earlier, Plato had claimed that God “made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary,” with its parts moving in circles.14 Copernicus argued that the planets move because “it is in the nature of perfect circles to rotate forever.” Also, he admitted epicycles into his system to account for deviations in the paths of the planets.15 Yet, his theory departed from tradition, in part, by breaking the barrier between the terrestrial and the celestial, by placing Earth in the heavens.

Present methods of education lead us to see Copernicus's scheme as natural, simple, and reasonable. However, it had features that seemed utterly repulsive to Copernicus's contemporaries. For example, if Earth is a heavenly body, then why does it spin? None of the others seemed to spin. And if Earth is spinning, why aren't things flung off? Furthermore, if Earth is moving, why don't we feel it? Shouldn't physics and astronomy be based on our experiences? Also, if Earth were truly a planet, then would planets also be worlds like Earth? Would there be humans in other planets? Why would God create many worlds? Did Jesus Christ visit them too? Any such questions would be unsettling.

Also, Copernicus's system was hardly geometrically simpler than Ptolemy's, partly because it too had epicycles. The small epicycles of Copernicus did not entail retrograde motions; instead, they served to account for irregularities in the changing velocities of each planet.

Assim como Aristarco, Copérnico também dizia que as estrelas estavam a uma distância praticamente infinita. o que era problemático. Copérnico circulou suas ideias de maneira menos pública e lançou seulivro após trinta anos morrendo logo depois. Brache e Digges tentaram testar o sistema de Copérnico, mas não conseguiram resultados, mas Brache calculou que os cometas era supralunares, desafiando Aristóteles e elaborou seu próprio sistema, no qual a Terra permanecia no centro, os planetas giravam em volta do sol e sol em volta da terra.

Some writers—who were not astronomers—had misconstrued Aristotle and Ptolemy, as if the ancient accounts claimed that the planets are embedded in crystalline material orbs, harder than diamond, “absolutely solid.”30 Brahe believed such misinterpretations. But by analyzing a comet in 1585, Christopher Rothman found that it traveled across the orbits of the planets, proving that no solid orbs separate them. In letters to Rothman, Brahe later appropriated this discovery to himself. He claimed to have refuted the common opinion of Pythagoras, Aristotle, and even Copernicus. Actually, there is no evidence that any of them ever held such an opinion about celestial orbs. Unfortunately, Brahe had little historical acumen, he “would not spare the time to scrutinize the writings of his predecessors to inquire who said what or when.”31 Accordingly, later historians wrongly echoed that the crystalline spheres were an ancient belief, propagating grandiose generalizations, reiterating mistakes.

Kepler entra em cena após a more de Brahe. Traz suas concepções religiosas e escolásticas para as astronomia inserindo os cinco sólidos platônicos para explicar o sistema solar: Interspaced between the orbits of the six planets, the five regular solids in the sequence of six, four, twelve, twenty, eight, actually gave the relative separations between the planets. Kepler thought he had found evidence of God's divine plan of the universe.

Responding to accusations against Foscarini and Galileo, the Catholic Church intervened. The Inquisition met in 1616 to discuss the Copernican theory. Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, who had been the inquisitor in the deadly trial against Giordano Bruno, participated. There is a recurring myth to the effect that the Catholic theologians were mainly annoyed by the notion that humanity was not literally the center of God's creation—but historical research shows no evidence of that. The center of the universe, inside Earth, was not a particularly privileged place to Catholics such as Bellarmino, who believed it to be the actual location of hell. The Copernican scheme seemed offensive because Galileo advocated it as a source of authority for interpreting Scripture, against the interpretations of the Church leaders. Cardinal Bellarmino noted that, although the subject matter of Earth's motion was indeed not a subject of faith, it was yet a matter of faith on the speakers: the apostles, prophets, and commentators, who had all agreed that the sun is in the heavens and moves around Earth. Bellarmino argued that, there being yet no proof, no demonstration of Earth's motion, it was inappropriate to abandon the traditional interpretation of Scripture or to depart from the Council of Trent.

In 1616, the Holy Congregation denounced “the false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to Holy Scripture.”55 The cardinals concluded that the proposition of a stationary sun is “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal interpretation of the words.”56 Therefore, the sun-centered theory could not be defended or held. The Holy Congregation promptly banned the books of Copernicus and Zuñiga until each could be corrected. More forcefully, to defend Catholic dogma, the Holy Congregation “completely prohibited and condemned” Foscarini's Pythagorean booklet and all future works like it.57 Similarly, inquisitors banned Galileo from believing in Copernican ideas, and Cardinal Bellarmino gave Galileo a certificate forbidding him from believing or defending the idea that Earth moves. But Galileo surmised that he could at least entertain and teach the theory as a speculative hypothesis. After all, the clergymen acknowledged that the scheme of Copernicus had certain mathematical advantages: it simplified calculations of the positions of the planets.

Giordano Bruno e Galileu seguiram Copérnico. Kepler escrevia ficção científica e não gostava da ideia do Sol não ser o centro do universe. Houve um certo movimento na igreja para harmonizar a visão pitagórica com as escrituras. Contudo, a igreja via as crenças panteísticas, reencarnodras, dentre outras coisas dos pitagóricos como uma ameaça.

The traditional story about Galileo says that in ancient times, Pythagoras argued that Earth and the planets orbit the sun; his theory was later adopted and refined by Copernicus, and it led Galileo to clash with the Catholic Church. This story is defective because half of it is fictitious. Instead, we can replace it with the following: Galileo attributed the heliocentric theory to Pythagoras, but this association entailed pagan connotations that could hardly help its acceptance among Catholics. This sentence does not summarize the main aspects of the Galileo affair, but it is the sort of thing we can fairly say if we wish to remark on its connection to a Pythagorean context.

Galileu rejeitava o efeito da lua sobre as marés como defendia Kepler, justificando que elas aconteciam pelo movimento terrestre.

Hence, astronomers and the Catholic Church were not irrational in criticizing Galileo, for he advocated more than was certain at the time. Again, if Earth spins constantly to the east, then why is it that when things are thrown up into the sky they do not deviate from a straight downward path? Galileo had no good answer. We now know that, actually, things do deviate as they fall, only very slightly so. This effect was demonstrated beautifully in Paris in 1851 by Jean Bernard Léon Foucault. He showed that as a pendulum swings repeatedly, its direction changes gradually throughout the day, just as if Earth indeed spins to the east. An example is that if you were in a moving car, and you tossed something straight forward toward the windshield, just as the driver turned the steering wheel to the left, you would see that the object you tossed would not hit the spot where you aimed it, but would tend instead to the right. Likewise, as a pendulum swings, its direction seems to change very slightly, which we attribute to Earth's spin. Lacking such results, Galileo had no clear proof of Earth's motion, just many interesting findings and analogies, along with some bad ones. Just as Aristotle and Ptolemy were wrong about many things, so were Copernicus and Galileo. The sun is not immobile, it is not at the center of the universe. Contrary to their expectations, the sun is a star. The stars are not immobile, either; they are not embedded in a sphere. And importantly, the orbits of the planets are not circular.

Newton

Existem alguns relatos de segunda mão da história da maçã. Para suplantar Hooke, Newton o retirou do Principia e substituiu pelos pitagóricos e outros filosófos antigos, dizenod que else já tinha conhecimento da lei da gravitação.


No final discute o que houve com a árvore e suas relíquias.

Transmutação

Fala bastante da saga dos alquimistas em tentar produzir ouro e traça um parelelo com a descoberta do decaimento radioativo descoberto no século XX. Conclui no final que a química começa com os mitos da alquemia e que else devem ser estudados.

Darwin

On the way back to England, Darwin began to organize his notes. While writing about his four specimens of Galápagos mockingbirds, he noted that two of them were distinct kinds exclusive to two islands. At that point he noted that some Spaniards claimed to know from which island came any tortoise by looking at the animal's size, shell, and scales. He briefly remarked that such statements “undermine the Stability of species,” and should therefore be examined. This does not mean that he had a sudden conversion to transmutation, but rather, as he later recalled, that during the voyage he experienced some “vague doubts” about the immutability of species.

By 1837, Darwin had privately inferred that species can change in time. In July he began a notebook on “Transmutation of Species.” He began to collect and organize facts about many species and their relations in places and times. By 1840, he was fully convinced that species were mutable.27 He had been struck by the overall character and distribution of the South American fossils and especially the Galápagos species. The distribution of animals in space and time, geography and fossils, suggested that species evolved. The differences and similarities between the ancient extinct animals and the living were stunning. There was a “continuity of types.” But why would God replace species with similar but distinct species? Having designed all species to live in harmony and to fit in perfect balance with their environments, why would the benevolent Creator allow entire species to die?

The environment did not always suit all species. Thinking about what he had seen regarding the distinct species of rheas in southern regions, Darwin considered the possibilities: perhaps the climate favored the more southern species, but one could also infer that it hurt the more northern species. If each species was perfectly suited to its territory, Darwin thought, then neither was perfectly suited to the region in between. The two species might be competing to occupy territory. How would this match the theory that every creature fits perfectly in its environment? The assumption that ecology is perfectly balanced became doubtful.

Some animals did not seem to match their environment. Animals at the Galápagos resembled American animals, yet the soils and environment of the Galápagos were quite distinct from those of the continent. Darwin realized that geologically the Galápagos islands resemble instead the Cape de Verde Archipelago, volcanic islands off the coast of West Africa, near the equator. He exclaimed: “there is a considerable degree of resemblance in the volcanic nature of the soil, in climate, height, and size of the islands, between the Galapagos and Cape de Verde Archipelagos: but what an entire and absolute difference in their inhabitants!”

Likewise, he noted that there were no frogs in the Canary Islands near North Africa, none at the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), none at St. Jago in the Cape de Verde, none at St. Helena Island (between Africa and South America).31 But why not? Why did God choose not to place any frogs in the oceanic islands? Darwin commented: “The absence of the frog family in the oceanic islands is the more remarkable, when contrasted with the case of lizards, which swarm on most of the smallest islands. May this difference not be caused, by the greater facility with which the eggs of lizards, protected by calcareous shells, might be transported through saltwater, than could the slimy spawn of frogs?”32 And Darwin was right. Frogs, similar animals, and their spawn have semipermeable skins that let their inner fluids seep out in saltwater, which kills them. Such animals cannot float across a stretch of salty oceanic waters without promptly dying. By contrast, the eggs of some lizards can well be transported by oceanic currents or in floating tufts of plants and dirt.

Darwin also contemplated the lack of native mammals in the Galápagos. On land, only some kinds of rats seemed to be native, and Darwin imagined that they had somehow arrived by ships or otherwise. There were also seals and sea lions. And there was another distinctive kind of mammal on the Galápagos, one kind of mammal found in virtually all islands: bats. The Galápagos had two species, the hoary bat and the red bat. Many other islands, such as New Zealand, Norfolk Island, the Viti Archipelago, Hawaii, Mauritius, also possessed unique bats. Why would the Creator make unique bats but no terrestrial mammals or frogs on most islands? Darwin knew that bats fly across great bodies of water, and Darwin noted that some bats were seen wandering stranded over the ocean in daytime, and some bats were known to visit Bermuda, six hundred miles from the continent.

Darwin realized that all the various kinds of species on the Galápagos were only such as could have arrived there by water or air: birds, reptiles, insects, bats. He conjectured that the diverse inhabitants were not created in these islands—they were colonists. Their ancestors all originated somewhere else, such as in South America. In sum, the only kinds of native animals on the Galápagos were those kinds that could have gotten there by themselves or by accident without an independent miracle.

Yet many of these animals were distinct from those on the continent. So Darwin reasoned: they first arrived at the Galápagos and afterward they changed. They somehow adapted to their new environments. But how? Years later Darwin reflected that in the Galápagos, “both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”33

Darwin also tested his inferences. Was it possible that eggs and seeds could really float across hundreds of miles of saltwater and still come to life on land? Darwin found that timber drifting in the ocean, as well as icebergs can carry clusters of trapped soil and seeds in such a way that the seeds remain able to produce vegetation. Further, he tested whether a dead pigeon, floating on saltwater for thirty days, could bear seeds in its stomach that would afterward germinate. He found, “to my surprise,” that indeed such seeds could then germinate. Also, by studying pigeons' excrements he found that some kinds of seeds passed undigested and could then germinate. Darwin also tested whether seeds can germinate after being immersed in saltwater for weeks [...]

Such transport did not seem random because it followed definite oceanic currents. He also knew that the average speed of Atlantic currents was about thirty-three miles per day (some as high as sixty miles per day), and so he estimated that seeds might travel nine hundred miles in open ocean in a month. After similarly considering how the eggs of certain animals travel, Darwin's findings converged on this conclusion: life on the Galápagos was not created there, it arrived by natural processes.35

So organisms thus spread to environments to which they initially were not perfectly suited, and there they changed. But how? Being acquainted with the theory of Lamarck, Darwin believed, wrongly, that as individual organisms change their habits in response to their environments, they acquire traits that are subsequently inherited by their offspring. Still, this mechanism seemed insufficient to explain the great complexity of many species.

To return to the myth about finches, we can summarize that old story as follows: While visiting the Galápagos Islands, Charles Darwin noticed that various species of finches had beaks of different shapes and sizes. Observing their eating habits, he noticed that the shapes of their beaks corresponded to their diets. He also noticed that some species were distinct to some islands. Hence he inferred that the various species were related: they were descended from common ancestors that had populated the islands and had adapted variously to the distinct island conditions. Species evolved.

This short story works because it fits in the space allotted by a science textbook. And it works because, as Sulloway argued, it fits into the form of a classic journey of discovery: man departs from home on a bold adventure, encounters and overcomes hardships, and returns with a deep truth. But the story is false, so the challenge is how to replace it with something better. Selecting elements from the longer account above, I suggest that we can well write: Halfway around the world, the young traveler Charles Darwin arrived at foreboding towering volcanoes, the “Enchanted Islands.” Their dark jagged terrain held swarms of hideous reptiles, “imps of darkness,” and tame birds. Yet Darwin found no frogs or toads on the islands. He found only the kinds of animals that could cross the salty waters from the continent. All resembled American species, but oddly distinct. He later concluded that such island species descended from colonists, but somehow evolved.

The latter story is just as short as the old, just as appropriate for a textbook. And it's better, because it involves mythic imagery but is actually true.

Franklin

História da pipa é provavelmente fake. Ele sugeriu o experimento, mas provavelmente não realizou.

Coulomb

Muitos pesquisadores contemporâneos tentaram reproduzir o experimento de Coulomb sem sucesso, levando a crença de que Coulomb teria fabricado ou escolhido seus resultados na formulação da lei do inverso do quadrado. Entretanto, Martinez também tentou e conseguiu resultados muito bons.

Thomson

Nunca existiu pudim de passas para Thomson, embora Lord Kelvin (também de sobrenome Thomson). Em seus experiments no tudo catódico: Thomson argued that his experiments led to the conclusion that gas atoms can split into smaller “primordial atoms,” which he called “corpuscles.” He argued that this “new state” of matter (not solid, not liquid, not gas) was all of one kind, and that it was the substance that makes up all the known chemical elements. Contudo, ele não foi pioneiro em seus resultados.

One more way to defend Thomson's alleged role is to argue that his work, at least, was the key contribution that finally convinced most scientists to accept electrons. This approach implies that the credit for being the discoverer of something consists not merely in being the first to make the claim, but in being the one to actually succeed in persuading the majority of the community of peers.

For example, Charles Coulomb was not the first to propose “Coulomb's law,” as others such as Joseph Priestley proposed it earlier. Likewise, Charles Darwin was not the first to propose that species evolve by natural selection. In a book of 1831, on the breeding of trees to build boats, Patrick Matthew argued that the superabundance of offspring against pressing competition and circumstances, makes species change. His conjectures seem to have been ignored. But after Darwin's success, Matthew claimed credit, and he described himself as the “Discoverer of the Principle of Natural Selection.” Yet he did not get the credit. In Darwin's opinion, speaking generally, “all the credit” for discoveries goes to whomever succeeds in convincing readers.

Demorou quinze anos até a acumulação de evidências convener a comunidade da existência do eletron. Demorou para ele ser isolado inclusive. Looking back at the “discovery of the electron,” Theodore Arabatzis proposed to construe that expression properly as describing a complex process that led to the consolidation of physicists' belief in electrons. In that sense, he concluded that J. J. Thomson did not discover the electron, he just contributed to the process of its acceptance.

O mito pode ter surgido porque Thomson passa uma credibilidade de cintista inglês convincente para crianças ou por simplificação para prover uma história com início meio e fim bem definindos.

I think that the electron discovery story also developed to satisfy an explanatory craving. As readers and students of history, we want to know who discovered what and when. We know that for ages people did not know the invisible nature of electricity, and we expect that with technological improvements someone eventually managed to see what had been hidden for so long: the invisibly small. A similar case was discussed years ago by Thomas Kuhn. He rightly analyzed historical problems of pinpointing the discovery of oxygen, in the 1770s, and he commented: “Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence, ‘Oxygen was discovered,’ misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time.”49

It is a myth that J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, but by “myth” I do not mean to belittle it as a plain falsehood. It is a myth because it functions as a marker, an apparent milestone to punctuate and orient our historical imagination. The electron, many students think, is a solid, discrete particle of electricity, like an invisibly small billiard ball. Such a thing, yes, such a solid natural thing, known for ages for its awesome effects—lightning and static electricity—begs for a story of origins, at least about how we came to find it. Such a definite object seems to demand a location in space, time, and history; like atoms and other subatomic particles, it seems to require a historical junction that pinpoints its entry into the common consciousness. Myths give a neat account of how somebody ingeniously overcame a great difficulty. After setting up the initial ambiguity between wave and particle theories, teachers have traditionally used the story of J. J. Thomson to convey an apparently neat solution, to give a sense of finality, and then move on. But really, no single person deserves sole authorship for this particular discovery.

[...] So, instead of saying that in 1897 J. J. Thomson discovered the electron, we can better say that several times since the 1870s, several physicists have found compelling evidence that electricity consists of particles; but time and again, others have encountered evidence to the contrary.

Einstein

In short, Einstein did not believe in Judaism and he did not believe in Christianity. He denied being an atheist. He admired Spinoza's pantheism, and at least once called himself a pantheist. And he sometimes accepted the label of agnostic. Do agnostics believe in God? No, but they also abstain from presuming to know the fundamental ordering of the universe. Early on, Einstein's thoughts about science erased his boyhood faith in Jewish and Christian theologies. But instead of abandoning “religion,” he chose to redefine it, so that, for him, religion became the sense of awe and reverence for the harmony and hopefully causal order of the universe.

Einstein II

As he complained in 1949: “my accomplishments have been overvalued beyond all bounds for incomprehensible reasons. Humanity needs a few romantic idols as spots of light in the drab field of earthly existence. I have been turned into such a spot of light. The particular choice of person is inexplicable and unimportant.”

Os experiments de Romer e Fizeau não chegaram a um valor constant para a velocidade da luz.

Thus Einstein posited that the speed of all light rays is equal and constant—that the time it takes light to travel from A to B is the same as it takes to travel from B to A—as a fundamental assumption. By contrast, some books simply claim that the constancy of the speed of light is “an experimental fact.”34 But they give no evidence about how the speed of light rays traveling in opposite directions can be measured and compared. Contrary to the myth that the postulates of special relativity are experimental facts, a very few good books do note the essential difference between the velocity of a light ray and the average round-trip speed of light.35

Einstein also considered the question of simultaneity. To understand the synchrony of clocks, we need to have some way to verify whether any two events happen at once. The morning after his conversation with Besso, it occurred to Einstein, just as he was getting out of bed, that events that are simultaneous to one observer might not be simultaneous to another moving relative to the first.36 To explain this notion, Einstein envisioned an imaginary experiment with a train.37 Suppose that lightning strikes at two distant places on a railroad track. How can we decide whether these two events are simultaneous? Einstein argued that you should stand at the midpoint between the two events, holding an angled mirror to reflect light to you from both directions. So, suppose you see both light flashes at the same time. Then you say: the two lightning bolts were simultaneous events.

The point is that throughout time, scientists have had to distinguish between the properties that belong to objects and the properties that exist only as relations among objects. People used to think (and many still do) that objects have certain colors, intrinsically, say, that a given apple is really red. But it turns out, as we know thanks to Newton, that colors are not in objects, they're in the light. If we turn off the lamp, an apple ceases to be red. Colors also vary depending on the speed with which we move relative to each object. Similarly, we used to think that weight is something that is an intrinsic attribute of a body. But again, thanks to Newton, we know that weight is a relational property. Your favorite book would weigh much more if it were sitting on the surface of Jupiter. And its weight there is no less real than its weight here. Einstein argued that notions such as length and time are also relational properties. If we're going to state the length of a body, then we'd better specify the reference frame. And events that are simultaneous relative to you, strictly speaking, need not be simultaneous relative to other observers.

Einstein showed that despite such disagreements, one could still formulate a physics in which certain relations hold generally. The net result was that physics as a whole became reformulated and statements that we used to know as laws became just approximations, while new statements came to replace them. Space and time, which for ages had been imagined as absolute, like mythical gods indifferent and unaffected by human affairs, came to be construed instead as variable relative concepts. Although Einstein based his theory on convenient assumptions, the old habit of viewing physics as based on universal facts continued. To this day, many scientists tend to construe, in particular, the constancy of the speed of light as a brute experimental fact. While Einstein construed his special theory of relativity as a makeshift and preliminary construct, many of his followers did not. Einstein became religiously devoted to the spirit of scientific inquiry, but many scientists remained devoted to scientific doctrine, even if it changed.

Eisntein III

Descontrói o mito da contribuição de Mileva.

Any document can include errors, omissions, inaccuracies, or even lies. Likewise, information of all kinds might include truthful claims. The important point is that each step away that a document is separated from the period it purportedly describes, introduces additional layers of potential inaccuracies that can arise in the translations, rewording, additions, and so forth. A letter written by a participant in the events in question, even decades later, can be very informative. But we should still be careful with its contents. A still later account by one who was not present at such events involves greater uncertainties. If we cannot dissipate such uncertainties, we should at least acknowledge them. We should cultivate a fair skepticism, especially against outstanding stories that resonate with what we would personally like to believe. Too often, writers enamored with a sensational conjecture tend to misread evidence. They seek not to test a conjecture but to confirm it. But what makes a good story does not necessarily make good history.

Einstein IV

Desconstroi a historian das torres do relogio de Eistein.

Abordagem de investigação em textbooks muito útil.

ears ago, one day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Church Street, I was at a store that repairs Swiss clocks and watches. On the wall, nicely framed, was a review article on Galison's book. Right then a man said to his companion: “Hey honey, did you read this one? How they got it all from Swiss clocks.” She smiled: “Oh yeah…. That was a good one.” Maybe we could draw a line between experts and laypersons, but what I want to highlight is the continuity between the biographers, historians, fiction writers, reviewers, physicists, and laypersons at a store. We're all connected by the common reflex to slightly misread, to decorate impressions with speculations. It is a common and pervasive habit. This is the same pattern that we have seen in the evolution of other historical myths: a plausible conjecture (“he may have…” or “he must have…”), voiced by an authoritative source (a prominent professor of history, a famous physicist), becomes misconstrued as an actual happening.

Aside from readers' urge to conjecture, the tale shines because of its plausibility. The overall circumstance is striking: Einstein formulated the relativity of time while living in the clockmaking capital of the world, Switzerland. He worked at the Swiss patent office, a clearinghouse for chronometric technologies, as Galison argued. Maybe patents on timing devices actually influenced Einstein? Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Einstein in fact was influenced by any such technologies or that he evaluated any patent applications for chronometric devices.

I much expect, someday soon, to come across a schoolbook on physics that will duly mention the supposedly chronometric roots of Einstein's relativity. It might be a brief human interest sidebar. Maybe it will have a nice picture of an old clock tower, like the drawings of Galileo's legendary experiments from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And fine, maybe it will help students to become more interested in the history of physics and its relation to society, which would be good. Already, I find an advanced textbook on quantum chemistry that tells a story about how Einstein was influenced by a tram and a clock. It stops short of referring to any tower: “Einstein recalls that there was a clock at a tram stop in Bern. Whenever his tram moved away from a stop, the modest patent clerk asked himself what would the clock show, if the tram had the velocity of light. While other passengers probably read their newspapers, Einstein had questions which led humanity on new pathways.”31

I read the growing echoes of the myths about towers and trams with a mixture of amusement and discomfort. It is revealing to see how many writers don't bother to check the truth of a story before they repeat it. I guess that they just trust their sources. And it is entertaining to see how they bury facts beneath layers of thoughtful but needless conjectures. It will be interesting to see what forms these tall tales will take, if they reach schoolbooks, standardized tests, and children's story books. But I also look forward to a time when writers bypass this cloud of fiction to get back to the task of finding out what really happened in the past.

Fala de tradução aqui.

Einstein V

Discute as influências sobre o pensamento de eisntein.

So what am I saying? That Einstein's breakthrough to relativity came essentially from child psychology? No. What I've shown is that Einstein's words to James Franck make historical sense. There was actually a significant growing tradition of researchers, even physicists, who seriously turned to the analysis of children's behaviors to understand the formation of fundamental notions. My point is not that the most important factor in Einstein's creativity was developmental psychology. There is evidence, however, that this played a larger role than, say, new timing technologies, art, religion, or his wife.

While childish thinking, on the basis of the documentary evidence, played an important role in Einstein's creativity, there were other factors for which there is even more evidence. I will not discuss them here, but we should at least mention them. In particular, Einstein often acknowledged the foremost influence of H. A. Lorentz's works in physics. He also reflected on various experiments, and his critical outlook was influenced by the writings of Hume, Mach, and Poincaré.

The reason why we can construct convincing narratives about the importance of one or another “key” component in someone's creativity is because there is often an abundance of evidence, such that one freely grabs pieces to cite and emphasize. Ultimately, the goal is to pull together all the various kinds of evidence but also to weigh the relative influences of the various factors. What we find depends on what we look for, but the evidence itself can lead us to places we did not anticipate. The value of really understanding someone's creative paths is that such paths might teach us some productive ways to think.

Eugenics

Discorre sober a historian da eugenia. Vale a coisa toda.


Epilogo

Writers and researchers who wish to tell the past go through a process of selection. Following their needs or curiosities, they carry out a limited search for source materials. Driven by personal or practical motivations, and by the interests they expect from a prospective audience, they search and select whichever elements seem worthwhile, plausible, and compelling. That limited search stops when writers or researchers become satisfied that they have enough material, that it is reasonably reliable, and that they have something worth saying. While composing their account, they not only omit, as they must, material that is beyond the present scope of interest, they also often add phrases and notions that are absent from the original sources. To compose their narrative, they imagine scenes, and consequently, imaginary details from those scenes become woven into the historical excerpts. That imaginative process is not arbitrary, it responds to certain notions.

In the myths that we have considered, we see a common pattern of compression. Key elements in a story are increasingly pushed together. Consider a few examples. First we read that Darwin fancied that variations in finches arose from some sort of evolution. Then writers imagine that Darwin entertained such thoughts while he was on his voyage of discovery and saw strange finches on the Galápagos Islands. Then they also assume that, being a naturalist, Darwin “would have” systematically measured the beaks of the finches, studied their eating habits, and recorded their geographical distributions; and then writers infer that Darwin “must have” concluded that finches had evolved, and that this was the seed that led to his theory of evolution. Likewise, first we hear that Newton was inspired by seeing an apple fall in his garden. Next, the apple falls at his feet, or on his head, or on his nose. Or it hits him hard on the head. And rather than being merely an interesting event that accompanied a series of thoughts, it becomes construed as the trigger, the cause.

What makes such stories even more compelling is when they come from an authoritative source: a famous scientist, a reputable historian, and so on. Readers assume that authoritative experts are less prone to invent the past. However, my impression is that there is a certain danger in authority. Once someone has written extensively about, say, Galileo, they sometimes tend to develop a kind of empathy, a sense of how that person would have behaved, what he must have thought. It is almost as if the investment of many thousands of hours of work had given the researcher a special power, an ability to divine the past, as if human actions were consistent, as if social and intellectual contexts involve conveniently few factors. The trouble with authority is that it often deters the first process of selection that I mentioned above. A writer or teacher needs to say something about Galileo, so they consult an authority on the matter and they trust that authority at their word. Authority can thus work to stop the already limited search that someone undertakes in order to ascertain the past.

The solution is to trust evidence instead of experts. If someone claims something, even if it is Galileo writing about Aristotle, or Newton writing about Galileo, or even the latest, best biographer writing about Einstein, we should abstain from simply believing what they say, unless they cite the specific evidence to which they refer.

Desmistifica a questão da carta de Marx.

The Darwin and Marx story grew from a series of conjectures. We have a compulsion to speculate, to fill in the blanks. It is the urge that moves us to infer meaning in a gesture and to draw constellations in the stars. How much less appealing it would be to look at several disconnected points of light in the night sky, not thinking about the belt and sword of Orion. With his telescope, Galileo tried to draw all the stars that he could see in Orion, but there were just too many of them, he could not replace the simple mythical figure of Orion with a comprehensive accounting of the usually invisible stars. Likewise, too often we prefer to pick and choose the pieces that fit whatever story we would like to tell; it is an urge from which I could hardly escape in this book.

My point is not that occasional pruning is necessary; obviously it is. My point is that the evolution of such myths should become part of the stories themselves; that we should work to track and enjoy the history of our mistakes. I believe that in studying that history, we learn to think more clearly; we find recurring patterns that illuminate this powerful urge to ever-so-slightly misread and misrepresent.

In researching to authenticate stories, I increasingly saw the extent to which many books blend speculations with evidence. There are patterns, for example, that when writers claim that he must have (done this or known that), or that it cannot be doubted that, such expressions usually belie, to the contrary, gratuitous conjectures. Words such as doubtless, probably, evidently, to be sure, certainly, always, are often used as patches precisely where writers really don't know the certainty of what they want to claim. So for this book I decided to not use such words and similar guesswork: he may have, nor common symptoms of imprecision, such as: scientists in the nineteenth century and the modern age. I am not saying that nobody should ever use such expressions, but the present book involved the experiment of not using such expressions at all, aside from quotations.

Myths connect us to famous individuals by placing such individuals in situations that we can visualize and that convey some idea that we find appealing. Most heroic myths are not malicious. Some fictions satisfy and empower: hearsay legends inspire us even when misconstrued as history. There's an urge to use intriguing historical figures—like Pythagoras, Galileo, and Einstein's wife—as characters in a morality play, to edit the past, to try to make it teach us what we're eager to learn. We project our concerns onto what we read. There remains, though, a need for genuine accounts that struggle to answer the questions: What happened? What can we fairly say about the past? By engaging in this struggle, we contribute to the evolution of stories: the gradual replacement of speculative myths with science and history. After having carefully studied how stories evolve in the recent past, when we are rich with documentary sources, we might again ponder the likelihood of much older stories and ancient accounts. Having traced the emergence of the story that Darwin was inspired by finches' beaks, or that J. J. Thomson discovered the electron, or that Einstein allegedly was inspired to relativity by evaluating patents for city clocks, we might return to analyze stories about Pythagoras. The more recent stories echo ancient forms; tales of heroes and unlikely feats.

On one hand, we may lose faith in some stories about feats of ancient genius, so it might seem that history loses some of its magic. On the other hand, there is no shortage of wonderful and astonishing stories that are true. For ages, alchemists failed to find the mythical Philosophers' Stone, but eventually chemists did find substances that emit rays, cure cancer, and are far more valuable than gold. It seemed impossible that elements might evolve, and that we might create gold. It seemed impossible that species too might evolve. It seemed impossible that we might breed animals to have innate friendly behaviors. It seemed impossible that there might be changes in the heavens. It seemed ridiculous that there might exist other worlds. Moreover, stories about how apparent impossibilities were overcome inspire us because they often involve rather ordinary people: Darwin was an average graduate from college, Coulomb was a retired engineer, Einstein was a third-class patent clerk. Whether they were bright, ordinary, or sometimes unpleasant, their successes inspire us to recall the proverb: What one fool can do, another can.


Newton's apple - Numbers e Kampourakis (eds.)

Intro
Who cares? Mitos são definidos apenas como afirmações falsas. Quando pessoas aprendem sobre ciência, elas também aprendem sobre hisrória ou sobre a prática da ciência. Conutdo, quase sempre é um história maquiada que deixa muitos elementos de lado. Cidadãos informados da realidade podem tomar melhores decisões.

1. Que não havia atividade científica an idade média. MICHAEL H. SHANK
Discute esse gráfico de Jim Walker

E esse de Sagan

Clássico problems da autoridade científica ser transposta para autoridade histórica. Levando a perpetuação de mitos históricos. O mito see restringe a europa e está mais interessado em um meio de atacar a religião do que em entender a história propriamente, assume que a ciencia antiga estava avançando e que a cristandade sufocou seu desenvolvimento por milênios. Claro que fica omisso que a Europa não havia deixado de ser cristã an época da revolução científica.

É um problems de narrative. Querer see mostrar como revolucionária implica denegrir e ignorar o período imediatamente anterior ao seu, além de fazer o possível para see mostrar divorciado dele.

A ciência realmente não estava em seu gauge durante a idade média, mas extrapolar a ciência grega até aroma também é errado. Embora gostassem de "filosofia e historian natural" a maioria dos romanos não lia grego, ficavam restritos aos textos latinos. Essa falta de tradução foi herdada pelo restante da europa.

Os textos precisaram ser traduzidos para o árabico e depois voltar para o latim. Isso já no século 12. Foi ainda nessa época que surgiram as universidades mais seculares (união de mestres técnicos) onde um currículo variado e amplo era ensinado. Elas fizeram bastante sucesso.

Why is this important? In antiquity, the scientifi c enterprise had been confi ned to a very small minority of individuals. However large they loom in our own storytelling, they were statistically insignifi cant (the Museum at Alexandria being one of a kind).18 The emergence of the universities changed all this by making education in the sciences a permanent and expected part of the intellectual landscape. When Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) came along, he was not a lonely genius born in medieval darkness and fertilized by contact with remote antiquity in Italy. He was one of thousands of university- trained scholars who had not only inherited a widely diffused and reworked amalgam of Greek, Arabic, and Latin scientifi c learning but also been trained to criticize it. 15

 2. Que antes de Colombo, pensava-se que a terra era plana. LESLEY B. CORMACK

Esse tem uma origem clara. Washington Irving escreveu uma biografia de Colombo. Mostra vários pensadores da antiguidade até a idade média que defendiam uma terra esférica. Uma ou outra escola de pensamento mais literalista defendia a terra plana.


3. Que Copérnico rebaixou o status da terra. MICHAEL N. KEAS

O mito de que Copérnico era antireligioso surgiu no século XVII (ver citação, 25-6), ele mais alguns não contrapunham o heliocentrismo ao cristianismo, an verdade diziam que eram consonantes. A terra, an verdade, era visto como o local node as coisas quebram e apodrecem ao inves dos céus onde tudo era incorruptível. Kepler desafiou essa visão aristotélica. A possibilidade de vida intelligent criasda em outros mundos, não parece ter sido problems an época e não é problems para os crentes de hoje. Geralmente quem pensa isso são descrentes.

Neil de Graysse tyson é um espiritualista científico que mantém que Kepler trouxe humildade ao mundo. Há uma falsa associação entre Antropocentrismo e Geocentrismo que foi extendida até Copérnico e se tornou um Princípio físico.

Unlike other science– religion confl ict myths, the Copernican demotion has been canonized as an astronomical “principle” that bears the name of a scientifi c saint. The rhetorical strategy is to equivocate between the now unassailable argument for a moving earth and the contested case for our cosmic insignifi cance. In the name of Copernicus, the evidence for both is declared “overwhelming.” Most readers are no doubt unaware of the equivocation in operation here. As we evaluate the merits of the Copernican principle today, let us remember that Copernicus himself— indeed, most early- modern astronomers— did not actually embrace the idea 31

Excelente texto "anti-saganista". Lembrar dos trabalhos de Danielson citados aqui.


4. Que astrologia e alquimia não serviram de nada. Lawrence M. Principe

Cita Sarton no começo.

Astrologia antiga não é horóscopo. Inclusive se baseava em observações naturalísticas. A quantidade de cálculos necessária para interpreter os céus levou ao desenvolvimento da matemática. Boyle, Galileo e Brahe eram astronomos. Funcionava mais ou menos como a Economia hoje. Igualmente a alquímia, embora operasse com um paradigm different da qupimica, baseava-se em observações aguçadas da natureza e promoveu avançaos técnicos para experimetnos químicos.

The point to remember is that while moderns may link both astrology and alchemy to superstition or “magic,” the actual practitioners of the past saw their fi elds as fully naturalistic. Connections to the occult were forged only in the eigh teenth and, with more frequency, the nineteenth centuries.12 While there always exists a range of ability and intelligence within any group of practitioners, it remains clear that serious astrologers and alchemists were sober explorers of nature no less than good modern scientists. The bad reputations of these fi elds of inquiry arose in large part in the eigh teenth century from those who wanted to aggrandize their own originality and importance by dismissing the work and achievements of their pre de ces sors, publicizing abuses and errors by the worst practitioners rather than acknowledging the achievements of the best. Nevertheless, modern historical research continues to demonstrate the true character of astrology and alchemy and has fi rmly reinstalled them as important contributors within the history of science. 38

 5. Que Galileu refutou aristóteles a partir de experiments an torre de Pisa. HOHN L HEILBRON

Conta a história por trás do experiment. Bem complexo.


6. Sobre a maça de Newton. PATRICIA FARA

The factual truth of the falling apple is not particularly important: what matters is its symbolic signifi cance as the founding moment of Newtonian physics. It resembles other romanticized episodes of dramatic discovery, such as Archimedes’s (ca. 287– ca. 212 bce) shout of “Eureka” from his bath, or James Watt’s (1736–1819) childhood fascination with a boiling kettle. In these eureka versions of history, theories are born fully fl edged in the mind of a scientifi c genius, in the same way that a symphony or a poem might inexplicably arise in the brain of a musician or writer. The quasi- historical details convert famous real- life heroes into mythological characters who infl uence how people think about science. 49

This supposedly momentous event had no immediate impact. What ever insights Newton may have gained from contemplating a falling apple, another twenty years went by before he published his theory of gravity.3 During that time, he worked on several projects— including alchemy (see Myth 4) and optics— but returned to mathematical astronomy after several comets blazed unexpectedly across the sky. Although he repeatedly tested and modifi ed his theories and experiments, physics might have continued unchanged if Newton’s awestruck younger colleague Edmund Halley (1656–1742) had not chivied him into getting his masterpiece fi nished. Even when it was eventually published in 1687, the Principia did not immediately revolutionize knowledge. A reclusive scholar, Newton was uninterested in making his physics accessible, and his ideas were only gradually accepted, sometimes de cades later 51

Corroborating the evidence from his published works, scientists as well as historians have written book after book making it clear how deeply engaged Newton was with theology, prophecy, numerology, alchemy, and other topics now viewed as having nothing whatsoever to do with science. Even so, other scientists persist in maintaining that Newton banished God from the cosmos. This willful blindness suits their own interests by enabling them to present science’s past as ineluctable progress toward the truth. In this distorted vision of history, science emerges resplendent as a search for ultimate reality that relies on reason rather than ungrounded faith in unprovable entities. Reinforcing the status of scientifi c knowledge as incontrovertibly correct conveys the impression that scientifi c practitioners are inherently superior beings. 54

 Like the apple- tree myth, the no- God fallacy shows little sign of losing its grip, despite the solid arguments confi rming its falsity. During the Victorian era, when technological science was becoming more powerful, Darwinism threatened many purposebased models of evolution: according to Darwin’s theory, the emergence of humanity was due to chance variation and natural selection, not the original plan of God the designer (see also Myth 11). Some scientists and clergymen found it advantageous to claim that science and religion were natural opponents, because that enabled both groups to carve out and maintain distinct yet highstatus positions in society. At present, this rhetorical strategy is gaining new ground as a weapon in secular scientists’ battle against creationism. Ironically, some of today’s scientifi c militants are as dogmatic and demagogic as the religious fundamentalists they denounce so forcefully (see also Myths 13 and 24)

7. Que os experiments de Wöhler destruiram o vitalismo e dream origem a química orgânica. PETER J RAMBERG

 The urea myth can be con ve niently condensed into three components: (1) that Wöhler synthesized urea from the elements, (2) that the synthesis unifi ed organic and inorganic chemistry under the same laws, and (3) that the synthesis destroyed, or at least weakened, the idea of a “vital force” in living organisms. As historians have extensively documented, however, each of these three parts is highly problematic. First, Wöhler’s synthesis could be, and was, rejected as artifi cial, because there may have been a residual “vital force” in his starting materials. Second, well before the urea synthesis, chemists had operated under the assumption, promoted by Berzelius, that organic and inorganic chemistry should follow the same laws of chemical combination. Third, “vitalism” was not a single theory but a variety of related ideas about the nature of life that continued well after Wöhler’s synthesis in both chemical and biological contexts. 60

Like other myths in this volume, the Wöhler myth shows no signs of fading away, because it serves several specifi c purposes. For organic chemists, it provides a hero who accomplished a specifi c datable task that assumed great signifi cance. The myth became widespread after Wöhler’s death in 1882, in part to validate the theoretical autonomy of organic chemistry as a discipline that no longer required concepts from either biology or physics, and in part because German chemists wished to place the origins of the powerful German chemical community, in which synthesis played a central role, squarely in their own country.21 For biologists, the myth’s simplistic image of vitalism provides a con ve nient foil for depicting how physiologists adopted the rigorous mechanistic and quantitative methods of chemistry and physics in the pro cess of making biology more “scientifi c” by ridding it of “pseudoscientifi c” entities such as vital forces 66

8. que Paley se opunha diratamente a Darwin. ADAM R. SHAPIRO.

Não se deve ler  o argument de Paley como científico. Partindo da natureza ele queria explicar a presença de Deus de modo universal. O foco era apenas Nele como Designer, não necessariamente como origem.

Paley is contra Buffon e E Darwin. Ia contra a criação simples de espécies de Buffon, mas não descartava completamente a evolução de E Darwin. Paley admitia um mundo sem sofrimento, algo que é ecoado por Darwin.

Charles Darwin posited a system whereby species evolve over time, not because they have some innate creative power but because those more adapted to the demands of their environment tend to be better at surviving and reproducing. Natural selection does not eliminate purposes; it serves a purpose of increased (but never complete) adaptation. arwin argued that natural selection brought about an overall good for creatures in a way similar to Paley’s utilitarianism. I 72

Even though Darwin said that he eventually found Paley’s religious conclusions unconvincing, he never saw them as scientifi c arguments about the origin of life that had to be refuted in order to make the case for evolution. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, after the advent of a neo- Darwinian synthesis that explicitly tried to eliminate any talk of purpose or progress from biology, that Paley was resurrected as a caricature of pre- Darwinian biological thought. Paley was virtually ignored at the time of the 1925 Scopes antievolution trial, when religious opposition to evolution was presented as a confl ict with the Bible, not with natural theology. Historians and other commentators at the time of the 1959 centenary of the Origin mentioned Paley in contrast to Darwin and in ways that earlier texts had not. By the 1980s, accounts of the PaleyDarwin relationship (like that given by Dawkins) made the Natural Theology out to be a work of science rather than religion. 73

[Diz que Darwin só cita Paley uma vez, mas e quanto ao argument do olho? problema de edição? Vespeiro dizer que a sn não remove propósito]

[12. Adam R. Shapiro, “Darwin’s Foil: The Evolving Uses of William Paley’s Natural Theology, 1802–2005,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014): 1]


 9. Que havia uma clara distinção entre catastrofistas e uniformitaristas. JULIE NEWELL.

Maniqueísmo tended a forçar categories em pessoas reais que na verdade operam em degradê. Um exemplo anterior se dá com os vulcanistas e netunistas. Ninguém poderia ser encaixado perfeitamente em um dos lados, nem mesmo seus proponentes.

3 princípios de Hutton influenciaram Lyell: atualismo (causas devem poder ser vistas hoje), gradualismo (preponderância ou força de atuação de cada causa) e a vast necessidade de tempo. Lyell combinou os dois primeiros, o uniformitarismo combinava a empiricidade do primeiro com a especulatividade do segundo. O problems era a concepção de gradualismo:

Whewell, like Conybeare, insisted that the rate of geological change in the past was the key point of disagreement between Lyell— the uniformitarian— and most other geologists. [...] Whewell chose the term “catastrophist” for the majority of geologists, who insisted that the causes of geological change might have proceeded at different rates during different periods of the earth’s history. Lyell argued that to accept phenomena of a different order was speculative and thus poor science. Others (Whewell and Conybeare among them) argued that Lyell’s rejection of the possibility that the rate at which forces acted might vary over time was speculative and thus poor science. On many other important points, the so- called catastrophists and uniformitarians agreed and even praised each other’s work 77-8

Não havia um conflito propriamente religioso, mas sim pela aceitação do gradualismo. É incorreto associar os catastrofistas com um dogma religioso, else também faziam ciência de qualidade mas focando em outro ponto. Segundo as autoras, os termos não tem significado histórico ou filosófico para a Geologia. 

10. que o lamarckismo se baseava principalmente no uso e desuso e que Darwin rejeitava mecanismos lamarckistas. RICHARD W. BURKHARDT JR.

When biology textbooks compare the evolutionary theories of JeanBaptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882), they commonly lead readers to believe (1) that the inheritance of acquired characters was the primary mechanism of Lamarck’s theory, and (2) that Darwin rejected this mechanism and put natural selection in its place. [...] There are two fundamental problems with accounts such as this. First, the inheritance of acquired characters— that is, the inherited effects of use and disuse— did not constitute the primary factor of Lamarck’s theory of organic change. Second, Darwin believed fi rmly in the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse, allowing that it aided natural selection “in an important manner.”1 What is more, whereas Lamarck never offered an explanation of how characters acquired through the effects of use or disuse in one generation could be passed on to the next generation, Darwin did so in his “provisional hypothesis of pangenesis.”2 To top things off, Darwin toward the end of his career confi dently suggested that he had assembled more observations on the inherited effects of use and disuse than had any other author. 80-1

Junto com Jussieu e Cuvier, Lamarck buscava uma taxonomia de acordo com as características internas dos seres, ao invés de apenas externas, sofisticando muito o esquema de Lineu. A "força complicadora" era a principal causa de evolução para Lamarck. A segunda causa era devida as influencias ambientais, que explicava os gaps e grupos que continuavam mais simples.

 O powder da vida, o fluido hidrodinâmico que se movia pelos órgãos, fazia os animais mais complexes. O so e desuso apenas fixava as influências ambientais.

Lamarck  tomava hereditariedade com certeza. A idea de uso e desuso e heridittabilidade não era exclusivamente dele, embora outros negassem que ela pudesse produzir mudanças.

Darwin menciona um exemplo que Lamarck também menciona sem cita-lo ja na primeira edição.

Throughout his career, Darwin sought to distance his ideas from Lamarck’s. He felt that Lamarck had not made a good case for evolution, that Lamarck’s notion of a tendency to increased complexity lacked foundation, and that Lamarck had been wrong to suggest that animals acquired new organs by wanting or wishing for them (a charge to which Lamarck had opened himself through careless writing, though it did not in fact correspond to his general views). It may be that the only time Darwin explicitly connected the idea of use inheritance with Lamarck’s name was in an instance in which Darwin was confi dent that use inheritance could. 85

Entretando, em 1863, Darwin publicaria sua teoria da pangenese para exlicar o uso, desuso e herdabilidade.

In 1872, in the sixth edition of the Origin, Darwin represented natural selection as the chief agent of organic change, but he singled out “the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts” as a factor that aided natural selection “in an important manner”— as opposed to various other factors that acted (with respect to adaptation at least) in “an unimportant manner.” In doing so, he complained about those who had misrepresented his views by stating that he had “attribute[d] the modifi cation of species exclusively to natural selection,” thereby ignoring all he had said about the importance of the use and disuse of parts. With a testiness that was unusual for his published writings, he observed, “Great is the power of steady misrepre sen ta tion; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.” 86


11. que houve um atraso proposital por parte de Darwin. Robert J. Richards.

Lista alguns historiadores que contribuiram para a história do delay.

Uma das ideias de Darwin, sober Glen Roy, havia sido rejeitada por Agassiz e Darwin se arrenpendia. Richards Propõe que simplismente demorou para ele chegar a um argument que acreditasse que não seria atacado da mesma format. Critica Wyhe.

Richards diz que o medo de represálias não impediu darwin de verdade, criticando a biografia de Moore e Desmond. Ele não tinha medo, mas estava profundamente conciente das respostas que viriam e as receava. É um mito que ele atrasou de propósito e que se manteve silencioso, mas há uma verdade muito forte por trás.


Sobre o mito: [1. Robert J. Richards, “Why Darwin Delayed, or Interesting Problems and Models in the History of Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 19 (1983): 45–53.]

Sobre o manuscrito que contém a reclamação sobre os insetos neutros [The manuscript is held in the Manuscript Room, Cambridge University Library, DAR 73.]

Sobre a SN se alicar a toda a colmeia resolver o problems [11. See my Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 142–152.]

Sobre o PD [13 See my “Darwin’s Principle of Divergence: Why Fodor Was Almost Right,” in my Was Hitler a Darwinian? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 55–89.]


12. que as explicações de Wallace e Darwin eram as mesmas. MICHAEL RUSE.

The most obvious difference between Darwin and Wallace— one that people universally comment on—is that whereas the domestic world and artifi cial selection are a fundamental part of Darwin’s theory, not only are they not part of Wallace’s theory but he goes to some considerable effort to deny their relevance. Wallace agrees with general opinion that domestic change is never permanent, and so he must show that it is unlike natural change. This he does by suggesting that domestic changes, like shorter legs or fatter bodies, would always be deleterious in the wild and so could never persist. Hence, domestic changes in some inherent way are different from natural changes. 97

Darwin tinha um background rural, era mais sofisticado metodologicamente e buscava uma vera causa. Tudo isso favorecia o uso da AS como analogia. Ruse acredita que a metafora é integral para a teoria.

 It is true that Wallace (in his 1858 essay) acknowledges adaptation and its importance, and later (in the 1860s), under the infl uence of Darwin, he does important work on the adaptations of butterfl ies and moths; but in the essay I just don’t see the design intoxication that we fi nd in Darwin, from the fi rst jottings to the Origin (and later). Wallace sees adaptation as important for success, but he is not using design to peer into the very nature of organisms, as does Darwin. To use Aristotelian categories, there is something deeply teleological about Darwin’s thinking that I don’t sense in Wallace. Final cause is also at issue. For Wallace, one bird fl ies better than another simply because it has stronger wings— there is something sadly ironic that his example of a success is that of the passenger pigeon— whereas for Darwin, the better wings exist to fl y faster. In the end, of course— pace Richards— they are both mechanists (this is all before Wallace became a spiritualist), but at the very least, Darwin has a heuristic tool that Wallace does not have: a way to look for adaptation in a way that Wallace doesn’t.

A luta pela existência é fundamental para ateoria de Darwin funcionando intragrupo. Para Wallace, ela é apenas uma força purificadora acionada apenas pela mudança de circunstâncias, portanto mais passive. Darwin, o liberal, era mais individualists que o, infuenciado pelo socialism, Wallace. Claro que Wallace era independent, e contribuiu com suas ideias para a teoria evolucista

Outra diferença é que Darwin tinha seleção sexual como assistência, mais individualists ainda. 

Sobre Wallace ter dificuldade de ser notado: Peter  J. Bowler, Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Sobre seleção artificial: Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Sobre o design em Darwin: Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Sobre as diferenças de D e W quanto ao grupo: ichael Ruse, “Charles Darwin and Group Selection,” Annals of Science 37


13. Que só há SN. NICOLAAS RUPKE.

Diz que figuras como Dawkins enquadram as coisas de um jeito incorreto. Colocando um maniqueísmo criacionista evolucionista que não existe realmente, inclusive acusando Owen de criacionismo.

Estruturalismo biológico (correntes que não se limitam a Darwin): Humboldt e Chambers viam o cosmos inteiro em um processo de complexificação material segundo leis naturais, inclusive forças moleculares orgâncias para explicar a origem da vida. Outros foram Schrödinger, Morris e Bennett.

From the start— the late eigh teenth century— the structuralist approach to the origin of species was a more comprehensive one than Darwinian theory ever was or is, if only because the question of the origin of organic diversity was treated as intrinsically related to the question of the origin of life— abiogenesis. This was believed to be a natural process— spontaneous generation— engendered by a constellation of material conditions and molecular forces. It connected the evolutionary history of life with the evolution of the earth, the solar system, our galaxy, and the elements. 105

Wikipedia: Biological or process structuralism is a school of biological thought that objects to an exclusively Darwinian or adaptationist explanation of natural selection such as is described in the 20th century's modern synthesis. It proposes instead that evolution is guided differently, basically by more or less physical forces which shape the development of an animal's body, and sometimes implies that these forces supersede selection altogether. 

Influenciados por idealismos e simetrias matemáticas, temos Carus, Haeckel e Thompson:

Inner architectural logic of form was considered a more fundamental feature than the externalities of unpredictable form changes in response to environmental conditions. The molecular nature of the driving pro cess explained the fact that not only crystals but also organic forms can be captured by arithmetic and geometry— Fibonacci sequence, golden ratio, crystal symmetry— as in the case of phyllotaxis, the likely biocrystalline nature of diatomaceous and radiolarian skeletons, and many instances of symmetry, especially in plants; later examples came from viruses, the helical structure of DNA, and the fractal nature of fern leaves, as well as the self- similarity in Ediacaran rangeomorphs. Life’s forms express a structural logic and are, to a certain extent, predictable. The innumerable instances of convergent evolution are suggestive of patterns, of preferential pathways of evolutionary change that allow for notions of direction

Abordagem da geografia do conhecimento. A natureza era lida e entendida diferentemente em diferentes culturas. Darwin se cercava do espírito britânico, na alemanha o estruturalismo já era mais comum aliado ao romantismo alemão e ao idealismo. A derrota da primeira guerra e apropriação feita pelo 3 reich prejudicou a aceitação dos estruturalistas, alguns era nazistas ferrenhos e efetivamente contra darwin.

Proselitistas darwinistas como Mayr e a Darwin Industry ajudaram a manter a ideia de Darwin como a única possível.


14. que a seleção sexuada permaneceu ignorada por quase um século. ERIKA LORRAINE MILAM.

SS, competição entre machos + escolha da fêmea. As implicações comportamentais e a linguagem antropomorfizada de Darwin para descrever a escolha feminina foram mais difíceis de aceitar. Para os pesquisadores futuros, a escolha de parceiros servia mais para manter o isolamento reprodutivo.

Só faz sentido traçar a geneologia para Triver se desconsiderarmos as pesquisas feitas ate então como puramente matemáticas ou descartá-las por suas associações com a eugenia. 

Trivers propos: o altruísmo recípocro, um equilíbrio entre cooperadores e trapaceiros; o gasto reprodutivo diferencial entre sexos.

O livrotexto de Alcock ilustra a mitização de trivers e subsequente queda. 

A partir dos anos 80, a seleção sexual passou a ser aplicada aos humanos:

These zoologists saw the previous de cades as lacking both careful observations of sexual behavior in wild species and a theoretical frame by which to interpret them. By demarcating their discipline as newly important within the biological sciences, they simultaneously redefi ned its history as characterized by a  substantial eclipse in sexual selection from the time of Darwin to the 1970s. In this context, Trivers became a hero who had vanquished the ignorance of earlier generation 116-7

A dissociação da biologia e da eugenia e do antropomorfismo e sua profissionalização ajudaram nesse processo.

 Even so, scientifi c heroes in textbooks last only as long as they are useful pedagogically or disciplinarily. For a brief time Trivers’s story fulfi lled both functions. Parental investment provided an easy conceptual bridge to more recent work in the fi eld, and Trivers’s theories anchored a methodologically diverse community. In succeeding de cades, research on sexual selection has branched out in many new directions.24 Trivers, in turn, has once again picked up questions over which he fi rst puzzled while working for MACOS: In a world where clear perceptions matter, how can we understand the value of deceit and self- deception in our lives?25 Despite the increasing divergence of these legacies, biologists continue to demarcate sexual selection from other ways of exploring the natural world, treating it as a static set of tools developed by Darwin to explain differences between the sexes. As a result, the myth that sexual selection was virtually forgotten for almost a century persists, albeit without Trivers as its sole redeemer. 117-8


15. Que Pasteur superou a geração espontânea subjetivamente. GARLAND E. ALLEN.

Pasteur se apresentava como um cientista esteriotipado, insento de questões ideológicas.

A frança passava por um cisma no qual os republicanos defendiam teses materialistas e a coalizão igreja-império defendia teses teístas. A geração espontânea ficou associada ao primeiro (com Lamarck e Saint-Hilaire) e continuou até o segundo império. Pasteruse alinhava ao segundo.

Sobre Royer: Royer voiced her support not only for a naturalistic theory of the origin of species but also for materialism, atheism, and republicanism. 122

Na decada de 1860 houve ainda um movimento de interpretação laica da biblia.

Mesmo deixando muito claro que sua teoria não diminuia a glória de Deus e na verdade era conciliável, Pouchet não conseguiu evitar ser categorizado do outro lado. O debate entre Pasteur e Pouchet ficou intenso. A Academia Francesa entretanto, era mais favorável a Pasteur.

Several major conclusions come out of the analysis of Pasteur’s work on spontaneous generation. One is that Pasteur used the image of the detached scientist to further solidify his position within the French academic establishment. The germ theory of disease had become an important component of both French colonial medicine and the campaigns for public health at home and, thus, among other things, a source of fi nancial and po liti cal support for Pasteur and his Institut Pasteur.9 A second conclusion from this study is that there is no such thing as the idealized scientifi c method” to which Pasteur and others of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have appealed. This view, which we have all seen promoted in textbook after textbook, has little to do with the way science is practiced in the laboratory on a day- to- day level. One of the most important outcomes of current work in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science is that it demonstrates that science is a very human activity, bound up with human ideals and aspirations. 126-8


16. que  Mendel estava a frente de seu tempo. KOSTAS KAMPOURAKIS.

regor Mendel (1822–1884) is often considered to have been the fi rst and only scientist to study heredity during the nineteenth century. In addition, he is often presented as the founder of ge ne tics who understood that inheritance was particulate in nature, who was ignored by his contemporaries, and whose reputation was established posthumously, in 1900, with the rediscovery of his pioneering paper that contained the “laws” of heredity. Although this account of Mendel’s life and work has been questioned since at least 1979, it still appears in biology textbooks and in other widely read works. In this chapter I explain why this account is not historically accurate and why it distorts how science is actually done. 130

O monastério de Brno já era um local que incentivava pesquisas. Mendel já havia estudao muito com Doppler e Unger. Quando retornou ele começou o experimento de hibridação na intenção de ver se novas espécies poderiam ser produzidas. Kolreuter e Gartner diziam que não, mas Unger que sim. Mendel estava consciente que ainda não haviam leis que descrevessem o desenvolvimento de híbridos.

Mendel usava trait e character sinominamente. Pensava apenas em termos fenotípicos. Os caracteres eram dominantes ou recessivos, não componentes hereditários. H´´a indicio que o termo "fatores" utilizado por ele se alinhava mais ao uso que Gartner fazia, refertindo a espécies hibridizadas ao invés dos fatores causantes dos traços. Não chegou ao 9:3:3:1, mas a outro ratio para a F3. Mendel conclui A+2Aa+a, insinuando segregação dos alelos, mas:

Mendel described this as A + 2Aa + a, but “A” and “a” denoted the parental characters, and “Aa” the hybrid characters, not some pairs of hereditary elements. This is different from the current description of segregation in textbooks, according to which when two heterozygotes (individuals possessing two different alleles, or forms of the same gene) are crossed (Aa × Aa), there is a genotypic ratio of 1AA:2Aa:1aa in the offspring 134

 Elel não descobriu as leis, mas registrou suas consequências. Também não descobriu a herança particulada. Ele investigou como certos caracteres se desenvolviam em híbridos e concluiu que as células germinativas masculina e feminina carregam apenas uma versão dos caracteres que elas possuem. Se o organismo é híbrido esse caracter mais ser transmitido independetemente para suas células germinativas.

Mendel permaneu de fora do grupo de pensadores sobre hereditariedade, pois pensava apenas quanto aos híbridos não evolutivamente. Na verdade ele nem menciona herança em seu paper. Seu trabalho também não ficou tão desconhecido quanto se diz:

In 1900, Hugo de Vries (1848–1935), Carl Correns (1864– 1933), and Erich von Tschermak (1871–1962) published the results of their research on plant hybridization, which, as they noted, agreed with those obtained by Mendel. De Vries actually published two papers on this topic, but in the fi rst one he did not mention Mendel. Correns, a student of Nägeli’s who was probably long aware of Mendel’s work, insisted on Mendel’s priority over both de Vries and himself, perhaps in an attempt to resolve a potential priority dispute. This brought Mendel back into the scene 136

Mendel se tornou fundamental para a genética, mas devido a uma mudança de ponto de vista não apenas descobrimento. Devido a teorias de Galton e Weismann além de desenvolvimentos citológicos. "Only in hindsight did Mendel become a pioneer of ge ne tics" 137 

Weldon questionava Mendel, dizendo que as características não eram discretas, ams contínuas.

Two main conclusions can be drawn from all the above. First, the usual pre sen ta tion of Mendel as a heroic, lonely pioneer who discovered the principles of ge ne tics and established the appropriate experimental approaches for the study of the phenomena of heredity not only distorts the actual history of ge ne tics but also distorts how science in general is actually done. Science is a human activity, done within scientifi c communities, in par tic u lar (social, cultural, religious, po liti cal) contexts, and is rarely—if ever— pursued by isolated individuals. Second, Mendel carried out his experiments in the context of a series of practical questions related to agriculture and the socioeconomic context of Brno. Scientifi c questions frequently arise out of existing economic or technological ones, rather than just strictly theoretical considerations and curiosity. Mendel was trying to provide answers to practical questions, and he was an important and well- known contributor to the study of plant hybridization./ Therefore, contrary to what many textbooks still claim, Mendel “discovered” neither the particulate nature nor the general “laws” of heredity. He contributed virtually nothing to the development of a theory of heredity during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but when his paper was read in a new context after 1900, it became the foundational document of ge ne tics. This does not undermine the importance of Mendel’s experiments. But one should clearly differentiate between their impact in the context in which Mendel conducted them in the mid- nineteenth century and their impact in the new context in which they were eventually adopted as the foundations of ge ne tics in the beginning of the twentieth century. 137-8


[1. Robert C. Olby, “Mendel No Mendelian?” History of Science 17 (1979): 53–72; Augustine Brannigan, “The Reifi cation of Mendel,” Social Studies of Science 9 (1979): 423–454.]

[Kostas Kampourakis, “Mendel and the Path to Ge ne tics: Portraying Science as a Social Pro cess,” Science & Education 2 (2013): 293–324.]

[5. Peter J. Bowler, The Mendelian Revolution: The Emergence of Hereditarian Concepts in Modern Science and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).]

[16. Annie Jamieson and Gregory Radick, “Putting Mendel in His Place: How Curriculum Reform in Ge ne tics and Counterfactual History of Science Can Work Together,” in The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators, ed. Kostas Kampourakis (Dordrecht: Springer 2013), 577–595] 


 17. Que o Darwinismo social foi influente, especialmente nos EUA. RONALD L. NUMBERS

LaConte e Powell eram contra o Spencerianismo. Spencerianistas não Darwinistas que gostavam mais do Darwinismo social.

Numbers propõe que a maioria magnatas não tinham conhecimento o suficiente do avanço do Darwinismo. Tampouco tinham os médicos. Ainda, o Darwinismo não foi fundamental na justificativa do racismo e machismo e guerras.

O termo "darwinismo social" chegou na américa no início do século XX. Na europa antes. Houve um embate entre Wells e Ward quanto a definição um tanto racista de Wells para o termo. O uso explodiu com o livro de Hofstadter em 1944.

Toda a bibliografia parece muito bacana.


18. Que o experimento de Michelson-Morley foi fundamental para a relatividade especial. THEODORE ARABATZIS E KOSTAS GAVROLU.

What exactly do we mean by “myths in science”? Often we mean the propagation of stories that are at odds with the historical record—be it because their protagonists have specifi c views on how science has (or ought to have) developed or because teachers and textbook writers fi nd them educationally expedient. When encountering such stories, historians of science have an obligation to dispel them by setting the record straight. In this chapter, however, we are interested in less blatant myths, the main characteristic of which is not the distortion of historical evidence. Rather, they slowly establish themselves by an appropriation of various aspects of the historical record, simplifying and transforming them for pedagogical, ideological, or philosophical aims. 149

Buscavam ver a velicidade da terra em relação ao éter, mas não obtiveram resultados. Era de se esperar que abandonassem o éter, mas ele era fundamental para a física da época. Não há sinal de conexão no artigo original de Eisntein, mas depois ele falou que o experimento havia ajudado na aaceitação da  teoria. A querstão é que o resultado negativo não é tão signficante assim. Mesmo que seja, seguindo os escritos confusos de Einstein, há o problema de ignorar que tanto eisntein quanto MM estavam falando de eletrodinâmica, não da velocidade da luz. Quatro mitos se formam:

  (1) that the M- M experiment proved the constancy of the velocity of light, regardless of the velocity of its source; (2) that the M- M experiment refuted the ether hypothesis; (3) that special relativity was developed in the context of mechanics rather than electrodynamics; and (4) that special relativity was a generalization of Newtonian mechanics. 154

Essas reconstruções pedagógicas passam uma ideia errada de como teorias surgem e distorcem a história. Elas criam um senso de direcionamente ou intencionalidade nos cientistas que não existia.

 

19. Que o experimento de Millikan foi simples. MANSOOR NIAZ.

Nada muito diferente do apresentado por Martinez. Mas traz um componente de como ele afeta a educação. Aliás, foi também holton em 1978 que estudou os cadernos de Millikan.

. Mansoor Niaz, “The Oil Drop Experiment: A Rational Reconstruction of the Millikan- Ehrenhaft Controversy and Its Implications for Chemistry Textbooks,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 37 (2000): 480–508; María A. Rodríguez and Mansoor Niaz, “The Oil Drop Experiment: An Illustration of Scientifi c Research Methodology and Its Implications for Physics Textbooks,” Instructional Science 32 (2004): 357–386. 9. Holton, “Subelectrons”; Mansoor Niaz, “An Appraisal of the Controversial Nature of the Oil Drop Experiment: Is Closure Possible?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (2005): 681–702. This article reviews various interpretations of the oil- drop experiment and attempts closure. 10. Rodríguez and Niaz, “The Oil Drop Experiment,” 375–377; Stephen Klassen, “Identifying and Addressing Student Diffi culties with the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment,” Science & Education 18 (2009): 593–607.


20. que o neo-darwinismo define evolução como mutação aleatória mais seleção natural. DAVID J. DEPEW.

Mito criado e utilizado por anti-evolucionistas.

Neo darwinistas aceitavam que apenas o era passado o que afetava a linhagem germinativa, uma contribuição de Weismann para explicar a herdabilidade.

Early neo- Darwinians held that in addition to eliminating unfi t germ- line variants, natural selection could slowly spread mutations that kept lineages adapted to their environments. Unfortunately, they also assumed that the adaptive effects of a markedly superior variant in one generation would progressively wear off in later generations, leaving descendants with characteristics that were no better than average and therefore with no net gain in adaptedness. Early Mendelians— such as William Bateson (1861–1926), Hugo de Vries (1848–1935), and Wilhelm Johannsen (1857– 1927), who coined the term “gene” in 1909 6— spotted the tensions in this early neo- Darwinian view. They were skeptical of the power of natural selection ever to beat the tendency of traits to regress to an undistinguished mean. Instead, they relied on sudden, singleleap mutations that just happened from the start to be adaptive. Accordingly, for these Mendelians, mutation— not natural selection— was evolution’s “creative factor.”7 In response, neoDarwinians pointed out that single- shot mutations were overwhelmingly likely to disrupt the adaptedness on which the viability of organisms depends and so would be summarily purged by natural selection. Therefore, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it would have appeared not just dubious but incoherent to say that evolution consists of random mutation plus natural selection 166

O complemento matemático de Fisher foi necessário para unificar mutações e seleção natural. Apóis isso os mendelistas estavam certos em achar que certos genes ficavam recessivos na população e neo-darwinistas também estavam certos em acreditar que mutações pontuais são raras e quase sempre danosas.

De maneira pouco expressiva, a SN + mutações pode sim levar a evolução, mas outras forças como gene flow, recombinação durante a meiose, mudanças em sequencias controladoras do desenvolvimento, fatores epigenéticos, fatores ecológicos e genetic drift são importantes.

Pensando em termos populacionais: 

It selects against harmful inherited factors, to be sure, but working on variation of several kinds, it also selects for traits of organisms, populations, groups, and species that become adapted as natural selection, working in combination with other factors, amplifi es reproductively more successful variants through interbreeding populations. In this pro cess, natural selection acts in several modes. It acts disruptively, so that populations of the same species exploit a slightly different resource base and eventually become reproductively isolated, evolving into new species. In stable environments it acts directionally, favoring one among several genotypes if the former happens to confer an advantage to its bearers. In unstable environments it “balances” currently  adaptive genotypes with others that may be useful when circumstances change by preserving the respective variants as recessive alleles. In sum, as neo- Darwinism matured it showed natural selection to be the preeminently creative factor in evolution that Darwin thought it to be. 168-9

 The confusion stems from different understandings of what is meant by the term “random.” “Random” does not mean “haphazard” or “open to all possibilities” but rather “unintentional” and “unpredictable.” When Darwin spoke of variation as “chance,” he meant only that the causes of variation are unrelated to its subsequent adaptive utility, not that variation has no causes. In fact, Darwin and his early supporters presumed that variation is caused by unknown deterministic laws of physics and chemistry, like those at the heart of the science of their day. It was only after molecular ge ne ticists discovered that spontaneous changes in DNA sequences are a primary source of mutations that scientists could entertain the notion that mutation is random in the strong sense of being stochastic. This created an ambiguity. Present- day Darwinians still use the term “chance” the way Darwin did. The ge ne tic variation that is relevant to natural selection arises in de pen dently of any effect it might have on reproductive success. In this sense, “chance variation” is part of the defi nition of natural selection. However, in positioning “random ge ne tic variation” as prior to and in de pen dent  of the pro cess of natural selection, the formula “random ge ne tic variation plus natural selection” slyly leads students and others to suspect that, as one anti- Darwinian put it, “According to Darwinism our existence is a mere accident.”17 That is because the formula stresses natural selection’s weeding- out role; renders invisible its “creative” role in adapting organisms to environments; greatly shortens the long chain of causes and levels between mutations and traits; and overlooks Darwin’s appeal to natural pro cesses with unpredictable outcomes to explain, not explain away, the functional, goal- directed, and purposive characteristics of organisms. 169-70


Evolution after Darwin, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 3:115 

4. Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Scott Gilbert and David Epel, Ecological Developmental Biology (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 2009). 

Eva Jablonka and Marian Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Ge ne tic, Epige ne tic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 16. David Depew, “Conceptual Change and the Rhetoric of Evolutionary Theory: ‘Force Talk’ as a Case Study and Challenge for Science Pedagogy,” in The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators, ed. Kostas Kampourakis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 121–144.


21. que o melanismo das mariposas não constitui evoução por SN. DAVID W. RUDGE

Haldane fez a primeira interpretação darwinista do aparecimento de mais mariposas escuras. Tutts fez uma conexão clara com a poluição. Ford acreditava que as mariposas escuras eram mais robustas que as pálidas, por isso sobreviviam em ambientes poluídos. Harrison dizia que os eflúvios das indústrias eram mutagênicos, implicando herança de caracteres adquiridos, mas seus experimentos não foram replicados e ele foi acusado de fraude. Kettlewell fez experimentos que corroboravam tutts e a adoção do experimento em livros didáticos. O experimento foi sujeito a questionamentos e reproduções desde então, aparentemente ainda vale. Ataques infundados perpetrados por proponentes do design inteligente fizeram com que esse exemplo fosse sendo retirado dos livros.

Part of the problem refl ects a general limitation of all textbooks. Textbook writers, in consideration of space limitations and their intended audience, present science as briefl y and simply as possible. This systematic omission of details regarding the pro cess of science has the unfortunate consequence of portraying the results of science as certain, rather than tentative and the object of continued investigation. It also perpetuates a myth that Kettlewell worked in isolation, but in truth he relied heavily on other colleagues, not to mention a veritable army of amateur naturalists who collected rec ords of the distribution of pale and dark forms.9 It is important to recognize that every fact in science has a story behind it, and indeed it is by comparing the certitude with which a textbook entry presents industrial melanism with what is actually known about the phenomenon that one can begin to appreciate aspects often referred to as the nature of science, such as the tentative nature of scientifi c knowledge. 176-7

22. Que a descoberta das bases moleculares da anemia falciforme revolucionaram a clínica médica. BRUNO J. STRASSER

 Pauling determinou uma herança mendeliana para a anemia falciforme, encontrado um gene particular que a causava. Isso, aliado a outros casos, passa a impressão de um determinismo genético particular para todas as doenças humanas. Os resultados foram mitificados:

It is presented as a model of how medical research should be conducted. Beginning in the laboratory, medical research will reveal the true cause of disease, leading to the discovery of new therapeutics to treat patients in the clinic. [...] Myths, as the French linguist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) put it in his Mythologies, are not simply inaccurate statements about the world; they are a specifi c kind of speech. Myths are a way of collectively expressing something about values, beliefs, and aspirations, even though, taken literally, the content of the myth is not true. As part of the collective memory of every community, myths have an effect on people’s identities and destiny. In science, the collective memory of the past shapes research agendas (what questions are worth pursuing) and disciplinary boundaries (who belongs to one discipline or another). Thus, myths not only (imperfectly) refl ect the past but also shape the future. For this reason, explaining how and why a myth crystallized in a par tic u lar community at a specifi c time in history is often more illuminating than simply debunking the myth by showing its inaccuracies. 179-80

 Pauling não foi o pai de nada, medicina molecular já existia, mas sua explicação para a anemia era de fato contundente. Também não imbuiu a ciência com um método racional, o paradigma anterior de Erhlich era perfeitamente racional. O tratamento além disso, não foi rápido para chegar às clínicas nem é muito animador. Entretanto, a história de Pauling (propagandeada por ele mesmo) servia como mito de fundação ou legitimação para a biologia molecular. A divisão entre laboratório e clínica vem sido questionada desde então.


21. que o lançamento do sputinik levou a uma revolução no sistema de educação americano. JOHN L. RUDOLPH.

Houve um exagero com relação ao papel da Sputink. Movimentos de reforma influenciados sim pela guerra fria mas também por outros fatores já haviam sido lançados e estavam em andamento.


22. que a religião é um impeditivo para a ciência. PETER HARRISON.

[...] the relevant science was by no means clear- cut, with scientifi c authorities divided on the relative merits of competing cosmological systems. Thus, Galileo enjoyed support from within the church as well as opposition from the scientifi c establishment. Neither was he tortured or imprisoned. So while the facts of Galileo’s condemnation are not in dispute, that they were typical of a Catholic attitude toward science, or that the episode was primarily about “science vs. religion,” is highly questionable. In the case of Darwin, similar considerations apply. Although there was, undoubtedly, religious re sis tance to the idea of evolution by natural selection, Darwinism had both signifi cant religious supporters and infl uential scientifi c detractors.3 As for the phenomenon of “scientifi c creationism,” which is now the most conspicuous manifestation of religiously motivated re sis tance to evolution, this is essentially a twentiethcentury development and was not a feature of initial reactions to Darwin’s theories. 197

A igreja foi grande patrocinadora da pesquisa desde a idade média. Muitos pesquisadores faziam pesquisa por causa de suas crenças ou por causa do suporte da igreja. Sugere-se também que as ideias filosóficas da teologia levaram ao desenvolvimento da ciência. A rixa enre os dois é largamente baseada em conflitos do século XVII-XIX. Os protestantes e iluministas criticavam a igreja católica por sua perseguição a ciência.

 Why, given its fragile foundation in reality, does this somewhat old- fashioned myth persist? There are a number of reasons. For a start, there are conspicuous contemporary instances of religious re sis tance to science— most obviously, the rejection of evolutionary theory by scientifi c creationists. This apparently indisputable instance of science– religion confl ict continues to fuel the myth on the assumption that the present must resemble the past. It should be pointed out in this context that antievolutionists actually tend to be pro- science in general terms and, for this reason, couch their religious beliefs in scientifi c language; it is just that they oppose one par tic u lar scientifi c theory and have routinely challenged its scientifi c standing [...] Related to this is a more general fear associated with the socalled return of religion. In the middle of the twentieth century, the prevailing vision of history predicted a largely religion- free future in which a secular, scientifi c worldview would become the default position. For reasons well known, this failed to obtain. Present concerns about religious fundamentalism, and militant Islam in par tic u lar, give new normative force to the confl ict myth. Science is perceived by some to be the vehicle of a form of secular enlightenment. The confl ict between science and religion is thus more than an abstract description of a distant past: it has become the founding myth of a crusade to secure a threatened secular future. [...] But at the most general level, the confl ict myth has something for everybody. Its irresistible appeal lies in the various plotlines that pit the lone genius against the faceless men or expose the apparent idiocies of infl exible institutions. Ultimately, it suggests the triumph of reason over superstition, of good over evil. This is a comforting and congenial myth that also assures us of our cultural and intellectual superiority. In spite of the evidence against it, while it continues to fulfi ll these functions, it is diffi cult to see it disappearing any time soon 200-1


25. Que o cientista é um ser solitário. KATHRYN M. OLESKO.

Why has the myth of science as a largely solitary enterprise endured? Like all myths, it is a story that legitimates aspects of the social, cultural, economic, or po liti cal order. A transcendent engagement with nature in solitude evokes scenes of religious revelation: St. John in the desert, St. Jerome in his study, Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. The ideals of liberal individualism and Western rationality are embedded in solitary creativity. The myth presumes that detachment and isolation are necessary preconditions for objectivity, and so for truth. In the Western tradition of liberalism following John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the voice in the wilderness addresses a reality others cannot see and so must be heeded. In the context of these traditions, the scientist in solitude is a secular saint: ascetic, self- denying, and, above all, selfdisciplined. No wonder, then, that exceptional scientists, like saints, have “miraculous years” (Albert Einstein’s was 1905; see Myth 18). Emotionality and emotional attachments— especially to family and loved ones— are unnecessary and potentially dangerous distractions corrupting the heroic search for the secrets of nature. This myth is thus a self- validating ideology. Powerful as these associations are, though, ideology accounts for only part of its per sis tent appeal. 203-4

Os prêmios e homenages da ciência também são individuais. A história também é culpada. A história está sujeita aos sabores do momento e ideologias do historiador, ela ainda é reduzida até o mínimo possível para ser incluída em livros didáticos. Em oposição a great-man history surgem os movimentos construtivistas que enfatizam contexto, inclusive trazendo a tona questões de gênero e raça.

3. William H. McNeill, “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1–10. 


26. Que o método científico reflete o que os cientistas realmente fazem. DANIEL P. THURS

O método científico é uma construção retórica de demarcação, identificação e legitmização. Não é uma invenção do século XX, mas ficou popular nele. O termo não reflete a realidade, mas ajudou a criá-la na medida que separava a ciência dos outros conhecimentos.

O texto é uma história do termo e suas implicações. Vale ser lido inteiro.


27. Que há uma demarcação clara entre ciência e pseudociência. MICHAEL D. GORDIN.

Faz uma interessante relato da ascensão e queda de Popper e seu papel na demarcação. Assim como o de cima, vale a pena ser lido por inteiro.

Then why do we per sis tently encounter this myth? The answer has less to do with philosophy or with science than with the law. Starting in the 1960s, a series of state governments in the United States passed statutes mandating “equal time” in biology courses for “evolution science” (neo- Darwinian natural selection) and “creation science” (an updated fl ood geology offering a scientifi c account that accorded closely with the creation story described in Genesis). Opponents countered that these laws introduced religion into the public schools, violating the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. As one case from Arkansas reached the federal courts, the testimony of many scientists as well as phi los o phers and historians of science was solicited to determine the validity of the defense that creation science was a legitimate scientifi c hypothesis and therefore not “religion.” Phi los o pher of science Michael Ruse (b. 1940) testifi ed about several different demarcation criteria that would exclude scientifi c creationism, but one in par tic u lar impressed Judge William Overton (1939–1987) in his January 5, 1982, decision in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education. In his fi ve- point list of what makes a doctrine a “science,” the fi nal one reads: “(5) It is falsifi able (Ruse and other science witnesses).”11 Thus, Ruse’s brief sketch of Popper came to serve as a legal metric to determine whether something is scientifi c. [Following critics to Popper, he was not enough to combat Inteligent design] Instead of endorsing Popper, legal pre ce dent now enshrines peer- reviewed publications in mainstream journals as the gold standard for demarcation.12 We have moved from epistemology to sociology. 224-5

Os movimentos combatidos sempre perseguem o novo critério de ciência. 

Yet demarcation remains essential for the enormously high po liti cal stakes associated with climate- change denial and other antiregulatory fringe doctrines.14 As sociologist Thomas Gieryn (b. 1950) has noted, although demarcation is a frustrating task for phi los o phers, for scientists it is an everyday matter: not to read this article, to ignore that email, to dismiss a website. They demarcate through socially trained judgment.15 They do not need the myth; it’s for the rest of us, who graduate from high school science classes to the ranks of registered voters.

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