Part II primary source seminars

Part II students' guide: Primary sources

Seminars are held in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

Seminars

Other Human Species in Linnaeus, Huxley and Dobzhansky

Staffan Müller-Wille (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

The history of conceptualising human diversity is usually treated through the lens of race and ethnicity, and hence at the level of infraspecific cultural and biological variation. This primary source seminar will choose a different vantage point by looking at key writings from the 18th, 19th and 20th century that endorsed or refuted the idea that more than one human species might exist. Moving from the enlightenment naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who posited the contemporary existence of two more human species ('night humans' and 'tailed humans'), to 'Darwin's Bulldog' Thomas Henry Huxley who placed humans at the top of a continues series of animal-human forms engaged in a struggle for existence, and finally to population geneticists Theodosius Dobzhansky's claim that the evolution of culture and language constituted a break in human evolution that made coexistence of different human species impossible, we are going to explore the scientific concepts and practices that shaped these ideas and contextualise them within respective imaginaries of colonialism, progress and human destiny.

Sources:

• Carl Linnaeus (1760), Anthropomorpha, Diss., Resp. Christian Emmanuel Hoppius (Uppsala, s. n.); English translation will be provided by the lecturer
• Thomas Henry Huxley (1861), 'On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower Animals', Natural History Review series 2, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 67–84
• Theodosius Dobzhansky (1944), 'On Species and Races of Living and Fossil Man', American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 251–265

Théâtre D'opéra Spatial

Tom McClelland (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

In 2022, artist Jason Michael Allen submitted his picture Théâtre D'opéra Spatial to the Colorado State Fair art competition. When it won first prize in the 'digital art' category, it emerged that Allen created the picture using the AI image-generating platform Midjourney. This triggered a global controversy, with some condemning it as the death-knell of authentic art and others hailing it as the culmination of staggering advances in Machine Learning. The Théâtre D'opéra Spatial debacle raises a number of pressing philosophical questions. In particular, when an image like this is created who, or what, is doing the creating? According to an ongoing legal case brought against Midjourney, AI image-generating platforms are nothing but '21st-century collage tools' that plagiarise the intellectual property of hard-working human artists. But according to advocates like Allen, users of these platforms are themselves artists who creatively coax images from the AI by entering the right prompts. A more dramatic possibility is that the AI itself is the real locus of creativity. An AI can only generate images thanks to what it learns from a body of existing images, but is this really so different to a human artist? Delving into a cluster of moral, legal, psychological, aesthetic and metaphysical issues, this seminar seeks to make sense of Théâtre D'opéra Spatial and the technological revolution that it represents.

Sources:

• Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, image by Jason Michael Allen, 2022
• Margaret A. Boden (2007), 'Creativity in a nutshell', Think 5(15), 83–96

The Sextant: Instruments and Documents in the Quest for Longitude

Joshua Nall (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

In this course we will consider what might be learned from the study of historic scientific instruments. Our subject is one of the defining instruments of the 18th century: the sextant, an ingenious device designed to aid navigation at sea. In seminar handling sessions we will use the collections of the Whipple Museum to analyse how sextants were made and used. We will then study a small collection of key texts relating to their invention and early use. This will bring the material culture of science into dialogue with a defining episode from British imperialism: the quest to find longitude at sea.

Sources:

• Sextants from the Whipple Museum's collection

Cause and Effect in Biology

Tim Lewens (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

Billed as a series of reflections from the perspective of a practising biologist on 'the special difficulties presented by the classical concept of causality in biology', Ernst Mayr's paper on 'Cause and Effect in Biology' (1961) contains canonical expressions of conceptual distinctions that have been enthusiastically invoked by generations of scientists. Some evolutionists have begun to argue that these distinctions are now impeding progress within their discipline. Early in his paper Mayr distinguishes four 'equally legitimate causes' – ecological, genetic, intrinsic physiological and extrinsic physiological – that one might cite in response to a question like 'Why did the warbler...start his southward migration?' He then invokes the distinction that, among all those he draws in the paper, has perhaps been most vigorously discussed in recent years: this is the distinction between 'proximate' and 'ultimate' causes. It is this proximate/ultimate distinction that some have argued now needs to be abandoned, or at least fundamentally rethought. But Mayr moves on to address yet more themes: the question of how to handle purposiveness and goal-directedness in biology, the limits of prediction in biology, and the sources of indeterminism in biology. The seminars associated with this source will give context for Mayr's paper, explain the key argumentative moves within it, and assess its recent reception, with particular focus on the proximate/ultimate distinction and its discontents.

Source:

• Ernst Mayr (1961), 'Cause and Effect in Biology', Science 134: 1501–1506

The Discovery of Time Travel

Matt Farr (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

In the late 1940s, the logician and philosopher Kurt Gödel was approached to write about the philosophical significance of Einstein's contributions to physics for the volume Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, in honour of Einstein's 70th birthday. Taking this rather seriously, Gödel wanted to write something novel about the theories of relativity, and ultimately provided the first published proof of General Relativity Theory's (GR) prediction of the possibility of backwards time travel. Gödel's models of GR were quite esoteric, but in his article for the Einstein volume he argued that the possibility of time travel revealed new and deep insights into the nature of time. Since Gödel's article, the physical possibility of time travel has raised foundational questions about our understanding of time and causality, such as the relationship between logical and physical possibility, the openness of the future, and the existence of the past. This seminar will survey these philosophical questions in light of Gödel's discovery.

Source:

• Kurt Gödel (1949), 'A remark on the relationship between relativity theory and idealistic philosophy' in P. Schilpp (ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, pp. 555–562 (La Salle, IL: Open Court)

Darkness in El Dorado

Rosanna Dent (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

In the year 2000, Patrick Tierney's journalistic exposé Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon sparked one of the most intense controversies in the history of anthropology. The book accused geneticists and anthropologists of serious ethical violations during research among Yanomami (Indigenous) communities along the border of Venezuela and Brazil. Its publication prompted international debate and institutional inquiries. While many of Tierney's claims were subsequently challenged and discredited highlighting serious failings in his research methods, other concerns raised by the book remained unresolved and continue to prompt critical reflection. In the aftermath of the publication, Brazilian anthropologists protested that their longstanding concerns about research Tierney cited had been ignored by the US academy. Yanomami discovered that blood samples of their loved ones had been stored without their knowledge and consent, prompting a campaign for repatriation. Meanwhile, academic debates intensified around sociobiology and explanations of human behaviour that appealed to innate and evolutionary factors. Using Tierney's book and the surrounding controversy, we will examine issues of representation, biomedical and anthropological ethics, Indigenous rights under conditions of scientific colonialism, evidence and public trust in science, and the challenging, often ambiguous realities of conducting scientific fieldwork.

Source:

• Patrick Tierney (2000), Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York: W.W. Norton & Company)

Resources for the primary source seminars on Moodle