Browsing by Subject "Science history"

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) was founded on the conviction that in order to make computers more advanced, it was necessary to build them to be more human. Adopting the human form as the blueprint for computer systems allowed AI researchers to imagine and construct computer systems capable of feats otherwise unimaginable for machines. As the institutions and professional boundaries of the field have evolved over the past 70 years, they have at times obscured the figure of the human at the heart of AI work. However, in moments of heightened optimism, when researchers permit themselves to speculate on the fantastic futures AI technologies will one day enable, it is inevitably to this figure that the field returns, forever striving to resolve that originary question of just what is the nature of this human intelligence the field has so long pursued?

In this dissertation, I trace the emergence of the figure of the human at the center of AI work. I argue that the human at the center of the imaginary of AI is rooted in a deeper impulse---that of envisioning not machines that think, but machines that speak. It is language that most fundamentally defines the original ambition of AI work and the inability to conceptualize language apart from the human that draws the field inevitably back to this figure. With language properly at the center of its project, AI becomes a study not of the physical world but of the narrative universe, not of the biological human being but of literary character, not of machinic intelligence but of machinic personhood.

Drawing on the history of AI's entanglements with language, I argue for a reconceptualization of the project of AI around a vision of language not as an encoding of solitary thought but as a collection of shifting social practices that allow human and non-human intelligences to navigate their shared worlds despite their irreducibly alien cognitive realities. Such a reorientation, I contend, makes room for a broader vision of AI work that joins critical and technical practices in the shared project of grappling with the question of what it means to be human.

Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America undertakes the first full-length historical overview of the intelligent design movement (ID), a popular and influential antievolutionary ideology prominent at the turn of the 21st century. To date, on one hand, full length treatments of ID have been primarily polemical, consisting of either critical refutations or hagiographic defenses. The scholarly, non-polemical assessments, on the other hand, have folded ID into a larger story of American creationism and in general do not focus on ID on its own. Rather than making ID a small part of a history of creationism or engaging in polemical conflict, this dissertation treats intelligent design it as its own subject.

In contrast to some critics and scholars who have interpreted intelligent design as a sleeker, deceptive, or “stealth” version of creationism, I find that ID is better understood as an evolution of creationist views into a distinct movement and ideology. The differences are especially stark if creationism is understood as young-Earth creationism, from which ID’s worldview was a significant departure. ID was animated less by the Biblical literalism and geological focus of young-Earth creationism and more by theistic metaphysics, the argument from design, and post-WWII intellectual conservatism. Its minimalist theological principles entailed a jettisoning of many of young-Earth creationism’s most important features, and its resultant lowest-common-denominator approach to antievolution (and reluctance to engage in doctrinal disputes) allowed ID to build a broad but shallow political coalition across antievolutionary movements. It was an expansive “big tent” with influence across the spectrum of antievolutionists and conservative political groups, and so creationists of all kinds were welcome (provided they sidelined doctrinal issues). However, ID and its supporters met their Waterloo in 2005, at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in Pennsylvania, where ID’s leaders struggled to clearly articulate a scientific vision for the concept and were dealt a disastrous legal defeat. Though ID did not disappear after the Dover trial, it was considerably reduced. Media interest declined, scientists reveled in their victory, and ID’s intellectual leaders responded by doubling down on existing arguments. ID’s general appeal meant that its leaders’ allegations of scientific bias legitimated a narrative of persecution that found great receptivity with its conservative religious supporters. In spite of its public decline, ID’s influence continued to be felt from the cultural margins, and the movement’s transition from an empirical challenge against Darwin to a radical rejection of scientific expertise is an illuminating development in the popular perception of science in the early 21st century. ID had little impact on the way science was practiced in America, but its influence on culture persists.

In order to chart a historical narrative of the movement’s rise, climax, and fall, I have focused primarily on ID’s intellectual history, for it was a movement concerned about the origins and effects of ideas. Supplemental research into the history of American conservatism and populist creationism is incorporated into a fuller picture of ID’s similarities and differences from the antievolutionary movements that came before it, and the latter half of the dissertation focuses on the legal and cultural context of ID in conjunction with its intellectual history. This project aims for a better understanding of what ID was—and what it was not—so as to make sense of its socio-political consequences, which are still being felt in 21st century America.

My project, Manifesting Vertical Destiny: Geology, Reform, and the Stratified Earth in American Literature, Long Nineteenth Century, excavates the cultural impact of the concept of the layered earth—or strata—in American fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In the nineteenth century, the concept of strata changed the planetary narrative, revising theological interpretations of earth history, showing that the earth was much older than humanity and that humans were one element out of many contributing to this narrative, and a recent one at that. As they encountered deep piles of distinct rock layers in which humanity was absent, scientists realized that in the long story strata told, humanity was a new character rather than a central player. As they reached the general public, these stories elicited lively debates about the place of the human, anticipating many of the debates we are having today surrounding the question of the Anthropocene. Manifesting Vertical Destiny chronicles these debates and their social and political consequences.

In four chapters, I place scientists and literary writers side-by-side, demonstrating how they variously engaged the insights of geology provided by strata. Four thinkers exemplify the response to the newfound diminishment of the human by finding a new role for humans in this transformed cosmos. Literary writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson assert the force of imagination for human preservation, using their literary works to transform the erasing power of telluric force into a power to reclaim the human. Similarly responding to the smallness of the human, the geographer George Perkins Marsh and the early American geologist William Maclure channel the stratigraphic imagination into new accounts of humanity writ large. Together, these figures show how strata inspired new ways of imagining the place of the human in society, while the literary case studies in particular demonstrate how the lessons of strata were working their way, metaphorically, into the collective imagination.

Ultimately, in looking downward, Americans discovered earth layers with no trace of the human. Such a conspicuous absence led these thinkers to pose the same question in the present: what are the limits of the human? In Manifesting Vertical Destiny, I show how the imaginative reconstruction of possible pasts within earth layers inevitably led Americans to reconsider the present and a hoped-for future. Geology and reform are intimately linked because, as Americans learned how to read the layered earth, they realized that each transition from one stratum to another marked a radical transformation in environment: the verticality of stacked-up layers denoted alternative places and times, in the form of ancient environments, within the same geographical point. The absence of the human within these many earth layers led nineteenth-century thinkers to question the impact of humans in their contemporary moment, pushing the boundaries of what was possible, from Hawthorne’s transformed literary vision to Dickinson’s argument for gender equality in the sciences, Maclure’s radical realignment of economic class, and Marsh’s evangelization of environmental ethics. For these scientists and literary writers did not merely dally in earthly depths—they claimed verticality.

This dissertation examines the contributions of apothecary craftsmen and their medicinal retailing practices to emerging cultures of scientific investigation and experimental practice in the Italian port city of Venice between 1565 and 1730. During this important period in Europe’s history, efforts to ground traditional philosophical investigations of nature in a new material culture of empirical and experimental practice elicited significant debate in scholarly communities. Leading the way in advancing the authority of “experience” were Europe’s medical practitioners divided between university-trained physicians and guild-regulated apothecaries and surgeons. In Italy, humanist praise for the practical arts and new techniques of analyzing inherited texts influenced sixteenth-century university physicians to redefine the medical discipline in terms of its practical aims to intervene in nature and achieve useful effects. This led to an important revival in northern Italian universities at Ferrara and Padua of the classical Greek writings on the empirical disciplines of anatomy and pharmacy. In the sixteenth century the university at Padua, under the patronage of the Republic of Venice, was the site of Europe’s first public botanical garden, anatomical theater and clinical demonstrations. The university also hosted important experimental practitioners such as Andreas Vesalius, Galileo Galilei and William Harvey, and remained a leading center of medical investigation attracting an international faculty of students and professors until the eighteenth century. At the same time, the study of Aristotelian natural philosophy in original Greek texts was largely emancipated from the faculty of theology at Padua, nurturing innovative discourses on experimental method by figures such as Giacomo Zabarella and the anatomist Fabricius Aquapendente.

The unique intellectual climate at Padua has thus attracted significant scholarly attention in the history and philosophy of early modern science. However, the university’s important relationships with the thriving world of artisan guilds and their commercial practices in the nearby city of Venice have not received due attention in historical scholarship. To address this issue, this dissertation focuses upon a unique group of guild-trained medical practitioners in Venice – apothecaries – to trace the circulations of materials, skills, and expertise between Padua and the Venetian marketplace. Drawing on the methods of urban history, medical anthropology, literary studies and intellectual history, I conceptualize Venice as an important “contact zone,” or space of dialogue between scholarly and artisanal modes of investigating and representing nature between the latter sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, I focus upon emerging apothecary strategies for retailing nature to public audiences through their medicinal creations, printed books, licensing petitions, and their pharmacy shops. Through these practices, apothecaries not only marketed commercial remedies during a period of growing interest in pharmaceutical matters, but also fashioned their own expertise as learned medical practitioners linking both theory and practice; head and hand; natural philosophy and practiced skill. In 1565 Venice’s apothecaries made their first effort to define their trade as a liberal profession in establishing a College of Apothecaries that lasted until 1804. Already by the turn of the eighteenth century, however, Venice’s apothecaries had adopted the moniker as “Public Professors” and engaged in dialogue with leading professors at Padua for plans to institute a new school of “experimental medical chemistry” with the prior of the apothecary college proposed as its first public demonstrator. Looking to a wide variety of statements on the urban pharmacy in Venice in published medical books, pharmacopeias, trade manuals, literary works, civic rituals and archival licensing and regulatory decrees, I trace the evolution of the public apothecary trade in Venice, paying particular attention to the pharmacy’s early modern materialization as a site of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the artisan workshop and the university world inhabited by scholars.

My readings of these sources lead to three important conclusions regarding the significance of apothecary retailing to the scientific culture of early modern Italy. First, the urban terrain of artisan practice in a merchant republic must be placed alongside the traditionally studied princely courts and universities as a fertile ground for dialogue between artisans and scholars in the study of nature. Second, apothecary investments in processing and retailing nature during this period made significant contributions to the material culture of early modern science in both mediating a growing pharmacopeia of exotic materials imported from around the globe, and in fashioning workshop models for the first university chemical laboratories instituted at Padua in the eighteenth century. And third, apothecary marketing strategies expressing their own medical expertise over nature’s materials articulated a fusion of textual learning and manual skill that offered some of the earliest profiles of the experimental practitioner that was eventually adopted in the public discourse of the experimental New Sciences by the latter seventeenth century.

In my dissertation, I attempt to demonstrate how both Romantic and Victorian literature and science came together to produce the idea of “objectivity.” Whereas prior naturalists had tended to embrace an epistemic ideal of what they called “truth to nature”—which involved manipulating observed phenomena to capture their underlying structure—I argue that philosophers of science soon came to recognise that this tendency distorted, instead of elucidated, the objects which they set out to study. In attempting to uncover the abstract form beneath material facts, scientists often ended up merely projecting their subjective beliefs onto nature itself. To prevent this epistemic misunderstanding, I suggest, philosophers began to emphasise the need for what they called “objectivity.” This meant attempting to regulate the unconscious biases of subjects through adopting both particular technologies—notably photographic reproduction—yet also mundane methods of self-regulation, including an emphasis on the need for reproducibility within observation. Through these different forms of epistemic self-restraint, which sought to remove personal belief from science, Romantic and Victorian authors thus attempted to capture the objective structure of nature.

This dissertation examines the architectural history of hospitals in the premodern Mediterranean. Hospitals—institutions providing medical care and social services to the diverse populations across the region—maintained socially organized wards; operated facilities like pharmacies, soup kitchens, and baths; and trained staff to care for patients. Hospitals formed nodes in regional travel networks across West Asia, Anatolia, North Africa, and Southern Europe, regions between which premodern people traveled extensively. The past century has seen broad surveys of European hospitals and narrow studies of individual institutions; however, current scholarship lacks a synthesis of the disparate data on premodern hospitals across cultural contexts. The field is therefore left wanting for holistic conclusions about the relationship between architecture and healthcare in the premodern Mediterranean. Having compiled a database documenting the construction, patronage, and social histories of over 600 hospitals operating in the region, the dissertation develops a transcultural architectural history of the hospital that centers the built environment as a meaningful part of the human health experience. It contends that, as a result of significant premodern cross-cultural exchange, these hospitals constitute a group in their architectural forms, their support of advancements in medical care, and their facilitation of social bonds within communities. To determine the intellectual and practical trends in hospital construction, the project examines architectural remains and contemporaneous texts through the framing approaches of Global and Comparative History and Anti-Orientalism. Among the hospitals in the corpus are the Ospedale Maggiore (Milan), Hôtel-Dieu de Tonnerre (France), Divriği Hospital (Turkey), Bīmāristān of Nūr ad-Dīn (Damascus), Hospital de los Venerables (Seville), and the Bīmāristān al-Mu’ayyidi (Cairo). The textual evidence consists of architectural and medical treatises (Filarete, Ibn Sīnā), travel accounts (Ibn Jubayr, John of Würzburg), histories (Al–Maqrīzī), and hospital foundation charters. Throughout, the dissertation argues that hospitals were an architectural focal point of premodern communities across the Mediterranean, in which hospital builders developed similar architectural solutions to offer a range of social services to the sick and needy, while responding to regional cultural circumstances. From this vantage point, it develops a new foundation for the architectural history of premodern healthcare that brings to light the extent and shape of a transcultural phenomenon. It analyzes the historical data in the aggregate to address relationships between healthcare, spatial organization and ornament, and cross-cultural exchange in the diverse premodern Mediterranean. In a historiography that has minimized contributions of people in North Africa, West Asia, and Eastern Europe to the history of science and architecture, this project contributes to our knowledge of the formation of the modern age by questioning the Eurocentrism in narratives of scientific progress. Ultimately, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to consider how the diverse cultures of the Mediterranean participated in a shared architectural and scientific history. As such, the project serves as a robust scaffolding for the history of hospitals, science, and architecture.

This dissertation delves into the history of contraception in twentieth-century Mexico by analyzing the technoscientific activities of local professionals who sought to promote fertility control at a time in which the state maintained a pronatalist policy. By examining the roles of doctors, eugenicists, economists, chemists, and demographers between the 1930s and 1970s, this dissertation argues that these experts contributed to the government’s shift in population policy in the 1970s. Drawing on various archival sources, including clinical reports, institutional records, correspondence, and published materials authored by doctors and social scientists, this study demonstrates how local professionals forged alliances with international donors and fostered interdisciplinary collaborations. All these initiatives allowed these experts to smuggle contraceptives, establish family planning clinics, and even conduct human trials with the birth control pill in Mexico. “The Science of Family Planning,” thus, underscores the complex interplay between state policies, expert interventions, and individual agency, contributing to broader discussions on reproductive rights, public health, and governance in Latin America.

“To Take Care of My People” is a study of healing practices employed by Kiowas, members of a Great Plains tribal nation, during their first sixty years of reservation life. Kiowa Nation faced major moments of sociopolitical fracture between 1867 and 1875, when the U.S. government confined them to a reservation under federal administration, and in 1901, when that reservation was allotted. In the interim, representatives of federal assimilation policy worked to reform Indigenous subsistence, residence patterns, religion, and mobility. These changes restricted Kiowa people’s access to healthful food, housing, ceremony, and economic opportunity, producing long-term health disparities between Kiowas and settlers. This dissertation explores how, between 1867 and 1920, Kiowas evaluated the tenets and practices of multiple faiths and healing philosophies. From community to community, Kiowas assessed and integrated these practices into an expanded, pluralistic Kiowa way of healing that resisted colonial efforts to control, confine, and divide their people. “To Take Care of My People” employs an ethnohistorical methodology, analyzing manuscripts and government documents alongside oral tradition, oral history, and ethnographic research to approximate Kiowa people’s shifting understandings of health and healing over time. “To Take Care of My People” explores the latitude for negotiation that emerged between the OIA’s production and implementation of medical policy, analyzing both Indigenous healing and western allopathy as tools of survival and renewal for Kiowa people. Despite the reservation era’s assault on Kiowa medicine men and healing ceremony, Kiowa healers maintained their healing knowledge and, through intertribal interaction, adopted new health-seeking relationships with peyote and other spiritual beings. While western medicine acted as a vehicle for colonial violence in Indigenous communities, Kiowa people influenced and, at times, directed collaborations between themselves and western doctors, nurses, and missionaries. These relationships allowed Kiowa communities to add western healing practices to their own medicine ways.