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Written by Staff Writer
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May 16, 2007 at 11:59 AM |
During the 19th century, social organisation was increasingly conceived in biopolitical terms: the social problems of urban, industrial society should be addressed by managing a population of bodies, thus expanding the domain of medical expertise and enhancing the political authority of the medical profession.
In Britain, the Vaccination Acts greatly strengthened the powers of the medical profession to compel the adoption of medical treatments. Significantly, in the late 19th century, critics of the attempts to alter such legislation argued that it would lead to the ‘de-Jenner-ration’ of the nation .These critics were playing on the fears of national degeneration.
From the 1870s onward, on the basis of an increasingly darwinian understanding of society, the middle class was fearful that the physically and morally degenerate working classes were reproducing faster than themselves, the better part of society: social degeneration. In other words, social difference was explained in biological terms, and now the biological differences between the normal and the pathological or deviant were increasingly assumed to be heritable. It is in this context that Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s nephew, coined the word eugenics to capture the importance of good breeding to the welfare of the nation.
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Last Updated ( May 16, 2007 at 04:56 PM )
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Written by Staff Writer
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May 10, 2007 at 05:44 PM |
From both the origin of species, and the early notebooks of Charles Darwin, it can be seen that the metaphor of the branching tree of evolution was integral not only in assisting in the explanation of the theory of transmutation of species', but also in the organisation of Darwin's ideas long before the publication of the origin. When Darwin suggested that “organised beings represent a tree, irregularly branched, some branches far more branched” in the B notebook in 1837, where we first hear of his ideas concerning the branching tree, the concept of systematic tree diagrams was relatively new. One might argue that it was in the rapidly maturing field of linguistics, or philology, that it was developed and used first.
August Schleicher, a major contributor to the field, was the first to emphasise the metaphor of family trees of languages, and to include actual tree diagrams in his work. Although linguistic thinking had been traditionally centered in Germany, this new, comparative philology postulated by Schleicher began to find its way into England by the early 1830s, and became strong point of focus for many British intellectuals. Probably the most significant of these was Hensleigh Wedgwood, Darwin's cousin and brother-in-law.
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Last Updated ( May 16, 2007 at 07:30 PM )
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Written by Staff Writer
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May 06, 2007 at 03:08 PM |
Phrenology was a medical school of thought concerning the brain, and how it might be understood as a physical representation of the human mind. It was most prominent in Edinburgh in the early 19th century, because Edinburgh was politically sympathetic to Whig ideas, and phrenology seemed to support those ideas.
There are 4 fundamental tenets of phrenology - 1; The mind is the brain, 2; The brain is a collection of organs, each representing an attribute of the mind, 3; The size of each organ in the brain represented the dominance of the corresponding attribute in the whole makeup of the personality and 4; The size of each organ, and thus the dominance of each attribute, is represented in the shape of the skull.
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Last Updated ( May 06, 2007 at 03:24 PM )
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Written by Staff Writer
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May 05, 2007 at 03:39 AM |
The advent of genetics introduced the concept of error within nature, with regard to the perceived proper functioning of the human body. Prior to genetic science, disease had carried moral connotations, and was seen in a moral light. The sick had deserved their condition due to inferior moral fibre, and disease was due to mistake (which implies judgement, a human quality) as opposed to nature’s error, non-human and therefore blameless.
When genetic science uncovered the link between “faulty” genes and certain diseases, it meant that an individual could become ill, through genetic error, no matter what his moral attributes were. Disease could no longer be viewed as a consequence of moral failure, because judgement never entered the equation in the first place. In this way, genetics dismantled the link between human thought/actions and nature.
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Last Updated ( May 05, 2007 at 03:53 AM )
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Written by Staff Writer
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May 03, 2007 at 04:06 AM |
In 1936 an American (Alonzo Church) and a Briton (Alan M. Turing) published independently (as is often the coincidence in science) the basics of a new branch in Mathematics (and logic): computability or recursive functions (later to be developed into Automata Theory).
The authors confined themselves to dealing with computations which involved "effective" or "mechanical" methods for finding results (which could also be expressed as solutions (values) to formulae). These methods were so called because they could, in principle, be performed by simple machines (or human-computers or human-calculators, to use Turing's unfortunate phrases). The emphasis was on finiteness: a finite number of instructions, a finite number of symbols in each instruction, a finite number of steps to the result. This is why these methods were usable by humans without the aid of an apparatus (with the exception of pencil and paper as memory aids). Moreover: no insight or ingenuity were allowed to "interfere" or to be part of the solution seeking process.
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Last Updated ( May 05, 2007 at 04:20 AM )
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