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13A diagrammatics of race: Samuel George Morton's ‘American Golgotha’ and the contest for the definition of the young field of anthropologyHistory of the Human Sciences. forthcoming.Between the last decades of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, something of paramount importance happened in the history of anthropology. This was the advent of a physical anthropology that was about the classification of ‘human races’ through comparative measurement. A central tool of the new trade was diagrams. Being inherently about relations in and between objects, diagrams became the means of defining human groups and their relations to each other – the last point being di…Read more
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Earth history and the order of society : William Buckland, the French connection, and the conundrum of teleologyIn Henning Trüper, Dipesh Chakrabarty & Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Historical teleologies in the modern world, Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2015.
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7Erika Lorraine Milam, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 408 pp., 33 b/w illus., $29.95 Cloth, ISBN: 9780691181882 (review)Journal of the History of Biology 54 (1): 143-145. 2021.
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5Biology as a Technology of Social Justice in Interwar Britain: Arguments from Evolutionary History, Heredity, and Human DiversityScience, Technology, and Human Values 39 (4): 561-586. 2014.In this article, I am concerned with the public engagements of Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, and J. B. S. Haldane. I analyze how they used the new insights into the genetics of heredity to argue against any biological foundations for antidemocratic ideologies, be it Nazism, Stalinism, or the British laissez-faire and class system. The most striking fact—considering the abuse of biological knowledge they contested—is that these biologists presented genetics itself as inherently democratic. Argu…Read more
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45Population-genetic trees, maps, and narratives of the great human diasporasHistory of the Human Sciences 28 (5): 108-145. 2015.From the 1960s, mathematical and computational tools have been developed to arrive at human population trees from various kinds of serological and molecular data. Focusing on the work of the Italian-born population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, I follow the practices of tree-building and mapping from the early blood-group studies to the current genetic admixture research. I argue that the visual language of the tree is paralleled in the narrative of the human diasporas, and I show how th…Read more
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10Visibility matters: Diagrammatic renderings of human evolution and diversity in physical, serological and molecular anthropologyHistory of the Human Sciences 28 (5): 3-16. 2015.Images are at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible and leave others unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning and imagination. By tracing diagrammatic images in the anthropological sciences throughout the 20thcentury, the contributions to this special issue highlight some dominant pictorial traditions for rendering human evolution and diversity visible. This article aims to provide an overview of and an introduction to the special i…Read more
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14First in Line: Tracing Our Ape Ancestry; The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal–Human Boundary (review)Isis 97 (1): 170-172. 2006.Tom Gundling. First in Line: Tracing Our Ape Ancestry. xiii + 204 pp., apps., bibl., index. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. $25 .; Raymond Corbey. The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal–Human Boundary. x + 227 pp., illus., bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. $65 ; $23.99
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11Seriality in the Making: The Osborn-Knight Restorations of Evolutionary HistoryHistory of Science 48 (3-4): 461. 2010.
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50History in the Gene: Negotiations Between Molecular and Organismal AnthropologyJournal of the History of Biology 41 (3): 473-528. 2008.In the advertising discourse of human genetic database projects, of genetic ancestry tracing companies, and in popular books on anthropological genetics, what I refer to as the anthropological gene and genome appear as documents of human history, by far surpassing the written record and oral history in scope and accuracy as archives of our past. How did macromolecules become "documents of human evolutionary history"? Historically, molecular anthropology, a term introduced by Emile Zuckerkandl in…Read more
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26Eoliths as Evidence for Human Origins? The British ContextHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 26 (2). 2004.In the second half of the nineteenth century, France was the main site of the controversy around the so-called eoliths, supposedly human-made tools of Tertiary Europe. In contrast to the more common situation where scientists have to make sure that an object stabilized in a laboratory is not an artifact of the lab but a natural object, in the eoliths debates the opposite was the case. The eolith proponents tried to render plausible the object's artificial, that is human, origin. In their case, t…Read more
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2The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (review)Isis 104 149-150. 2013.
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12‘an Amusing Account Of A Cave In Wales’: William Buckland and the Red Lady of Paviland (review)British Journal for the History of Science 37 (1): 53-74. 2004.In 1823 the first Reader of Geology at Oxford University, William Buckland , unearthed the human skeleton known as the ‘Red Lady’ in Paviland cave, south Wales. While the Red Lady is valued today as a central testimony of early Upper Palaeolithic humans in Britain, Buckland considered the skeleton as of postdiluvian age, meaning from after the biblical Deluge. Rather than viewing Buckland as either obscurantist or as having worked entirely within ordinary scientific practice, the paper focuses o…Read more
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14Dirk Preuß;, Uwe Hoßfeld;, Olaf Breidbach . Anthropologie nach Haeckel. 256 pp., figs., illus., index. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006. €46 (review)Isis 99 (1): 206-207. 2008.
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2Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything (review)Isis 100 674-675. 2009.
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32Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives: William Sollas’s Anthropology from Disappointed Bridge to Trunkless Tree and the Instrumentalisation of Racial ConflictJournal of the History of Biology 38 (2): 327-365. 2005.During the first decades of the 20th century, many anthropologists who had previously adhered to a linear view of human evolution, from an ape via Pithecanthropus erectus and Neanderthal to modern humans, began to change their outlook. A shift towards a branching model of human evolution began to take hold. Among the scientific factors motivating this trend was the insight that mammalian evolution in general was best represented by a branching tree, rather than by a straight line, and that sever…Read more