Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

economics. Jevons' experiments on clouds will serve as a kind of format from which it is evident that his
general approach to science did not involve a split between pure theory and statistics, but was rather
motivated by a unified framework in which analogical reasoning played a dominant role.
Madison, Mark
E-mail Address: mark_madison@fws.gov
From Essential to Endangered: The Species Question in Conservation Biology
The case of red wolf reintroduction questions the popular and scientific understanding of the term
"species" in the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The red wolf (Canis rufus) once ranged widely over the
southeastern United States yet by the 1970s it was considered America's most endangered mammalian
species. In the wake of the 1973 Endangered Species Act the Red Wolf Recovery Program was implemented.
However, successful reintroduction was thwarted by new more rigorous definitions of species.
Interbreeding with coyotes led to difficulties in identifying "pure" red wolves and DNA analysis began
to call into question the legitimacy of the entire species. Failing to meet the guidelines for a biological
or a phylogenetic species, the red wolf found itself outside clear protection of the Act. Biological essentialism
(or speciesism) seems to have rendered the ESA impossible to enforce. Ironically the stresses
that may have led the red wolf to adapt a hybrid survival strategy are the same environmental stresses
that created the ESA in the first place.
Maerker, Anna
E-mail Address: akm23@cornell.edu
Experiments on Nature and Society: The tension between universality and locality in Benjamin
Thompson's late eighteenth-century reform projects
In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the absolutist ruler of Bavaria, Elector Karl Theodor,
employed the American-born military expert and natural philosopher Benjamin Thompson (Count
Rumford) to design and carry out a number of military and social reforms. During his time as Karl
Theodor's aide-de-camp, Thompson continued to conduct experiments on topics including nutrition and
the propagation of heat, part of an overall program of rationalizing social order by basing it on universal
laws of (human and physical) nature. Thompson envisioned his rationalizations as universally applicable:
he attempted to transfer them to different national contexts by means of standardized practices
and procedures, tables, instructions, and institutions. I situate this study of Thompson's Bavarian reforms
within a recent development in the historiography of the sciences of the Enlightenment which
critically reassesses both the attempts by which eighteenth-century scientists worked to achieve universality,
and the tendency in scholarship to take the unity of "Enlightened science" as a given. By looking
at scientific practice, and especially at the production of inscriptions and representations, Science Technology
Studies analyzes how scientists construct universality. My aim is to take those analytical tools
developed in Sto investigate the means Thompson employed to base his reform projects on universal
laws and to support his universalizing goal. In particular, I ask how his project, in confrontation with
political practice, was reshaped in the tension between the universal and the local.
Marcum,James
E-mail Address: marcum@westmont.edu
Reconstructing Opposition in Science: The DNA Provirus Hypothesis, the Central Dogma of
Molecular Biology, and the Origins of Retroviology
Reconstructing opposition to novel ideas in science is often problematic, especially when the sources
for the reconstruction are accounts written by scientists involved in the conflict. Reconstructing opposition
to the DNA provirus hypothesis exemplifies several of these problems. In 1964 the Wisconsin