Pasteur & Tyndall on Spontaneous Generation: The Role of Biology Textbooks in Creating an Experimentum crucis
by James Strick

I saw Strick speak earlier this evening on the debate in early molecular biology over the structure and function of flagella in single-cell organisms (the paradigm case of which is the dread salmonella enteritidis.) His discussion of the early debates over what was being seen (artifact of equipment vs. actual phenomenon) in early microscopic films has single-handedly reignited my smoldering passion for the history of science. I've had trouble finding any net material by Strick on that particular subject, but this article handily lassoes many absolutely crucial issues.

If this entry seems especially exuberant, it's because I, through a chance accident, was able to buy Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life today for a mere $6. I'm listening to it, with no small amount of sheer fucking glee, as we speak! I almost believe in God.

Who cannot have noticed in late years that some information media, by their condensed nature, feel pressured to distill complex debates into brief, sexy sound bites? One need only follow the television recap or morning-after coverage of a modern Presidential campaign debate to see this phenomenon in sharp relief. My argument here is that similar pressures are felt by those who write general biology textbooks.

Textbook writers face the need to: (a) present the history of as complex a subject as spontaneous generation controversies; as well as (b) carry out their function to inculcate stories of exemplary scientific practice into a young generation of potential future initiates. I suggest that these pressures were at work in the creation of the "textbook account" of spontan-eous generation controversies from about 1870 onward. This especially favored the selection of Louis Pasteur's swan-necked flasks and John Tyndall's dust-free chamber as icons, and the adoption of renderings of each of those experiments as an experimentum crucis. The conversion into iconic status was a long, slow process, however, that was not complete in English-language texts until the 1950s and 60s.

posted by neel master at 1:20 AM

Bill Hicks, the black-humored articulator of doubt
by Jack Boulware

The terrible headline and bad article are redeemed by the sheer excellence of the subject.

"So who the hell is Hicks?

He walks onstage wearing all black, thanks the crowd, and says it's really great to be here, wherever he is. Pulling out a cigarette, he asks a guy in the front row how much he smokes. A pack and a half a day, the man answers. Hicks snorts. "You little puss -- I go through two lighters a day." He lights his cigarette, the flame adjusted to a ridiculous height, flaring like a blowtorch, and delivers a message for all the uptight, whining, prissy little nonsmokers: "Nonsmokers die ... every day." He pauses and exhales up to the ceiling. "Sleep tight."

posted by neel master at 10:49 PM

"Ethnic and Minority" Studies
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

A wonderful bit of nineteenth-century student doggerel about the famous Victorian classical scholar Benjamin Jowett nicely sums up the claims of the monoculturalism:

Here I stand, my name is Jowett.
If there's knowledge, then I know it.
I am master of this college:
What I know not, is not knowledge.
(McFarland 6)

Unfortunately, as history has taught us, an Anglo-American regional culture has too often masked itself as universal, passing itself off as our "common culture" and depicting different cultural traditions as "tribal" or "parochial." On a more global scale are the familiar claims for a great and integral "Western tradition" containing the seeds, fruit, and flowers of the very best that has been thought or uttered in human history. Conventionally opposed to monoculturalism is multiculturalism, which frequently finds its academic site in so-called ethnic and minority studies. The multiculturalism claims that only when we are free to explore the complexities of our hyphenated American culture can we discover what a genuinely common American culture might look like.

Lately, multiculturalism has been on the defensive. We have been told that it threatens to fragment American culture into a warren of ethnic enclaves, each separate and inviolate; that it menaces the Western tradition of literature and the other arts; and that it aims to politicize the school curriculum, replacing honest historical scholarship with a "feel good" syllabus designed solely to bolster the self-esteem of minorities. The alarm has been sounded, and many scholars and educators--liberals as well as conservatives--have responded to it. After all, if multiculturalism is just a pretty name for ethnic chauvinism, who needs it? Yet common sense reminds us that we are all ethnics, and the challenge of transcending ethnic chauvinism is one we all face.

posted by neel master at 6:22 PM

afterword to Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America
by Cathy N. Davidson

Friedrich von Schiller, one of the most eminent historians of the late eighteenth century, was carried into the lecture hall in Jena upon the shoulders of enthusiastic admirers who deposited him at the podium where he would answer, once and for all, a question he had raised before: "What Is Universal History and Why Do We Study It?" Universal History, Schiller explained, discovered in the past a vast network of causal relationships that, with relentless logic, produced the present. It was the task of the Universal Historian to chart out those causalities in order that the reader might see the coherent whole that was modern Europe, might understand how previous events had produced a stable Continental society that enjoyed an enduring peace and that promised (history portended as much) to last forever. Schiller's speech on that May day in 1789 was constantly interrupted by cheers from the crowd who could not foresee, any more than the Universal Historian, that in less than two months another crowd would storm the Bastille and launch Europe into its most revolutionary epoch. '

This anecdote is also an admonition, for any attempt to make a Universal History assumes an interpretation of the present and then discovers or even creates a past that validates that interpretation. Perhaps even more dangerously, it also projects the past-present into the future, as if the status quo, as defined by the historian, were expressly designed for eternity. A revolution looks different, too, depending on which side of the ocean or Bastille one views it from, all of which would seem to be an obvious enough assertion. Yet it is unsettling in that the alternative to Schiller's Universal History or to the positivism of nineteenth-century history seems to be cultural relativism, a valueless history with its own attendant political and theoretical nightmares.

posted by neel master at 6:19 PM