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In recent years, culture studies and cultural history have become very popular approaches in the humanities. This is all to the good, but the notion of "culture" is used in several different ways, and they aren't compatible with one another. In this post, I want to look at two of these notions of culture and the problems they cause; I'll look at some others later.
Continue reading "Concepts of culture. 1: Social science vs. criticism" »
I've posted a draft paper on the intersection of evolutionary and developmental biology (called "Evo-Devo"), which can be downloaded by clicking on the title in the list on the left. This is from a workshop last year at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. It's a lovely place, and the workshop was very productive and a lot of fun.
The workshop grew out of a session the year before at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA., which is one of the finer ornaments of civilization.
The papers from the workshop are going to be published in a book edited by Jane Maienschein and Manfred Laubichler of Arizona State, who also organized the workshop, gave papers, and made everything work right.
The paper sketches a major thread in a complicated argument I'm trying to make about the ways in which institutional arrangements influence the intellectual content of research. It focuses Evo-Devo, which is the most interesting and exciting area of research in biology today.
