The cult of amphioxus in German Darwinism; or, our gelatinous ancestors in Naples' blue and balmy bay.

Biologists having rediscovered amphioxus, also known as the lancelet or Branchiostoma, it is time to reassess its place in early Darwinist debates over vertebrate origins. While the advent of the ascidian-amphioxus theory and challenges from various competitors have been, documented, this article offers a richer account of the public appeal of amphioxus as a primitive ancestor. The focus is on how the 'German Darwin' Ernst Haeckel persuaded general magazine and newspaper readers to revere this "flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood", and especially on Das neue Laienbrevier des Haeckelismus (The new lay breviary of Haeckelism) by Moritz Reymond with cartoons by Fritz Steub. From the late 1870s these successful little books of verse introduced the Neapolitan discoveries that made the animal's name and satirized Haeckel's rise as high priest of its cult. One song is reproduced and translated here, with a contemporary "imitation" by the Canadian palaeontologist Edward John Chapman, and extracts from others. Predating the American "It's a long way from amphioxus" by decades, these rhymes dramatize neglected 'species politics' of Darwinism and highlight the roles of humour in negotiating evolution.I thank the Wellcome Trust [088708] for support.This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40656-014-0034-x

La importància de l'anàlisi històrica de les imatges de la ciència, amb Nick Hopwood

La Història de la Ciència ha mostrat una tendència tradicional a l'estudi dels textos oblidant-se de les imatges. Però la pràctica científica produeix una àmplia varietat de representacions visuals i el seu estudi ofereix una excel·lent base per comprendre la formació del coneixement científic. Aquest ha estat el tema entorn del qual ha girat la 6a. Escola Europea de Primavera d'Història i Popularització de la Ciència de Maó, organitzada, entre altres entitats, pel Centre d'Història de la Ciència de la UAB (CEHIC). Nick Hopwood, professor titular del Departament d'Història i Filosofia de la Ciència de la Universitat de Cambridge, expert en representacions visuals de la ciència, hi fou convidat, i nosaltres el vam poder entrevistar

Doctoral student experience in Education:Activities and difficulties influencing identity development

This paper explores variation in the events or activities Education doctoral students describe as contributing to their feeling of being an academic or belonging to an academic community as well as difficulties they experience. The results (drawing principally on students in a Canadian research-intensive university though with some in a UK university) demonstrate a rich variation in multiple formative activities that are experienced as contributing to a developing identity as an academic, with many lying outside formal and semi-formal aspects of the doctorate. Yet, at the same time students report tensions in the very sorts of activities they often find significant and positive in the development of their identity. We see this analysis as offering much-needed insights into the formative role of cumulative day-to-day activities in the development of academic identity

Introduction: Communicating Reproduction.

Communication should be central to histories of reproduction, because it has structured how people do and do not reproduce. Yet communication has been so pervasive, and so various, that it is often taken for granted and the historical specificities overlooked. Making communication a frame for histories of reproduction can draw a fragmented field together, including by putting the promotion of esoteric ideas on a par with other practical activities. Paying communication close attention can revitalize the history of reproduction over the long term by highlighting continuities as well as the complex connections between new technologies and new approaches. Themes such as the power of storytelling, the claiming and challenging of expertise, and relations between knowledge and ignorance, secrecy and propriety also invite further study.This essay introduces a special issue that began in a conference on “Communicating Reproduction” (http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/medicine/communicating.html) held at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge in December 2011. This was linked to an exhibition on “Books and Babies” at Cambridge University Library curated by Mary Fissell, NH, PMJ, Francis Neary, and JS (legacy website: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/Babies). We thank the Wellcome Trust for funding the meeting and the exhibition through a strategic award in the history of medicine on the theme “Generation to Reproduction” [088708], Francis Neary for sterling organizational work, and all participants for their engagement.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Johns Hopkins University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2015.006

The tragedy of the emeritus and the fates of anatomical collections: Alfred Benninghoff's memoir of Ferdinand Count Spee.

Retirement can be a significant period in modern academic careers, and emeritus professors have shaped the fates of collections in departments and disciplines. This is evidenced by reconstructing the meanings of Alfred Benninghoff's remarkable memoir of Ferdinand Count Spee, sometime director of the anatomical institute in the University of Kiel. Thematizing the 'tragedy' of the emeritus, Benninghoff's 1944 article recalls his predecessor's possessive interactions with his collections as these approached assorted endings. With nostalgia and humour, it places the old aristocrat physically, intellectually and emotionally in a building that bombing would soon destroy. Benninghoff's Spee retained control over the microscope slides with which he engaged colleagues in conversations about research in embryology and physiological anatomy. He lost authority over the teaching charts and wet preparations, but still said a long farewell to these things; he tried, like a conductor alone after a concert, to recapture an experience he had once shared. The elegy is interpreted as apologetic about anatomy under National Socialism, and as offering a model of collegiality. It illustrates how collections have mediated relations between scientific generations at the end of a career

How poetry and song can grapple with the dialectics of crisis and agency, and become tools for transformative research

 Activist scholarship inspired by a cultural-historical tradition often seeks to foster agency with people facing crisis. The aim is to develop new understandings and bases for action that can help people break away from the status quo and change what is possible. Cultural-historical theory understands crisis and agency dialectically, linking both to individual and social transformation. Dialectic understandings of crisis foreground breakdown and renewal. Dialectic understandings of agency foreground personal contributions with social consequence and contingency. I argue that these understandings are crucial as a point of departure in research where we stand alongside others on grappling with matters of equity and justice. However, establishing these as a shared basis for resisting, reimaging and rebelliously acting is not straightforward and requires countering dominant neoliberal framings. Arts-based forms have significant potential to enable precisely such disruptive thinking. The line ‘Dance on the shark’s wing’, opens a poem by Nikos Kavadias, bluring the lines between the real and the imagined, the fearful and the possible. ‘No One Is Alone’, a song from Sondheim’s ‘Into the Woods’, tells a story of how individual interest is overcome through collective wisdom and consequential action. These examples are discussed as potential transformative tools that could provoke and support collective radical imagination based on coherent understandings of individual agentic contributions to collective struggles. An argument is presented to embrace arts genres as means to destabilise engrained ways of thinking about crisis and agency, thus strengthening collaborative efforts in activist researc