Nicolaas A. Rupke

Large-scale slumping in a flysch basin, southwestern Pyrenees

Sheets of deformed beds in the Eocene flysch of the southwestern Pyrenees are exposed along strike for over 16 km. The thickness of these sheets in places exceeds 100 m, and their volume is c. 10 km3. The sheets formed by gravity induced slumping, triggered most likely by earthquakes. The velocities of slump transport may have been as high as those of turbidity flow. Directions of slumping are consistent indicators of regional palaeoslopes. The slump sheets do not reflect a particular environment of deposition, but more likely record the seismic regime (periodic earthquakes of great magnitude) of the flysch basin.

Translation studies in the history of science: the example of Vestiges

The three translations of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation invested the text with new meaning. None of the translations endorsed the book for the authors advocacy of species transformation. The first translation, into German (1846), put forward the text as evincing divine design in nature. The second, into Dutch (1849), also presented Vestiges as proof of divine order in nature and, more specifically, as aiding the stabilization of society under God and king in a process of recovery from the 1848 Revolution. By contrast, the third translation, into German (1851), interpreted the book as furthering the very revolutionary, anti-ecclesiastical and anti- monarchist ideals that the Dutch edition sought to counter.

Growth of an Ancient Deep-Sea Fan

A thick deep-sea clastic succession in the Upper Carboniferous of the Cantabrian Mountains, Spain, is identified as a small (radius some 10 km) deep-sea fan, called the Pesaguero Fan. The fan succession is composed of facies triplets, each of which consists of a mudstone blanket, a sandstone lobe, and a conglomerate tongue. A facies triplet represents a complete cycle of progradation of a major, active fan lobe (sandstone and conglomerate) over a previously inactive part of the fan (mudstone). New lobes originate by avulsion from the inner fan environment. The distribution in space and time of individual fan lobes may be controlled by the combined influence of gradient advantage, the Coriolis effect, and sea level change.

The Study of Fossils in the Romantic Philosophy of History and Nature

This paper focuses on Germany, from the 1770s till the 181Os, when the study of rocks and fossils widened the horizon of history and was made into one of the corner-stones of Romantic Naturphilosophie. The period under consideration is probably the single most creative and complex half-century of German intellectual history. It brackets the tail-ends of the Enlightenment and of Sturm und Drang, together with the early half of Classicism and Romanticism. Philosophy was given contemporary form with the emergence of Transcendental Idealism and of Naturphilosophie. Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, the Humboldt brothers, and many other coryphaei of German culture published a wide variety of all-time classics. Hegel, Holderlin and Schelling spent part of their student days together at the Evangelische Stift in Tiibingen. Oetingers output demonstrated the continued vigour of Swabian Pietism, and Schleiermacher brought theology in tune with the new supremacy of feeling and inner experience. Weimar became a cultural centre, and in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars the city of Brunswick attracted a large number of exiled aristocrats and scholars sympathetic to the ancien regime and its intellectual heritage. New institutions of academic learning grew into national centres of education where the medical faculties supported a wide range ofinterests in the natural sciences. At the Karlsschule in Stuttgart men such as Cuvier and Schiller received their higher education. The University of Gottingen, where Blumenbach taught, became an obligatory stop during a young scholars Wanderjahre. And Werners lectures gave international prestige to the Mining Academy of Freiberg. At the same time some of the ancient universities such as Heidelberg and Tiibingen were threatened with extinction. In general, the decentralized agglomeration of little states which we, somewhat

Alexander von Humboldt and Monism

A linkage of “Alexander von Humboldt” and “monism” is by and large absent from the history of science literature of the post-Second World War period. Yet the connection is real and of considerable significance for our understanding of the monist movement and its history. Monism took on different forms in different places, as this volume shows, and I am dealing predominantly, although not exclusively, with its German location. In the German-speaking world, the linkage of Humboldt with monism, in addition to expressing a scientific trend, was part of a political dynamic. As I have documented elsewhere,1 literature about Humboldt and his works began appearing at the time of the 1848 revolution when it was produced by the radicalized liberal Left on behalf of the politics of “Freiheit und Einheit” (freedom and national unification). These forty-eighters, as well as many of Humboldt’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century biographers and interpreters, were by and large the same people who took part in the monist movement and its forerunner organizations, demonstrating the importance of political dissent for the rise of monism.2

Five Discourses of Bible and Science 1750–2000

Today the old conflict thesis about science and religion – the contention that the two necessarily clash – has largely been abandoned in favor of a complexity thesis that argues for a variety of different “encounters”. Yet much conflict did and does exist over the issue of science and religion; if not between these two, however, where then? Here the argument is put forward that from 1750 till today strife primarily has been located between different discourses of Bible and science, each conducted by a distinct socio-political group to which both religious believers and scientific experts belong. Five such discourses are identified on the basis of contrasting views of the Bible, namely that it (1) is a guidebook of science, (2) is adjustable to scientific discoveries, (3) has nothing to do with science, (4) complements science, and (5) contains much anti-scientific nonsense.