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

capacity to rise above self was also essential to an ideal of service valued by Oxbridge elites. Statistics,
to which he turned with much excitement about 1892, exemplified for him these virtues in more than
one sense, since it provided a rigorous, self-denying method which, by its concentration on mass phenomena,
reflected also the insignificance of mere individuals. Pearson even indulged, in his Grammar
of Science, the Machian view that "Das Ich ist unrettbar," there is no stable self. Yet this doctrine of
science, endorsed so warmly, was also for him the core of a tragic view of his own career, as he worried
that his descendants would remember nothing of his labors and his bold, synthetic vision but a formula,
to which the name "Pearson" might be attached. He was, perhaps, snared by a contradiction, but a rich
and fascinating one, of quite general significance, involving the relations of the personal to the objective.
Porter, Theodore
E-mail Address: tporter@history.ucla.edu
Growth of HSTM Faculty within a General History Department
In many large universities, HSTM faculty are placed administratively in the History Department
rather than a specialized Department of HSTM. What does this mean for graduate students seeking
teaching positions? This paper will address the growth of HSTM faculty within the History Department
of one large research university, UCLA, and will discuss the qualifications looked for by faculty when
new hires are contemplated.
Potthast, Thomas
E-mail Address: potthast@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Ethology goes Environmentalist: Konrad Lorenz' Ecological Politics
Ethological issues of the human condition as a driving force for environmental degradation have been
discussed as intensely as the ecological affairs. Environmentally oriented ethologists around Konrad
Lorenz (1903-1989) contributed significantly to the making of a 'scientific' discourse of environmentalism
in Germany. In this paper, environmentalist transformations of Lorenz, among others, will be
sketched from the invention of ethology as an evolutionist discipline up to the 1940s, its career among
ecological doomsday writers in the 1950s to the production of Lorenz as leading writer and activist for
environmental politics mainly since the 1960s. It shall be argued that he and other ethologists made
possible theoretical as well as personal links between classical nature protection and the emerging
ecology-based environmental approaches. This resulted in an unstable coalition of culturally diverse
groups which nevertheless gained social power by building a common 'scientific' anthropological framework
for ecological politics.
Regal,Brian
E-mail Address: bregal@tciedu.com
Racing Out of Central Asia: Henry Fairfield Osborn and the Origins of Man
There has been much work done on the role of race in the study of human evolution, but little on the
role of race in the study of human origins. Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), evolutionary biologist,
paleontologist, and longtime head of the American Museum of Natural History, developed a theory of
human origins which was heavily invested in racialist thinking. His extensive publishing in books,
journals, and newspapers, coupled with his high public profile helped establish his views of race and
human origins in the popular consciousness. Osborn’s theory was that the first humans had appeared in
Central Asia as a group only tangentially related to the primates. These early ‘Dawn Men’ then split to
form the various archaic peoples (Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, and others) and then the different modern
racers. Osborn’s underlying methodology was to create orthogenic family trees which effectively
separated all human groups into distinct species with little or no direct kinship. In this way he could