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

Dangerous Minds? The Science of Children's Lies in Fin-de-Siecle France
In October 1882, a curious debate broke out at the Société Médico-Psychologique, France's premier
psychiatric association. Introducing the case of the notorious "child K," a five-year-old boy whose
attempts to murder his one-year-old brother had made national headlines, society president Eugène
Dally warned his audience not to let the apparent gravity of the boy's condition blind them to a more
fundamental scientific truth: all children, he declared, were "essentially liars, eager to deceive" childhood
was "the age of lying." Effectively challenging widely accepted and supposedly enlightened
visions of childhood as a period of innocence and sincerity, Dally's indictment initiated a lengthy, wideranging,
and virtually unexplored debate which offers privileged insight into the cultural and scientific
landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As practitioners of the emerging human
sciences, from criminology to child psychiatry, experimental psychology to sociology, submitted
children's mendacity to rigorous analysis, they raised fundamental questions, not only about the nature
of scientific evidence and expertise, but also about the power of that expertise to ensure the future of a
modern, republican polity. By focusing on the efforts of a wide variety of specialists to understand a
particularly vexing scientific problem, this paper directly confronts the intertwined origins of the modern
human sciences and their relationship to some of the most pressing political and social issues of their
era.
November, Joseph
E-mail Address: november@princeton.edu
The Organism as Tape: Information Theory, Cybernetics, and the One-Dimensional Model of the
Gene
In Who Wrote the Book of Life, Lily Kay touched on a remarkable transformation: "[t]he organism
would be compressed into a sequence, its functions collapsed into a message inscribed in a one-dimensional
DNA tape." I will follow the organism, specifically the gene, as it was reduced to the one-dimensional
structure it has become today, and I will examine how biologists used information theory and
cybernetics to make sense of their new tape model as they applied it to their own three-dimensional
world. I hope that by viewing biologists' use of information theory and cybernetics in the broader
context of a shift to a one-dimensional model of the gene, we will obtain a better understanding of the
nature of the information and regulation metaphors that currently permeate molecular biology. Specifically,
I will discuss: 1.) the emergence of the one-dimensional model of the gene and Henry Quastler's
use of information theory in the early 1950s to try to make sense of the new model 2.) the use of information
theory and cybernetics by biological theorists, namely Howard H. Pattee in 1963 and C.H.
Waddington in 1967-1972, who tried to apply the one-dimensional model of the gene to the threedimensional
world 3.) the rise of anti-reductionism - or neo-vitalism - when information theory and
cybernetics failed to provide biologists with a feasible means of bridging the gap between their onedimensional
model of the gene and the complexity of three-dimensional life.
Ochs, Kathleen
E-mail Address: kochs@mines.edu
The Hula and the War Bonnet: Science or Knowledge about Nature in Traditional Oral Societies
This paper looks at how traditional, oral societies learn, store, and transmit knowledge about nature. I
became interested during an NEH seminar in Hawaii. At a traditional hula ceremony, the first dance
taught how to plant and irrigate taro, with the men showing the motions while the chanter elaborated the
details. I was struck, among other things, by the fun these people had transmitting technological information
compared to the suffering of modern students. Another time, a traditional religious practitioner
explained a geological formation consisting of three low hills it existed because the gods had compas-