2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
charlatans, arguing that they misappropriated and attenuated what had been a limited
and useful concept. Even popularizers, however, used the standardized and formal
measurement of efficiency, the percentage, a standard mathematically precise and
yet devoid of content. This measurement, the efficiency percentage, retained the
technical features of the concept. This paper discusses the role of the efficiency
percentage in two different and widely circulating journals of the early twentieth
century: Engineering Magazine and The Independent. It argues that efficiency
experts adopted the technical standardized measurement of efficiency and
developed a precise and parallel social equivalent, which was neither a metaphor
nor simply a rhetorical device. It takes exception to the prevalent emphasis on
efficiency as a cultural artifact more expressive of the progressive social ethos
than of its own scientific and technological heritage.
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Stephen␣ G. Alter University of Notre Dame
Unconscious Selection and Darwin’s Distribution Thinking
This paper explores the nexus between Charles Darwin’s concept of
unconscious selection and what I call his “distribution thinking,” a subset of
Darwin’s population thinking as described by Ernst Mayr. Darwin never fully
articulated the linkage between these two concepts, yet he increasingly
connected them in his correspondence, in revised editions of the Origin of
Species, and in The Descent of Man. He did this, I argue, in an effort to
compensate, by analogy, for his imperfect grasp of the normal distribution of
any given variation existing at a particular point in time. Although Darwin
built his natural selection theory implicitly on the idea of a normal range of
variations, he undercut this theme by suggesting (Origin, ch. 4) that nature
produced “favorable” variations only rarely. He then addressed this perceived
obstacle by suggesting that the presence of a large population (analogous to
the conditions producing unconscious selection) increased the chance of useful
variations appearing at a given time. The real issue, however, was not the
chance of useful variations arising at a given time—what Darwin misleadingly
suggested—but the chance of their being included in a given population sample.
Ideally, a full range of variations always exists, according to the distribution
principle, yet it is not necessarily represented in every actual sample. Darwin
was therefore right to emphasize large populations as a condition favorable to
selection. Yet he was logically inconsistent in saying that the chance of their
appearing could be increased even while affirming their inherent rarity. Darwin
often responded to critics on this and related issues (A. R. Wallace, Fleeming
Jenkin, and Moritz Wagner) with appeals to the unconscious selection analogy,
for this, he felt, provided a gestalt picture of selection working on a large
range of variations, even without the aid of geographic isolation. My paper
builds upon yet differs from histories of these controversies written by Peter
Bowler, Frank Sulloway, and Susan Morris.