Peter J. Bowler

Peter Bowler shows how a nation that benefitted from sound secondary education in the early 20th century, but had not yet been able to widely access the tertiary level, provided a groundswell of interest with which scientists of the time were happy to engage.

From the beginning, Darwin's dangerous idea has been a snake in the garden, denounced from pulpits then and now as incompatible with the central tenets of Christian faith. Recovered here is the less well-known but equally long history of thoughtful engagement and compromise on the part of liberal theologians. Peter J. Bowler doesn't minimize the hostility of many of the faithful toward evolution, but he reveals the existence of a long tradition within the churches that sought to reconcile Christian beliefs with evolution by finding reflections of the divine in scientific explanations for the origin of life. By tracing the historical forerunners of these rival Christian responses, Bowler provides an alternative to accounts that stress only the escalating confrontation. --From publisher's description.

In 1928, paleontologist William Diller Matthew wrote, "The story of life on earth is a splendid drama." This story has captivated generations of biologists, including those working in the years immediately following publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Yet histories of the Darwinian revolution have ignored the main nineteenth-century application of evolution: the attempt to reconstruct the history of life on earth. Now Peter J. Bowler seeks to recover some of this lost history in Life's Splendid Drama, the definitive account of evolutionary morphology and its relationships with paleontology and biogeography. As Bowler tracks major scientific debates over the emergence of the vertebrates, the origins of the main types of living animals, and the rise and extinction of groups such as the dinosaurs, his richly detailed accounts bring to light complex interactions among specialists in various fields of biology. Charting the role of Darwin's ideas and the degree and direction of their influence, Bowler shows how these interactions constituted an interdisciplinary program with a focus on reconstructing the past rather than on mechanisms of evolutionary change. Bowler also examines the socially laden metaphors used by early biologists to describe the history of life, and argues that such usage influenced the development of modern evolutionism by exploiting Darwinian principles outside the context of the genetical theory of natural selection. Much of the rhetoric of "social Darwinism" may thus have been derived not directly from natural selection theory but from the application of Darwinian principles to the rise and fall of different animal groups over time. Bowler's magisterial work will appeal to historians of science and ideas and also to biologists - particularly those working in evolutionary biology, paleontology, and systematicsinterested in the roots of their disciplines, as well as to the many readers fascinated by Darwin and his influence.

Aristotle taught that a human embryo grows from a spiritual essence provided by the father. In the eighteenth century, some thinkers imagined preformed miniatures - the entire human race, one inside the other like Russian dolls, placed by God within the womb of Eve. Even when Gregor Mendel's now-famous experiments with peas revealed the existence of what Mendel called "dominent" and "recessive" traits, other researchers ignored the findings. The history of genetics, argues Peter J. Bowler, is often a history of scientists' religious, political, and social preconceptions. In The Mendelian Revolution Bowler shows how our thinking about heredity and reproduction has changed over centuries. He describes how modern notions of heredity developed, explains what Gregor Mendel's work really meant, and challenges the myth of Mendelism's "rediscovery" in the twentieth century. From the example of genetics, he reveals the flaws in the traditional view of scientific progress as an objective search for empirical truth. And he reveals how understanding Mendelism and heredity can help us understand the increasingly complex role of genetics in the modern world. -- from dust jacket.

Describes the life and work of the renowned nineteenth-century biologist who transformed conventional Western thought with his theory of natural evolution.

Bowler & Morus explore the history of science & its influence on modern thought.

In this wide-ranging survey, Peter J. Bowler explores the phenomemon of futurology: predictions about the future development and impact of science and technology on society and culture in the twentieth century. Utilizing science fiction, popular science literature and the novels of the literary elite, Bowler highlights contested responses to the potential for revolutionary social change brought about by real and imagined scientific innovations. Charting the effect of social and military developments on attitudes toward innovation in Europe and America, Bowler shows how conflict between the enthusiasm of technocrats and the pessimism of their critics was presented to the public in books, magazines and exhibitions, and on the radio and television. A series of case studies reveals the impact of technologies such as radio, aviation, space exploration and genetics, exploring rivalries between innovators and the often unexpected outcome of their efforts to produce mechanisms and machines that could change the world.

A history of science text imagining how evolutionary theory and biology would have been understood if Darwin had never published his "Origin of Species" and other works.--publisher summary.