Copernicus to the Present
Details: Your essay should be five pages in length. The questions below are only suggestions for the kinds of topics you might discuss in your essay. You must choose to answer one of the questions below. These are not research papers. All the sources you need are included in the pdf’s documents that I’ve included along with the textbook.
Please use the textbook, “Making Modern Science” by Iwan Morus and Peter Bowler.
1. How was the interest in classification in the eighteenth century driven by big science and the second age of exploration? How did it inform the work of eighteenth-century biologists and chemists?
2. What was the Chemical Revolution? To what degree is this a story about the development of the modern discipline of Chemistry. How successful was Lavoisier in establishing new analytical chemistry?
3. Describe Georges Cuvier’s new historical view of nature. How did he argue for deep time? Why is he described as a Catastrophist? And how did his deep time become compatible with Anglican natural theology
4. Describe the controversies provoked by pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories. What was at stake, both politically and theologically? In what ways could Robert Chambers Vestiges be understood as the domestication of evolutionary theory paving the way for the publication of Darwin’s Origin in 1859?
5. What can we learn about the nature of scientific discovery from the discovery of the conservation of energy principle? What can it tell us about the relationship between science and technology during the industrial revolution? What can it tell us about the nature of scientific concepts such as energy?
6. Compare Michael Faraday’s experimental practice to other nineteenth-century electricians such as William Sturgeon. How did Faraday fashion himself as the natural philosopher for the Victorian genteel classes? What was different about the way Faraday presented his experiments compared to other electricians like Sturgeon?
7. What is Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. To what extent, if at all, did it depend upon nineteenth-century big science? Given that Darwin was
not an evolutionist when he was voyaging, what is the relationship between the time he spent on HMS Beagle and his arrival at his theory of natural
selection
8. Discuss the relationship between the rise of genetics and eugenics at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth? What, if
anything, can the history of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement teach us about our own historical moment?
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