Science and Technology Studies

It is my contention that Carl Sagan's Cosmos is a revolutionary work, a standard-setter for all subsequent works of popular science. In this way, Cosmos shares a remarkable kinship with Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Published anonymously in 1844, Vestiges was not just a Victorian sensation. In his 2000 book Victorian Sensation, James A. Secord argues that Vestiges would become “a template for the evolutionary epic-book-length works that covered all the sciences in a progressive synthesis” (Secord, 2000, p. 461). More than a century later, Cosmos would provide a template for the modern multimedia evolutionary epic, a template that remains in use to this day. For this reason, I will argue that Cosmos is the epitome of the present-day evolutionary epic.
I will also argue that the evolutionary epic is more than an enduring narrative style. More fundamentally, the evolutionary epic is a powerful tool for subverting the agenda of the scientific elite. This tool permits the disruption of the presumed ‘diffusion’ of scientific knowledge, from active scientists to passive publics. Instead, the evolutionary epic powerfully demonstrates the inextricability of ‘science’ and ‘culture’, wherein the meaning and value of scientific ideas is constantly renegotiated in local contexts.

Controversies have been the focus of considerable attention in the STS literature. As past studies have shown, the processes of closure are closely related to the production of technoscientific knowledges and artifacts. In this STS dissertation, I build on these studies by opening the black box that is the Cohen Report, thereby illuminating the various forms taken by, and contestations associated with, controversial salmon in the Cohen Commission, 2009-2012, a federal inquiry into the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River of British Columbia, Canada.

In this empirical study, I ask: (i) What are the primary sources of controversy in the Fraser River fishery? (ii) What salmon controversies are revealed through the social-life of sockeye, and how do they compare to those depicted in the Cohen Report’s overview of the life-cycle of sockeye? (iii) What factors contributed to the (de)legitimation of particular understandings of controversial salmon during the Cohen Commission?

To address these questions, I employed a three-phase, multi-method approach which involved (I) collecting qualitative data in the field; (II) creating a map from these data; and (III) using this map to analyze the ‘social lives’ of various human and non-human actors.

My primary research findings (1-9) shed new light on various salmon controversies, including those arising from (1) Indigenous responses to the ongoing experience of colonial violence and dispossession, (2) an ethic of exploitation oriented towards establishing and maintaining dominion over nature, (3) the prevailing view that fish (and fishing) are principally vehicles for economic growth and financial profit, and (4) the local effects of anthropogenic climate change. I also found that (5) these controversies are largely minimized by the Cohen Report’s life-cycle overview, which reduces the sockeye life-cycle to a series of physiological transformations loosely connected to the particulars of place. During the Cohen Commission, salmon controversies were (de)legitimated through (6) the boundary work of expertise, (7) the Commission’s emphasis on efficiently neutralizing contention, and (8) differing assessments concerning the importance of place. This resulted in the production of a controversial blueprint for closure—i.e., the Cohen Report—which (9) called for the production of knowledge and ignorance in relation to the impacts of salmon farming, accentuating the importance of attending to generative symmetry, this dissertation’s foremost contribution to the STS controversy studies literature.

To better understand the work of pre-Darwinian British life researchers in their own right, this paper discusses two different styles of reasoning. On the one hand there was analysis:synthesis, where an organism was disintegrated into its constituent parts and then reintegrated into a whole; on the other hand there was palaetiology, the historicist depiction of the progressive specialization of an organism. This paper shows how each style allowed for development, but showed it as moving in opposite directions. In analysis:synthesis, development proceeded centripetally, through the fusion of parts. Meanwhile in palaetiology, development moved centrifugally, through the ramifying specialization of an initially simple substance. I first examine a community of analytically oriented British life researchers, exemplified by Richard Owen, and certain technical questions they considered important. These involved the neurosciences, embryology, and reproduction and regeneration. The paper then looks at a new generation of British palaetiologists, exemplified by W.B. Carpenter and T.H. Huxley, who succeeded at portraying analysts' questions as irrelevant. The link between styles of reasoning and physical sites is also explored. Analysts favored museums, which facilitated the examination and display of unchanging marine organisms while providing a power base for analysts. I suggest that palaetiologists were helped by vivaria, which included marine aquaria and Wardian cases. As they became popular in the early 1850s, vivaria provided palaetiologists with a different kind of living and changing evidence. Forms of evidence, how they were preserved and examined, and career options all reinforced each other: social and epistemic factors thus merged.

This paper presents two different visions of how one might portray the interaction of an organism's body parts and thus how a society might be likened to an organism. In the case of Herbert Spencer there was a democratic vision of an organism, often portrayed as a political assembly of body parts, each one acting in its own 'interest'. Spencer learned about certain organisms whose very status as unitary individuals was questioned in the 1840s and '50s. Many of these invertebrate animals were seen as compound organisms, as aggregations of harmoniously-interacting parts. In these organisms, each part had a surprising amount of independence, often having its own simple 'brain', the ganglion. And the principles demonstrated by these simple invertebrates were thought to hold for more complex organisms like humans too. This democratic vision of an organism linked nicely with Spencer's distaste for dirigiste authorities, and the young Spencer grew up amidst three excellent examples of organizations that defied or did not require central authorities -religious Dissent, radical politics, and phrenology. Spencer therefore believed that societies and organisms were guided by the same principles of specialization and harmonious interaction encountered in comparative anatomy, Dissent, radical politics, and phrenology; and so he saw no apparent contradiction when he likened a society to an organism in 1860.

In May 1870 T.H. Huxley had to organize the administration and marking of 3705 animal physiology examinations for the Department of Science and Art. This paper closely follows this case as a window into how industrial-scale testing became possible in the second half of the 19th century.

applied evolution to everything from psychology to aesthetics. A selfdeclared 'philosopher,' he wrote on many topics, and contemporaries saw him as one of the most important intellectual figures of their time. After co-presenting his theory of natural selection with Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace visited Spencer in 1862 when he wanted to find out what evolution really meant.

There seem to be three intuitions about biological individuality that are held in western culture. This paper calls these intuitions about essences "anatomical essentialism", "physiological essentialism", and "developmental essentialism". These intuitions reinforce one another. They work to a certain extent, and any explanation using one of the essentialisms tends to be accepted by an audience more easily. Yet when held unreflectively such intuitions lead to an impoverished understanding of individuality. These intuitions are highly resilient – histories of biology show how they have been challenged both analytically and empirically, yet they still persist to this day, even in the 'Darwin Industry' where people should know better. I suggest this is because they both depend on and reinforce notions of purity, stability, indivisibility and autonomy.

Starting in the 1850s achievement tests became standardized in the British Isles, and were administered on an industrial scale. By the end of the century more than two million people had written mass exams, particularly in science, technology, and mathematics. Some candidates responded to this standardization by cramming or cheating; others embraced the hope that such tests rewarded not only knowledge but also merit.

Written with humour, Making a Grade looks at how standardized testing practices quietly appeared, and then spread worldwide. This book situates mass exams, marks, and credentials in an emerging paper-based meritocracy, arguing that such exams often first appeared as "cameras" to neutrally record achievement, and then became "engines" to change education as people tailored their behaviour to fit these tests. Taking the perspectives of both examiners and examinees, Making a Grade claims that our own culture’s desire for accountability through objective testing has a long history.

The nineteenth century was one in which millions of people acquired certificates and other credentials attesting that they knew what they claimed to know. These credentials resulted from mass examinations: systems of infrastructure that aspired to procedural objectivity. One key feature of these exams were the new numerical marking systems used to compare and commensurate different answers on these exams, because these numbers could generate averages and other formal abstractions of knowledge. While the resulting tests could be restrictive for the individual, they could be positive and even creative. Exam successes and credentials helped people work collectively in groups, giving each group member the confidence that other members knew what they claimed to know.

The word 'meritocracy' first appeared in Michael Young's 1957 Rise of the Meritocracy, and his book was intended as a satire and dystopia. For to call one's society a meritocracy means one can justify the exclusion of certain people-or, conversely, the celebration and elevation of otherson perceived talent. It can also be used to explain why some people fail to rise in the social scale: because they lack 'merit', however one defines that trait. The book ends with a rebellion against what has come to resemble a hereditary aristocracy (Young 1958; Sandel 2020).