Science
The Pandemic Timeline
Trump’s lies are like zombies. Fact-checkers keep killing them, but he keeps bringing them back to life — and repeating them over and over again. The only antidote is the truth — repeated over and over again. Steven Harper is following the pandemic for Moyers on Democracy. Continue reading
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Are the Humanities More Digital than the Sciences?
A panel discussion with Howard Hotson, Andrew Prescott, Dave De Roure and Heather Viles Are the Humanities More Digital than the Sciences? A panel discussion with Howard Hotson, Andrew Prescott, Dave De Roure and Heather Viles. Part of the Humanities and the Digital Age TORCH 2016 Headline Series. The presumption is often that the relationship between the humanities and sciences will be one-way, and that it will be the humanities learning from sciences. But what can sciences learn from the way that the humanities are using digital output for their research?
Too Valuable to Die?
Silke Ackermann, Nigel Biggar and Liz Bruton debate the ethics of science and scientists going to war Silke Ackermann (Director, Museum of the History of Science) Liz Bruton (Co-curator, “Dear Harry”… Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War) and Nigel Biggar (Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford) will discuss the ethics of scientists going to war in response to the current Museum of the History of Science exhibition exploring the life and legacy of talented English physicist Henry Moseley.
When Moseley was killed on the battlefield at Gallipoli in August 1915, newspapers on all sides of the conflict denounced his tragic death with one English newspaper headline proclaiming that Moseley was "too valuable to die". Moseley's death contributed to a changing attitude to scientists and science going to war with scientists and engineers being kept away from the frontline. Instead the work of scientists and engineers - research and expertise - is used to meet military goals with scientific research increasingly relying on military funding.
In this discussion, the speakers discuss the ethics of scientific research being used for military ends as well as whether scientists being held back from frontline service means others serve and die in their place.
Periodic Tales
Author Hugh Aldersey-Williams, historian of science Jo Hedesan and chemist Peter Battle discuss the ways in which the elements continue to inspire us today The chemical elements, the fundamental ingredients of all matter, have fascinated people for centuries. Their stories have been richly described in Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ bestselling book, Periodic Tales, which forms the basis for a major exhibition curated by Compton Verney Art Gallery.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams is joined by historian of science Jo Hedesan (Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford) and chemist Peter Battle (Professor of Chemistry, University of Oxford) to discuss the ways in which the elements continue to inspire and fascinate us in an event supported by Compton Verney, the Department of Chemistry and TORCH.
Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett
An interdisciplinary discussion of Kirsten Shepherd-Barr's book Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Associate Professor of Modern Drama, University of Oxford) discusses her book Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett with Michael Billington (Theatre Critic, The Guardian), Morten Kringlebach (Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford) and Laura Marcus (Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature).
About the book: Evolutionary theory made its stage debut as early as the 1840s, reflecting a scientific advancement that was fast changing the world. Tracing this development in dozens of mainstream European and American plays, as well as in circus, vaudeville, pantomime, and "missing link" performances, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett reveals the deep, transformative entanglement among science, art, and culture in modern times.
The stage proved to be no mere handmaiden to evolutionary science, though, often resisting and altering the ideas at its core. Many dramatists cast suspicion on the arguments of evolutionary theory and rejected its claims, even as they entertained its thrilling possibilities. Engaging directly with the relation of science and culture, this book considers the influence of not only Darwin but also Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, Wallace, Haeckel, de Vries, and other evolutionists on 150 years of theater. It shares significant new insights into the work of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilder, and Beckett, and writes female playwrights, such as Susan Glaspell and Elizabeth Baker, into the theatrical record, unpacking their dramatic explorations of biological determinism, gender essentialism, the maternal instinct, and the "cult of motherhood."
It is likely that more people encountered evolution at the theater than through any other art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering the liveliness and immediacy of the theater and its reliance on a diverse community of spectators and the power that entails, this book is a key text for grasping the extent of the public's adaptation to the new theory and the legacy of its representation on the perceived legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of scientific work.
Leviathan and the Air Pump: Thirty Years On
The historian of science David Wootton reviews the controversial dispute between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, followed by a reply from Boyle's biographer Michael Hunter Robert Boyle's air-pump experiments in 1659 provoked a lively debate over the possibility of a vacuum. The air-pump, a complicated and expensive device, became an emblem of the new experimental science that was promoted by the Royal Society. However, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes challenged both the validity of Boyle’s experiment and the philosophical foundations of this new approach to science. In their controversial book Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer took up Hobbes’s case, arguing that experimental findings depend for their validity on the scientific culture in which they are made.
David Wootton (Anniversary Professor of History, University of York) reviews this controversy and present a new view of the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes. His lecture is followed by a reply from Robert Boyle's biographer Michael Hunter (Emeritus Professor of History, Birkbeck). The discussion is chaired by Ritchie Robertson (Taylor Professor of the German, University of Oxford).
That Other Place: Art and Alzheimer's
A short video about a recent exhibition of photography and film As the social, emotional and welfare costs of Alzheimer’s disease gain prominence, and with the number of sufferers predicted to reach one million by 2025, exploring the ways in which the disease affects the lives of the sufferers and those around them becomes an ever more important task. Responding to this the O3 Gallery in partnership with TORCH presented That Other Place, an exhibition exploring Alzheimer’s disease from the perspectives of sufferer and carer.
In this short video we explore why photography is a valuable tool for documenting the effects of Alzheimer's and the relationship between art and research. We are joined by Victoria McGuinness (Business Manager, TORCH), Helen Statham (Director, O3 Gallery) and Nicola Onions (Artist).
John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war
A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray – and the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong
For an influential group of advanced thinkers, violence is a type of backwardness. In the most modern parts of the world, these thinkers tell us, war has practically disappeared. The world’s great powers are neither internally divided nor inclined to go to war with one another, and with the spread of democracy, the increase of wealth and the diffusion of enlightened values these states preside over an era of improvement the like of which has never been known. For those who lived through it, the last century may have seemed peculiarly violent, but that, it is argued, is mere subjective experience and not much more than anecdote. Scientifically assessed, the number of those killed in violent conflicts was steadily dropping. The numbers are still falling, and there is reason to think they will fall further. A shift is under way, not strictly inevitable but enormously powerful. After millennia of slaughter, humankind is entering the Long Peace.
This has proved to be a popular message. The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day, Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument consists in showing that the past was more violent than we tend to imagine. Tribal peoples that have been praised by anthropologists for their peaceful ways, such as the Kalahari !Kung and the Arctic Inuit, in fact have rates of death by violence not unlike those of contemporary Detroit; while the risk of violent death in Europe is a fraction of what it was five centuries ago. Not only have violent deaths declined in number. Barbaric practices such as human sacrifice and execution by torture have been abolished, while cruelty towards women, children and animals is, Pinker claims, in steady decline. This “civilising process” – a term Pinker borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias – has come about largely as a result of the increasing power of the state, which in the most advanced countries has secured a near-monopoly of force. Other causes of the decline in violence include the invention of printing, the empowerment of women, enhanced powers of reasoning and expanding capacities for empathy in modern populations, and the growing influence of Enlightenment ideals.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate review – Naomi Klein’s powerful and urgent polemic
Naomi Klein pins the blame for climate crisis squarely on capitalism. John Gray fears the problem is much bigger
This Changes Everything is as much about the psychology of denial as it is about climate change. “It is always easier to deny reality,” writes Naomi Klein, “than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of diehard Stalinists at the height of the purges as of libertarian climate deniers today.” Much of this book is concerned with showing that powerful and well-financed rightwing thinktanks and lobby groups lie behind the denial of climate change in recent years. There is not much reasonable doubt as to the findings of science on the subject. As a result of human activities, large-scale climate change is under way, and if it goes on unchecked it will fundamentally alter the world in which humans will in future have to live. Yet the political response has been at best ambiguous and indecisive. Governments have backed off from previous climate commitments, and environmental concerns have slipped down the policy agenda to a point at which in many contexts they are treated as practically irrelevant.
For Klein none of this is accidental. Following on from her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, a timely and powerful exposé of the environmental and social devastation wrought by neoliberal policies of “shock therapy”, Klein interprets the marginalisation of climate change in the political process as the result of the machinations of corporate elites. These elites “understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the ‘warmists’ in the political centre, the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don’t need to go to war with anybody… The deniers get plenty of the details wrong… But when it comes to the scope and depth of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.”
The Determinism of the Gaps
I'm surprised to find that it appears nobody's coined the phrase "the determinism of the gaps". So henceforth it's mine.
Just as the "God of the gaps" argument ("If [scientifically unexplained phenomena x] isn't the work of God, what else could it be?") is justly dismissed as an irrational argument from faith, so the scientistic claim that some imminent theory of everything will show that any observed phenomena is the result of the playing out of purely deterministic processes just because "What else is could it be?" should be dismissed for the same reason.