Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

appropriate ways to treat people. Fueled by a desire to make psychology appear more professional and by a preference to self-regulate,
members of the American Psychological Association (APA) created the profession’s first code of ethics through the early 1950s, with
two distinctive features: a lack of concern with the ethical treatment of human subjects, and a decision to create the code inductively,
building the moral guide around a survey of member psychologists. By the mid-1960s, however, popular backlash and congressional
hearings directed at the discipline spurred a revision of the professional code, again using the inductive model, this time specifically
aimed at delimiting the proper treatment of research subjects. Receiving thousands of survey responses attesting to the questionable
treatment of human subjects by their colleagues, leaders of the APA wrote a narrow and detailed new version of the code. Yet this new
version would be reworked countless times over three years because of the outcry, particularly from experimental social psychologists,
claiming that research would be impossible under such ethical restrictions. Eventually, some research practices, such as debriefing, were
deemed virtuous by the APA, rendering morally acceptable some practices, such as deception, that were fraught and yet necessary for
experimental research.
David Steffes, University of Oklahoma (David.M.Steffes-1@ou.edu)
Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom II
Causal Connections, Nature’s Game and Organismal Perspective:
The Role of Chance in Sewall Wright’s “Balanced” Evolutionary Theory
The extraordinary career of American geneticist Sewall Wright unites three prominent areas in the history and philosophy of science:
statistics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of biology. Unfortunately, discipline-bounded scholarly discussions have treated these
facets of Wright’s science as if they were independent of one another. In this paper I seek to link these aspects of Wright’s work and
so to provide a more complete picture of his science. I will do so by focusing on one of modern science’s hallmark concepts: chance.
A persistent preoccupation with causal interrelationships pervaded Wright’s multifarious accomplishments, such as path analysis in statistics,
the “shifting-balance” theory in evolutionary biology, and organicism in philosophy. In his view, the prerequisite for an understanding
causal systems (whether in statistics, biology, or philosophy) was an appreciation for nature’s game. For Wright, the statistical
study of causal links yielded a bold indeterminism not easily appropriated within the biology of his time. Consequently, Wright’s perspective
on life’s processes diverged from that of his “neo-Darwinian” peers, most notably from R.A. Fisher’s analysis of causal interrelations.
Ironically, Wright’s views—the importance of chance mechanisms at sublevels, the hierarchical order of nature, and the central
role of equilibrium conditions in driving change—more closely resembled today’s perspective on life than did those of the vanguard
of the evolutionary synthesis.
Mary Terrall, University of Califorina, Los Angeles (terrall@history.ucla.edu)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom VI
Réaumur’s Networks of Knowledge and Practice
By virtue of his enmity with Buffon, Réaumur has been largely shunted aside in the historiography of the 18th-century life sciences, but
his prolific work arguably set the standard for observational natural history. It deserves careful examination for what it can tell us about
the practice of natural history, and for unexpected connections between mundane work with e.g. chicken breeding and the most hotly
contested theoretical questions of the day. Réaumur made a practice of avoiding grand theorizing or speculation while coordinating a
global network of correspondents who fed his prolific appetite for curious phenomena and previously unknown organisms. His books
on insects and chickens sparked enormous interest in observation, collecting and experiment among his readers, on a spectrum that
included provincial intendants, colonial physicians, noblewomen with time on their hands, clerics, and small landowners. They also
inspired extensive research programs in young people who subsequently made natural history their own work, men such as Bonnet,
Trembley, Lyonet, Bazin and Lelarge de Lignac. This paper looks at Réaumur’s work on breeding as an arena where development of
technology and instrumentation (incubators, thermometers, hygrometers), rational improvement (increasing poultry production), theories
of generation, management of correspondence networks and production of books all contributed to a form of natural history that
incorporated elements of genteel country life, urban academic science and artisanal work. Manuscript material on Réaumur’s breeding
experiments will be discussed in the light of this nexus of problems.
Charles Thorpe, University College London (thorpe73@yahoo.co.uk)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom II
Scientific Freedom, Cold War Liberalism, and the Oppenheimer Case
This paper examines the cultural impact of the 1954 Oppenheimer loyalty-security hearing in relation to Cold War liberalism. It argues
that the powerful significance of the case for American intellectuals was due to the central place which the notion of scientific freedom
had assumed in the conceptualization of liberal political freedom during the Cold War. The notion of scientific freedom had become
an important element in American intellectuals’ framing of the ideological conflict between the capitalist democracies and communism.
At the same time, an idealization of science went hand in hand with liberal intellectuals’ increasing distrust of popular democracy and
mass movements in the wake of World War Two and in response to the rise of McCarthyism. For Cold War liberals, science was the
key to defending liberal democratic culture against pressures from expansive communism abroad and irrational populism domestically.
Against this background, the Oppenheimer case represented not just an institutional crisis in the relationship between the scientific community
and the state, but was widely understood as a cultural crisis which went to the core of the relationship between intellectuals and