2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
to define some topics and problems that subvert or cut across disciplinary divides,
and that point to shared aspects of their cultural and intellectual identities. One of
these is the use of quantification, which has been a lively topic within history of
science in recent decades. Another is the practices and discourses of laboratories and
interventions. I would gather both of these issues under a large rubric, the rival forms
of experience in nineteenth-century social science. Should experience be direct or
vicarious, broadly interpretive or reduced to forms and tables, gathered up
individualistically or bureaucratically, ethnographic or statistical? What social
backgrounds and educations provided preparation and standing to study social science
in these various ways? A second large issue is the relation of social to natural science.
It would be a mistake to suppose that this was entirely or even mainly a relationship
of one-way dependence, though it was common already in the late eighteenth century
to represent it this way. The choice of natural-scientific models was of course an
important one: botany, morphology, and mathematical physics had very different
implications for social understanding. To this we should add that in no case were the
implications self-evident. One of the main tasks of philosophy of science throughout
this period was to clarify that relationship. Finally, I will emphasize that social science
represented not only an ideal of knowledge, but also of management and reform.
That has remained true into the more contemporary period, but is unmistakable for
the earlier one. Again, this points us not to a monolithic explanation, but to a set of
alternatives. Among the most important was the choice between social science as a
contributor to a broader public discussion—social science in the public sphere—
and a more recondite social science aimed mainly at expert bureaucracies. The politics,
moreover, was very much contested, in relation to class, gender, political affiliations,
and geographic situations.
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Patricia␣ M. Princehouse Harvard University
Mutant Phoenix: Macroevolution from Germany to the U.S.
Julian Huxley declared that the Modern Synthesis was Darwinism “risen from
the ashes of the pyre like a mutated phoenix” thanks to those following the
“true-blue Darwinian stream.” Huxley and other Modern Synthesis writers
were actively constructing an ontological essence for Darwinism. This
rhetorical move succeeded in privileging a set of rules that largely excluded
many of the instrumental and methodological traditions in which evolutionists
of the time were invested, even though they were all working within the same
basic paradigm. But the Modern Synthesis program was not the only possible
incarnation of the mythical synthesis animal. Due to the dislocations of the
war, and institutional structure of their science departments, German
paleontologists, most notably Otto Heinrich Schindewolf, constructed an
alternative synthesis, derived in part from Goldschmidt’s field studies and lab
genetics. This was much more synthetic and holistic than the Anglo-American
Modern Synthesis, significantly incorporating data and approaches from