DARWIN at his ethical worst : the Janet Browne biography

   Admitably GCR did rather hit out at Thomas Huxley in the blog post about Bernie Lightman at Kings College University.

   But no one was more critical of the hierarchical nature of Victoria Science than Thomas Huxley - and rightly so !

   Janet Browne, Darwin's biographer, frequently takes a useful forensic accounting approach to her subject's efforts.
    Pointing out that the cost of even the basic microscope his doting father gave him as a boy, was worth the annual income of *several* farm labourer families.

   Their kids might have better powers of observation that Charles, but were unlikely to make much of them without the ability to own a basic microscope.

   Darwin, not Wallace, got the fame for the Theory of Evolution, she points out, in part because the incredibly high cost of scientific illustrations favoured the rich amateur over the poor amateur -- both scientist and average reader responded better to lavishly illustrated articles in an age starved for visual information of distant or obscure events.

   And because Darwin could afford to use the (private) letter post to further his public aims by spending what was then the equivalent of a large middle class annual income simply on postage and paper.

   GCR asked Browne on a her visit to Dal whether some of the revelations* she uncovered had lowered her estimation of the personal character of Darwin, as it had done for us, and she was less than fulsome in her defense of Darwin it seemed.

   *Such as him stealing/borrowing a document he particularly wanted from the grieving widow of a poorer colleague, because he was sure he could get away with it. 

   Huxley's oblique response to rich amateurs (like his friend Darwin) was to publicly urge that if institutions (and thus ultimately the public) provided the equipment and lab rooms (and salaries), and individual scientists simply provided the brain power to use them, Society could then make use of the best brains around .

   Then the British would no longer be simply 'getting by' scientifically , by being content to just use 'good-to-average brains, but with rich daddies' ....

POPULAR SCIENCE has always included people talking to scientists as well as scientists talking to people ...

   HALIFAX - Professor Bernie Lightman, the editor of the prestigious history of science journal ISIS, told the 150th anniversary lecture celebration of the Nova Scotia Institute of Science (NSIS) at Kings College University on May 7th, that Victorian popularizers of Science encompassed far more types of individuals and organizations than the well known science practicioner-popularizers like Thomas Huxley that most histories of Victoria science popularization begin and conclude with.
  In speaking to the NSIS of non-scientists who dared speak in public about the sacred religion of Science (all bow), Lightman was in a very real sense, speaking to the converted.

   But Lightman's account of the extraordinarily wide variety of Victoria popularizers was a rebuke to popular science as it is regarded today, where most of those allowed to write about science are either prominent scientists or prominent science journalists.
   It is no game for amateurs both editors and readers seem to say.
   Perhaps in the area of popular science books, this is definitely true.
   But citizen amateurs are writing lots about science in blogs and being seriously read - to adapt an old joke about the Internet: 'on the Internet, no one knows you're a blog'.
   Meaning that visually, the blog of the top science journalist at the New York Times, of a Nobel Prize winning scientist, or from Josephine Blow from down the road , all tend to look alike.
   The blogging price of entry starts low and it starts free and neither Nobel Prize-winning academic footnoting nor mega media corporate money will enable any blog to separate themselves from their lessors.
   A future century's Dr Lightman will , beyond a doubt, be looking at blogs rather than lecture halls and Powerpoint magic lantern shows to locate the nexus of popular scientific debate in the 21st century....