Erika Lorraine Milam

An Introduction to Scientific Masculinities

This volume seeks to integrate gender analysis into the global history of science and medicine from the late Middle Ages to the present by focusing on masculinity, the part of the gender equation that has received the least attention from scholars. The premise of the volume is that social constructions of masculinity function simultaneously as foils for femininity and as methods of differentiating between “kinds” of men. In exploring scientific masculinities without taking the dominance of men and masculinity in the sciences for granted, we ask, What is masculinity and how does it operate in science? Our answers remind us that gender is at once an analytical category and a historical object. The essays are divided into three sections that in turn emphasize the importance of gender to the professionalization of scientific, technological, and medical practices, the spaces in which such labor is performed, and the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation are measured and serve as metaphors in society and culture.

The Ascent of Man and the Politics of Humanity's Evolutionary Future

Throughout the twentieth century, contemporary understandings of evolutionary theory were tightly linked to visions of the future freighted with moral consequence. This essay traces the origins and legacy of this scientific commitment to a universal family of man in postwar evolutionary theory, and elaborates how evolutionary scientists sought to reframe the politics of human evolution by claiming that the principles governing the physical past of humanity differed fundamentally from those that would matter in the coming decades, centuries, or even millennia. Education and public engagement embodied the moral importance of actively participating in the creation of that better, future world.

Special Issue Introduction: Science in the Public Eye.

In the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century, the looming specter of war—including the aftermath of World War II, the shadow of the Cold War, and post-Cold War threats to national security—contributed to the social urgency and political salience of scientists’ engagement with the public. With cases drawn primarily from the life sciences, the papers in this special issue explore the interstices of the public, the political, and the popular in scientific work that addressed pressing contemporary problems from the threat of nuclear war, to the dangers of overpopulation, to the hopeful possibility of a peaceful human future. By placing public science at the analytic heart of our histories, we see that the very idea of science—its practices, its sources of authority, its epistemic characteristics—is negotiated in dialogue with multiple publics. The papers build on recent scholarship that has embraced multidimensional approaches to the appropriation of and engagement with science among diverse public communities with a stake in scientific claims. The papers focus, too, on the political stakes of public engagement for scientists. Throughout these decades, questions of citizenship and technical authority required constant renegotiating. Scientists emphasized the importance of their efforts to correct popular misperceptions of scientific ideas. Among popular audiences, the idea that scientists should be held responsible for public misunderstandings of science has not gone away, nor has the impression faded that in trying to engage with non-scientifically trained audiences, scientists deserve any public scrutiny that inevitably follows. In this spirit, our papers attend to a variety of discursive spaces of popular scientific engagement, including print and visual media like books, magazines, and films, designed to reach

Understanding our origins

How a long tradition of exceptionalism distorted our perception of human evolution. What would happen if tomorrow, scientists were to rediscover the entire hominid fossil record, without any preconceptions inherited from the last century? According to Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, the resulting picture of human evolution would differ dramatically from that bequeathed to todays paleontologists by their predecessors. In The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, he traces the contingencies, false starts, and diversity of opinions that have characterized the intellectual history of paleoanthropology from Darwin to today.

A Field Study of Con Games

In 1978, the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers, began a collaboration exploring the evolution of self-deception. Together they published a brief paper that used their ideas about the naturalistic basis of deceit and self-deception to explain the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 in Washington, D.C. Given the continued power of the naturalistic fallacy in the modern life sciences, historical attention typically focuses on highly visible controversies with great popular traction. This essay instead mobilizes the muted legacy of Trivers and Newton’s publication to underscore the inherent difficulties scientists face in finding a receptive audience for their theories, even naturalistic ones.