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

Gould's 22 books, 300 Natural History essays, 101 book reviews, and 479 scientific papers, in terms of
their subject (Evolutionary Theory, History of Science/Science Studies, Natural History, Paleontology/
Geology, Social Science/Commentary), and themata (Theory-Data, Time's Arrow-Time's Cycle,
Adaptationism-Nonadaptationism, Punctuationism-Gradualism, Contingency-Necessity). Special emphasis
will be placed on the interaction between the subjects and themata in Gould's work, how Gould
has used the history of science to reinforce his evolutionary theory (and vice versa), and how his unique
philosophy of science has influenced both his evolutionary theory and his history of science. That
philosophy can best be summed up through what Shermer calls Darwin's Dictum (from an 1861 letter
written by Darwin): "All observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service."
Gould has followed Darwin's Dictum throughout his career and his extensive writings on the history of
science.
Silva, Cibelle
E-mail Address: cibelle@ifi.unicamp.br
The struggle between quaternions and vectors: the historical origin of some misunderstandings in
modern algebra
Vectors and quaternions are quite different mathematical quantities because they have different
symmetry properties. However, Gibbs and Heaviside created their vector system starting from the
quaternion system invented by Hamilton. They identified a pure quaternion as a vector and introduced
some changes in the product of two vectors defined by Hamilton without realizing that the scalar product
and vector product cannot be interpreted as the scalar part and vector part of the quaternion product.
Towards the end of the 19th century some authors perceived that there was an incompatibility between
vector and quaternion formalisms, but the central problem was not altogether clear. This paper will show
that the main difficulty arose from Hamilton's contradictory use of i, j, k both as versors and as vectors.
Silverman, Chloe
E-mail Address: chloes@sas.upenn.edu
From Nervous Weakness to "Future Shock": the Cultural History of Stress, 1890-1970
This paper discusses the history of discourses of systemic stress and adaptation in American popular
culture. Speculations on the somatic effects of social change have occupied popular and scientific
discourse, as anxieties about the present were expressed in terms of hopes for the future predicated on
the capacity for conscious human adaptation to social and environmental change. Theories of adaptive
failure, figured as failures of communication between mind and body as well as species adaptation,
influenced research in physiology, but have a related history in popular discourse, especially among
public intellectuals of the American middle and upper classes. These theories have been altered in the
service of different ideologies. In the 1890s George Beard's "nervous weakness" reflected anxieties
about industrialization and urban life, while Walter Cannon's later popular work on homeostasis and
psychosomatic medicine offered a Progressive vision of a just society organized on the model of a selfregulating
organism. Alvin Toffler's "future shock," (1970) presented an organism in need of active
intervention in the process of self-maintenance. Responsibility for equilibrium had increasingly turned
from the society to the individual as American culture embraced a "therapeutic idealism" (Lears, 1994).
This paper considers how public representations of psychosomatic responses to stress reflected and
influenced changing patterns of economic production and the organization of public and private life.
The public circulation of discourses about adaptive responses represents more than the diffusion of
progressive scientific knowledge. As treatments for stress become increasingly commercialized and
consumer-oriented, theories played a material role in the construction of markets, consumers and desires.