Joeri Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong


Planet Earth II : BBC (November 2016–January 2017) Television


Courtney Fullilove, The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture


Patrick Manning and Mat Savelli, eds., Global Transformations in the Life Sciences , 1945 – 1980 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 366 pp., $45.00 Cloth, ISBN: 9780822945277


Janina Wellmann, The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830


Angela Ki Che Leung and Izumi Nakayama, eds.: Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia


Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, For the Birds: American Ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice


Complicating the Story of Popular Science: John Maynard Smith’s “Little Penguin” on The Theory of Evolution

Abstract

Popular science writing has received increasing interest, especially in its relation to professional science. I extend the current scholarly focus from the nineteenth to the twentieth century by providing a microhistory of the early popular writings of evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith (1920–2004). Linking them to the state of evolutionary biology as a professional science as well as Maynard Smith’s own professional standing, I examine the interplay between author, text and audiences. In particular, I focus on Maynard Smith’s book The Theory of Evolution (Penguin 1958) and show how he used it to both promote neo-Darwinism and advocate the utility of mathematics in biology. Following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and David Lack, Maynard Smith was a science communicator blurring the lines between genres (popular, professional, textbook) and audiences (expert and non-expert) while contributing to ongoing discussions within and on the profession of evolutionary biology around the Darwin-Wallace centenary.

Climate, Fascism, and Ibex: Experiments in Using Population Dynamics Modeling as a Historiographical Tool

Abstract

In the interwar years the Gran Paradiso ibex population followed two subsequent, contrasting trends: a steady rise once the national park was established in 1922, followed by a precipitous fall after the Fascist regime took direct control of conservation in 1934, which almost led to the colony’s extinction. This paper addresses the issue of how models taken from population ecology may inform historical narratives. The data for the interwar years were analyzed using a statistical model based on climate and population density, which has proved reliable for most of the post-World War II period. The article highlights the pivotal role of anthropic variables in determining the inter-war trends and how these are best analyzed using historical scholarship.