Arthur C. Clarke dramatizes this in his Voice Across the Sea: The Story of Deep Sea Cable-laying, 1858–1958 (Muller, 1958). See also John Griesemer, Signal & Noise: A Novel (Picador, 2004).
There have also been several fictional and historical accounts of the Great Eastern, the ship that unspooled the cable. See Griesemer’s Signal and Noise as well as Howard Rodman’s The Great Eastern (Melville House, 2019).
Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Riskin, Restless Clock, 70–71.
T. H. Huxley, “Biogenesis and Abiogenesis,” 1870 →.
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Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (University of Washington Press, 2015).
Haeckel spent several years of his life documenting the thousands of species of microorganisms sent to him by the Challenger Expedition. On this, see the short film Proteus.
For a critique of this “dangerous” mixing of philosophy and biology, see the preface to Peter Brian Medawar and Jean S. Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology (Harvard University Press, 1983). For a critique of Huxley being too old fashioned (and mechanistic), see Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature (Vintage, 2011). For a closer analysis of Huxley’s error and what it came to represent in evolutionary science, see Donald J. McGraw, “Bye-Bye Bathybius: The Rise and Fall of a Marine Myth,” Bios 45, no. 4 (1974): 164–71.
There are of course many ways a model can be wrong, and an incorrect or incomplete model can, and has, led to significant gains in scientific knowledge. For a helpful overview of the importance of false models, see chapter 6 of William C. Wimsatt, Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Harvard University Press, 2007).
Cited in Alison Abbott, “Lost Curve Hits a Nerve,” Nature, no. 464 (2010): 681–82.
Henry Schmidgen has written extensively on Helmholtz’s myograph experiments and has noted how, when working in Paris, Helmholtz referred to the curve made by the needle as “le temps perdu’’ (an utterance of “lost time” some hundred years before Proust). Such treatments of animals and especially model organisms has a long and ugly history. Both Claude Bernard and his teacher François Magendie describe some of the most sickening reports of vivisection I have encountered. In terms of frogs, the happiest report I have found is the work of the great Lancelot Hogben who devised a quick pregnancy test for women by injecting their urine into the frog species called Xenopus. The frogs would then lay eggs within hours, thereby confirming a woman’s pregnancy. This did not harm the frog and replaced dissections of injected rabbits and mice which were previously used to identify pregnancies in women. Huxley’s own “Has a Frog a Soul?” is steeped in details of frog torture and dissection over the ages.
Too often the figure of the engineer is caricatured as the pragmatist against the theoretician. Mark Wilson’s work on the philosophy of engineering is very helpful in this regard as he demonstrates how engineers utilize theoretical concepts but treat them as pliable in a way that too often philosophers of science do not. See, for instance, Physics Avoidance (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Cited in Silvanus Phillips Thompson, The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
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Peter Bowler and Stephen Jay Gould have documented the decades following Darwin and the various forms of progressive or directed evolution. See Bowler’s The Eclipse of Darwinism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and Stephen Jay Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Belknap Press, 1977).
See chapter 1 of Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Ernst Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 29–30.
Here I am following Henning Schmidgen’s text “Inside the Black Box: Simondon’s Politics of Technology,” SubStance 41, no. 3 (2012): 23–24.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey (University of California Press, 43).
Henri Bergson’s portrait of the intuitive mind as caught between thought and perception seems structurally not far off from Helmholtz’s perch between rationalism and empiricism (although their motivations for such an island are opposed). In Matter and Memory, Bergson attempted to avoid idealism and materialism, even describing the conscious mind as a telegraph operator suspended between waiting for a message and sending one. For Bergson the brain is a bureaucratically boring central office, while for Helmholtz it is the ship that navigates the unknown. Bergson’s metaphor has been criticized, notably by Catherine Malabou, as there is no central power anymore, nor is the mind best understood as a computer when one takes into account the plastic nature of synaptic activity. Incidentally, Bergson gave the Huxley lecture “Life and Consciousness” in 1911.
Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 97.
In this sense Kapp is quite Kantian in maintaining a difference between a constitutive and a regulative role regarding purposiveness in human organisms. But while the split for Kant was at least in part to engender a normative dimension regarding the treatment of living things as non-mechanical, for Kapp it is about using the productions of thought to strengthen the case for a human or non-divine teleological program.
Riskin, Restless Clock, 370–74.
Huxley, “Geological Reform,” 1869 →.
The term “modern synthesis” was coined by the evolutionary biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley, grandson of T. H. Huxley as well as brother of the writer Aldous Huxley.
Riskin quotes Ernst Schrödinger as an exception to the strict mechanist trend and cites a passage about the chaos of clockwork that is very much in line with Huxley’s reasoning.
I am of course speaking of the eugenics programs which were overwhelming the product of the biometricians and biostatisticians of the early twentieth century such as Ronald Fisher, Walter Weldon, and Karl Pearson.