 Welcome back everyone. We have a talk right now from Isabel Gabel and we look forward to a question and discussion afterwards. Isabel Gabel is a historian of science, medicine and political thought. She is currently an LC postdoctoral fellow in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. On August 1st, 2021, she will begin a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. Isabel's work has appeared in journals including History of the Human Sciences, Revue de Histoire de Science and the AMA Journal of Ethics. First of all, I wanna thank Chris and Brittany in particular and also this whole team at NHGRI for making this event possible. I'm really honored to be here at the celebration of David DePue's work. Thinking about the themes of this gathering, I decided to take it as an opportunity to think through the limits of genocentrism, especially when it comes to thinking about evolution as a process entwined with human history. What do I mean by this? Simply put, the vision of evolutionary history offered by mid-century linear genetic theory is no longer very plausible. As biologists move beyond classical genetics and the central dogma and towards accounts of reddity that are less linear and more somatic, for example, in the fields of epigenetics, gene regulation studies, environmental genetics, how does the meaning of genetics for history change? I think this is a really important contemporary question and one which DePue's work can very well help us think through. I also think it's a question with a really long history and that's part of what I wanna discuss today. What does evolutionary theory and genetics role within that theory mean for human history? I'm currently completing a book that tracks this question in 20th century thought and my talk today draws from chapters one and two of this book. In particular, today I'm gonna discuss some debates within French evolutionary theory that became really central to French ideas about history and to French philosophy of history. And the most important thing to flag up front is that the debates that I'm gonna talk about today were within the kind of realm of French neo-lemarchism. In other words, non-Darwinian evolutionary thought. So in the first part of my talk, I'm gonna go over some key features of neo-lemarchism in France and here's the central question that I'm exploring and that the figures I'm talking about are exploring are what is life such that we can know its history? In the second part, I'll give some examples of how the failure of the experimental program of neo-lemarchism led to conceptual innovation among these scientists. Here the question that supplements but does not supplant the first is in what sense is it possible to know the past? Finally, I'll show how concepts and interpretive frameworks from evolutionary theory made their way into philosophical approaches to history. And to do so, I'll talk briefly about how Raymond Arone, arguably the most famous French liberal of the 20th century found the neo-lemarchian tradition to be a resource for his theory of history. Specifically, I'll argue that neo-lemarchism offered Arone an epistemological path beyond universal history and helped him develop his critique of Hegelian Marxism. Here the question could be stated as can historical knowledge be universal or objective? So neo-lemarchism was a heterogeneous tradition but it was characterized by three main features. A belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, a rejection of Darwinism and a rejection of mentalism. French biologists did not believe that evolution could be explained by natural selection. In many cases, they conceded that selection might cause the elimination of disadvantageous traits but this could still not explain how new traits came into being. They were also often resistant to the Darwinian model of the environment which seemed to impose what they called an ultimatum of the milieu. For them, the organism environment relationship was one primarily of adaptation, not danger or competition. Meanwhile, they rejected genetics as somewhere between irrelevant and flat out false. But then by the 19 teens, two of the most important biology chairs in Paris were held by students of the French ethologist Alfred Giard. At the Sorbonne, Etienne Rabaud was the chair of experimental biology and Maurice Gullery was chair of the, quote, evolution of organized beings. Their shared teacher, Giard, had conceived of his project as a corrective tendency to the tendency since the 19th century. Their teacher, Giard, had conceived of his project as a corrective to the tendency since the work of the 19th century physiologist Claude Bernard to distinguish too sharply between morphology and physiology. As Rafe de Bonne has shown, Giard aspired to a general biology that brought form and function together by studying organisms within their milieus. This emphasis on the inseparability of form and function and on the importance of milieu played a role in Rabaud and Cholery's rejection of genetic theories of heredity. Rabaud was extremely influential and was known for having, quote, declared war once and for all on mentalism. For example, in 1912, he got into a heated exchange with an agricultural geneticist who had accused him of lacking evidence for his neolomarchian claims. The French, Rabaud, insisted, did not cling to neolomarchism because they relied on reason above experimental proof, but rather because, quote, in observing and experimenting, it is not enough to represent the results by an assemblage of letters. For Rabaud, genes weren't only arbitrary abstractions. They also falsely and impossibly divided the organism into mutually independent parts that could be recombined in any way. Mendelian genetics violated an intuitive and obvious principle in his view, which was the continuity of matter. For Rabaud, heredity was transparent and simple. The true question was about plasticity, the ways that organisms change in response to their environments. But as a result, attention arose between the need to explain changes, individual morphological adaptations, and explain stability or the persistence of species over time. But you might ask, well, why was a natural selection a possible solution to exactly this question? Before the modern synthesis, which brought wide, if not complete consensus on the compatibility between genetics and evolutionary theory, many French biologists understood selection as a purely negative force. They rejected the idea that selection could provide anything beyond the elimination of maladaptive traits. They accepted that selective forces might operate to eliminate the unfit, but there was no way in their view that it could explain fitness itself. In this case, it also could not explain the development of new species. This may have been a misunderstanding of Darwin, but it was also reflective of a genuine gap in scientific knowledge at the time. It was as yet unknown how it was or by what precise mechanism novel traits were produced in nature. Darwinian selection acted on phenotypes, but the source of new phenotypes still had to be explained. For neo-Lamarkeans before 1930 or so, this was the primary goal of experimental biology. How did new phenotypes come into being? In 1910, Colary was, in fact, wrote a sort of treaties on evolution as an experimental science. He declared that, in my opinion, which is an opinion that is neither revolutionary nor even original, the most fruitful efforts in the study of evolution are those which implement experimentation as directly as possible. But, of course, Colary wasn't merely stating the obvious. He was, in fact, countering a 19th century perception originating perhaps with Claude Bernard that zoology was merely an observational or quote, contemplative science. Establishing evolutionary biology as an experimental science was of utmost importance to neo-Lamarkeans. Colary made the case that, given that the past wasn't some fundamental way inaccessible and not subject to direct experimentation, it was imperative that evolutionary biologists experimentally probe the present. But if evolution in the past can necessarily never be more than a hypothesis, he wrote, while in truth being so plausible that it borders on certainty, can we not arrive at certainty itself in regard to the evolution of nature in the present? If the present state of nature is the result of evolution, there is no reason for this evolution to be stopped. It must continue before our eyes. We must see the forms vary, new species form, at least under certain particular conditions we can hope to find and we must seek the mechanism by which they are formed and these acquired results will be a verification of all that's past. This is where experimentation comes in and let's face it, he wrote. We are in this matter a lot less advanced. It is therefore in this direction that we must focus our efforts. Experimentalism was tied, in other words, the belief that evolution was ongoing in the present, still in process and that the processes of life's diversification and advancement were still ongoing. Coleroy made this declaration in 1910, but by 1930, seeing that experimentation had not only failed to provide a verification of all the past, but in fact yielded almost no progress towards understanding evolution, he abandoned experimentation altogether, more on that in a moment. But first, very briefly, I wanna go back over what I just sketched out. So I've tried to give you a broad strokes overview of the major agenda of French Neolomarchism at this period of the turn of the century. They rejected genetics as a fictitious abstraction superimposed upon normal variation and as a specious reduction of the organism to component parts. They rejected natural selection on the grounds that it only explained the negative phenomena, the elimination of unfit traits, but could not explain how new species came into being. For Neolomarchians, organisms were adaptive and active in their environments and this was the only plausible way to explain fitness and by extension, evolution. So the answer to that original question, what is life such that we can know its history, was that life was whole, individuated, continuous, plastic, creative, evolving. So now moving to section two, the aim of this experimental agenda was to demonstrate that by altering the conditions of development, i.e. the organism's milieu, individual organisms were capable of adapting physiologically and morphologically in ways that were in turn passed down to future generations. The precise mechanism of transmission was less important than the idea that somatic changes in response to the environment were the engine of evolution. Here I'm just repeating the idea that plasticity was of greater interest to French Neolomarchians than heredity. But throughout the first decade of the 20th century, the first several decades, it was becoming increasingly clear that experimental results were not in favor of the inheritance of acquired characteristics as an explanation for evolution. The situation in which experimental results failed to support an entrenched theoretical apparatus caused the slow-moving epistemological crisis in French biology. This crisis, I wanna suggest, gave rise to a period of great creativity in French evolutionary thought. So in this section, I'm gonna argue how in response to experimental failures, Neolomarchians began to accept mentalism in limited cases, but not as an explanation for evolution, to move away from experimentalism and towards description, and argue that they did so on the grounds that if the inheritance of acquired characteristics could not be shown to operate in the present, this must be because the laws of nature had changed over time. And the implication being that evolution might have concluded or at least slowed down so much as to be meaningless. So now I'll just return to cholery. Like his colleague, Rabaud, cholery never believed genetics could explain evolution. Genetics might be a useful formalization of heredity, but it couldn't explain plasticity. This was in part because the concept of mutation, as I said before, was at the time really conceived of as only in terms of loss or deletion. As he wrote, it is significant that when we have started with mutations and genetics and tried to formulate an explanation of evolution, we have only arrived at disconcerting paradoxes. We would have to admit that new forms resulted from successive losses in their genotypes. That is to say, evolutionarily superior forms of the animal and vegetable kingdom are due to a progressive simplification of the initial complexity of the most primitive and inferior forms. Thus, man would seem to be a simplified amoeba. No doubt there is a touch of humor in the idea, although it reveals an embarrassment in constructing the theory of evolution on the basis of mutations. Cholery drew in part here on the work of Felix the Dantech, a prolific and widely known biologist who had argued in 1910 on the basis of thermodynamics that life forms had stabilized and evolution had come to an end. The Dantech argued that plasticity was a property of all life but that it decreased as complexity grew. That is while the simplest organisms could be transformed easily by the environment as complexity increased, heredity became more powerful than plasticity. Cholery began to believe with the Dantech that the ability of organisms to bury with environmental conditions or their plasticity was a function that decreased with the complexity and morphological specialization of living beings. In other words, as complexity had increased, evolution had slowed and was at a near standstill. In the 1910s, Cholery published an essay on the nature of biological law. He argued that whereas, quote, in the entire range of the inorganic world, in mechanics, physics, chemistry, the idea of law is in fact universal, uncontested, given. This was not the same in biology. If it were, he wrote, his task would be completed. Nevertheless, the apparent alternative, which to him was vitalism, was incoherent, merely a modern form of finalism that rendered experimentation meaningless. Cholery pointed to Claude Bernard's ambivalence about vitalism, the symptomatic of this kind of contradiction. On the one hand, Bernard's concept of the milieu antérieur was a kind of, as he called it, intraorganic teleology. On the other hand, Cholery pointed out, Bernard did not let this undermine his own experimental determinism. Therefore, Bernard would have rejected 20th century vitalism precisely because it rendered positive biology, in other words, experimental knowledge incoherent. Cholery concluded with a call for epistemic modesty, citing Ladon-Tex assertion that honest science should be merely descriptive. He developed this point in what was arguably his most influential work, his 1931, The Problems of Evolution. So here's the cover of the book, which says the fact of evolution prevails, only the mechanism remains uncertain. Cholery in this text repeated the case against genetics as a mechanism. He asked, are mutations as presently understood really evolutionary processes? That is to say, are they capable of giving rise to distinct species and of eventually splitting up into diverse groups? He illustrated his question with this drawing of hooded rats from a study done by the American geneticist, William Castle. To Cholery, it was obvious that no matter whether the Mendelian ratios held, they only described intra-species variation. It could not lead to the emergence of new species. In continuing to reject mutation as a mechanism of evolution, Cholery acknowledged that he was in an epistemic bind. The existence of Mendelian mechanisms of inheritance were experimentally verifiable. And even one of his own students had shown this. Soft inheritance or the inheritance of acquired characteristics was not. For this reason, Cholery suggested that perhaps experimentalism was not the best approach to evolutionary science after all. As he wrote, nature herself probably no longer performs such experiments at the present time and has realized them only at certain epics without our being able to discover the reason. She does not keep repeating them continually. In general, therefore, species are stable, at least in the present epoch. It seems that at the present time, we do not know whether stabilized nature and genetics will inform us of the modalities of this stability. As seems probable to me, do evolutionary transformations depend on some other causes which still elude us? In many ways, this was a very timely attitude. This late phase neomarkism took shape against the backdrop of World War I and its aftermath. The idea of continuous progress in history was becoming ever more doubtful across Europe. This naturally extended to evolutionary thought and to the limits of Darwin's famous attitude at the end of the origin in the same as line, which will be familiar to most of you. There is grandeur in this view of life with several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one. And that whilst this planet gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. But for neomarkians, evolution was no longer endless. This brings us to the fact that during the very period in which biologists like Hullary were reassessing the evolutionary past and the evolutionary future, an important generation of philosophers was emerging very nearby at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In the mid-20s, figures including Raymond Durand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Boris Conguillem, and semi-officially Simone de Beauvoir, all completed philosophy training at the UNS. The status of biology was of great interest to this group. And so what I'm gonna do in the last section of my talk today is show a few ways in which this neomarkian tradition and these debates made their way into this philosophical milieu. So this brings me to the final part of my talk today in which I'll talk too briefly about the philosophical reception of this set of scientific debates. So I'm focusing today on Raymond Durand. And Durand was perhaps, as I mentioned, the most famous French liberal of the 20th century, philosopher, sociologist, journalist, Durand has mostly been celebrated as a champion of liberal reason against the, quote, totalitarian temptations of the age. His most famous book, The 1955 Opium of the Intellectuals, was an attack on the French left for what he saw as their uncritical and even hypocritical embrace of communism. But before becoming a liberal critic of the left, Durand trained in philosophy alongside Sartre and Conguillem. They were all in the same class and his dissertation, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, was an attempt to assess the possibilities of objective historical knowledge while rejecting the idealism of his neocontian teachers, as well as the tendency towards Hegelianism among his peers. In the thesis, Arone developed a kind of perspectival approach to history in which knowledge was possible, but inherently finite. At the time, this was perceived as quite radical, even scandalous. As the dissertation defense, he was famously accused of being either desperate or satanic in his attack on French academic tradition and on his teacher's ideas. But more importantly, for our purposes, Arone began this work on the philosophy of history as a research project on Mendelian genetics. After several months of research in Paris and a period of military service, he went to Germany as an exchange student in 1930 and it was in Germany that he wrote the thesis. Crucial chapters through the work were devoted to biology and evolutionary thought. In other words, this thesis on history emerged out of his study of biology in the 20s. And in this regard, colliery was a really important source for Arone. To Arone, biologists appeared satisfied simply to demonstrate the fact of dissent. Moreover, the standoff between Lamarckism and Darwinism, as he saw it, had resulted in a kind of anti-finalism which he saw exemplified in Red Boat. For biologists, history had become what he called a series of events and no longer an intelligible sequence. This doctrine of chance reached its apex in genetics which made living forms, quote, reducible to assemblages of vital atoms of genes. In 1938, Arone could follow by conceding that of course most biologists found this genetic concept of life unsatisfying because in France it was still true that most biologists found this unsatisfying. Colliery was chief among them, but Arone pointed out that inclaiming that different mechanisms operated in the past then could be observed in the present. In other words, Colliery's argument about the transformation of natural law. In that case, Colliery was challenging and undermining the very idea of meaning and history. In Arone's reading, Colliery's conclusions about the epistemic limits of evolutionary theory had profound implications for the philosophy of history. It implied that certain forms of causality might, it implied that certain forms of causality might apply on some temporal scales, but not on others. In a chapter on time in history, he wrote that if certain laws eliminate history from a certain point of view, they also imply a discontinuous causal framework that excludes the exact repetition of the state of the total universe. The time moved in one direction, that it was irreversible, allowed Arone to see causality and singularity as reconcilable. And he continued, in any case on our scale, we see a real multiplicity which leads at the same time to the opposition of chance and evolution to the irreversibility of becoming. For Arone, Colliery's writing on evolutionary theory identified a similar problem to the one facing the philosophy of history, how to understand the past from the perspective of an epistemically unstable present. And it also suggested some possible solutions. Running orthogonal perhaps for contemporary expectations, evolutionary theory gave Arone license to limit the claims that could be made about the deep past. It was only by acknowledging these limits, that he believed that man's historical nature could begin to be understood. So by way of conclusion, in my larger project, Arone is just one, or it's just the beginning of what I argue is a long lasting relationship between biological and historical ideas in 20th century France. What I think is surprising about this story is that evolutionary theory did not in this case feed into deterministic or reductionist ideas about the social or about historical progress. Instead, philosophers drew on biology to animate theories of contingency, resistance and individual autonomy. Biology from evolutionary theory and genetics to embryology became not only a way to think about the material unfolding of history through the human organism, but a resource for thinking about the limits of knowledge and therefore perhaps of universalism itself. In other words, French biology was part of an ongoing conversation about what liberal values could look like in the changing tumultuous landscape of the 20th century. Thank you so much, Isabel. So I'm moderating the Q&A session and let's just wait two moments if there are any questions from the audience and then I will go to our presenters. Just a moment more. All right, and then I'm gonna go to Charles. So Charles, you have your hand up, so go ahead. Thanks, Isabel, all very new to me, except a little bit about Claude Bernard and very interesting. Staying in my comfort zone, question about vitalism. So except for Claude Bernard, who actually seems to do something interesting, including inadvertently, in the way he's always sort of fighting with the concept and worrying that he himself might be one and trying to push people like Bishah into a box where they're still too metaphysical and not experimentalists, even though he himself in the end, as I think that's what meant when you said, you referred to Khudri's comments on the internal environment in Bernard as a kind of crypto-teleology, well, right. So Milion Atelier has something weakly vitalistic about it. What I meant to say is in the case of Bernard, it does seem like an interesting problem to me sort of almost at times like a repressed problem for him. By the time of the late 19th, early 20th century, and this is a question, I'm just putting it in the form of a comment, it seems like the word is not a very interesting word. It's just sort of, it means metaphysics or it means spiritualism or it means bad science, but it doesn't seem to have any special content to it. Is that a wrong impression? Does it have any interesting content to it? No. I think, well, in the example that, or in the brief mention that I make of the term, which is I think only in that via cholery, no, I'm kind of intentionally maybe like not invested in like delimiting what counts as vitalism or in labeling any of these things. People one way or the other, except insofar as, I think that the use of it as a slur clearly already, I don't know, slur is a strong word, but is it derogatory term already exists for the kind of philosophical actors that I'm looking at. And so there's a sort of self-consciousness, at least on like Aaron's part about, Bergson is perhaps like a little too vitalist and like it's not really, he doesn't wanna be seen as too aligned with that kind of metaphysical vitalism. And so, at least for me, like the interesting thing to track is exactly the kind of, what I would say is like a more epistemological definition of vitalism, which is just an investment in the line between life and non-life and specifically in biology as its own discipline as autonomous from the physical sciences. So like that is a kind of piece of vitalism that I am interested in tracking and less so the question of metaphysics or whether this is like being, the term is being used too broadly. So I don't know if that kind of gets at your question. Okay, okay. I mean, thank you. So I would add that at least in the work of someone like Lidon Heck, vitalism is used as an almost straw man argument. So there's a kind of polemical use of vitalism that allows individuals in this space to articulate certain positions but they have this idea of what vitalism is and then they say, well, I'm against this account of vitalism, I am against that account of vitalism and look at these vitalists who are unscientific and or who make all sorts of metaphysical claims or claims about organisms and evolution or development. I'm interested in making these claims because I myself am a scientist. But Phil has a question and I wanna, or a comment I wanna get right to him. Phil, you're muted. I don't you take the question on the, from the audience first and then you can come in. Sure, sure. That's right, thank you. Okay, so Eric Holloway notes for his question. What did Aaron think was responsible for evolution in the past? Or did he just think it was something unlike anything we can know from the present or is it otherwise unknowable? I just muted myself instead of undoing myself, sorry. So my set, my read is that he essentially kind of adopts that the kind of agnosticism about exactly which things governed, which natural laws or which processes, mechanisms governed evolution in the past, but not, I mean, he's sort of because he catches cholery exactly at this moment of what I call sort of a certain kind of epistemic modesty and where he's saying, there's like certain things we may never know. I mean, it's not a question of whether, but exactly whether the mechanisms can be understood. And that I'm suggesting becomes a piece of our own sort of perspectival philosophy of history where he's not saying you can't know anything about the past and he certainly isn't claiming to like weigh in within the biologists debates, but he's sort of like taking up this biological problem and seeing a parallel with this historical question of how much can you know about the past from this very local perspective of the present? So it's not a matter of casting doubt on natural history, but just on whether you can create a kind of universal picture of how it all transpired. Phil, you had a question or comment? I had a question here. First of all, I wanna thank you for very interesting paper and making generating some very interesting connections that I hadn't actually thought about, but then that's where my question comes from. You made a comment and maybe you could flesh this out a bit that these people drawing on these neo-Lamarkean views were in fact, they seem to be pessimistic about the progress in history. And it would seem that it would be working in as a Lamarckian, you would be working another way. And I mean, I'm thinking of something that's coming out of that environment like Tyre de Chardin, for example, you get these very progressivist kind of views, whereas, and yet you seem to say that they're really pulling away from that and there really isn't a progressionist view of the philosophy of the history, which would seem just intuitively anti-Lamarkean, but maybe you could comment on that. No, I think you're pushing me on a kind of maybe some imprecise language or like that I wouldn't say, I think what I was trying to get at in more like, in more general terms is a move away from the kind of optimistic, a kind of epistemological optimism that you could really see the direction that history was gonna go in based on these sort of universal laws of history. And not so much, well, not so much a story of decline, although again, via Le Dantek potentially of stasis or like a question of like how much more is there to go? I mean, maybe this is like the end and whether or not that's a pessimistic or optimistic view is it really depends on the interpreter or the pot and also the exact political persuasion of the interpreter of that idea. So I think maybe your point, I think I could be more precise and I can think about how to be more precise about why, what's the relationship between like progressive, universal and like optimistic versus pessimistic and I have to go back and see whether I could improve the wording but that's what I was getting at. Okay, so in other words, I mean, but you put a quite a bit of emphasis on the restriction that had been posed by this one particular scientist that caller is reading Dantek that is pretty much saying that we're limited in this and this would give us at least I'm understanding where this might be coming from, yes. Yes, so we're limited in the reason that that's sort of a kind of pessimism is because what it means is that we can't, there's no way to recreate or to generate evolutionary processes in the present anymore. And so that could go with a kind of more general political pessimism or it could just be like, well, we're never going to be able to fully understand the mechanisms because it's done and nature herself has stopped experimenting. And so that is a more like a disciplinary pessimism you could say about the potential of evolutionary biology. Good, okay, thanks. Yeah, so there's also, I'll just add before getting to the Q and A that there's also this really fascinating book called The Concept of Equilibrium An American Social Thought by Cynthia Eagle Russa that talks about the ubiquity of equilibrium metaphors in the social science of thought in the United States. And I think that's across political persuasion. So it might be interesting in terms of looking at the ubiquity of this metaphor of stasis or equilibrium around the time that the Don Tech is riding and your figures as well. So Stuart Newman points out that a lot of this sounds like historical materialism without marks, which brings a, so can you respond to that a little bit or unpack sort of how that relates, how that assertion relates to your work? So it definitely, I mean, I don't, it's to me, I would say, one of my intuitions, I guess, going into this project years ago was that, oh, maybe people take up biology within history as a kind of replacement, because how do you anchor, yeah, how do you materially anchor history? I see that, I actually decided that that's not what I think is happening in these cases. I mean, it is a response to a kind of Marxist, so in some senses, it's also in conversation with Marxist history at the time, but I think actually that what I would say, perhaps criticism is maybe more applicable to the uptake of biology and contemporary history right now where people are returning to biology as a kind of resource to write the history of the Anthropocene and this new allegiance. I think, anyway, that's a much longer conversation. That was my first intuition years ago. I actually think it is not an attempt to kind of do secret historical materialism, it's actually an attempt, it's actually connected to attempts to really elevate contingency and unknowability, which I would say is counter to that cut to historical materialism. Okay, so we are now getting lots of questions. So one, so this question is from Alejandro Brejas-Tajeda in which he says, thank you very much for the talk, excellent work. Could you say something about Kori's later reconstructions of the history of biology? For example, in his book, Les Etapes de la Biologie, how was his historiography laid out? Did he publish there or was he pushed there for, did he push there for a particular philosophy of history? And if not, did it, and if so, did it coincide with the one advocated by Aron? I would, oh, yeah, no. I really don't know that text well. I think that's a great question that it makes me want to read that later text. I don't, I mean, does it coincide with Aron? I don't want to actually even guess given my lack of knowledge of the text. I wish this was more of a dialogue because then I would ask why that's, why is that the text in particular you're interested in? So maybe that can be like an email conversation. I'd love to talk more. Okay, and Eric Holloway questions, what changed between the French biologists and the modern biologists? The French seem very skeptical regarding a Mendelian mutation, natural selection, driving evolution, but that seems to be what all biologists believe today. So what happened to these French objections? So I would like seriously, this is something that other people have written a lot about and I would be like, I think there are people here who could probably speak better to like, why is it that, what brought the French into line with the modern synthesis? And I only rely on other people's work when I go over this in my own. So I feel like there could even be somebody else in this room who wants to say, what is it that meant that we went from the story I just told to like the Nobel Prize going to Jacobin Menod and Lough like, and I'm also pretty hesitant to make causal arguments to begin with. And anyway, it's, there are lots of experts on that question. Okay. So we have one minute, so that leaves just a little bit of time for David's comment or question. You're muted, David. On the answer to the last question, I think that we should refer to Dick Berian's work and I wish he could say something about it because he and Jean Guillaume really did try to address exactly that question. My question is related and I'm not sure. It occurs to me that the phenomena that they were stressing on as opposed to heredity that you listed were plasticity, fitness, and how do you get new phenotypes? Well, a remarkable list of things that, it seems to me that the Dubjansky wing of the modern synthesis actually tried to answer those within a neo-Darwinian framework. I wonder if they were conscious of trying to do that. Conscious of trying to answer the, took conscious of doing that within a neo-Darwinian framework? Yes, yes, highly get that inside, yeah. I'm not, I take your point about that triad being interesting and I don't exactly know what the answer is. I mean, yeah, I'm not sure. It's a good question anyway, I think. Okay, so any further questions from the audience? Any further questions from our panelists because we really have to move on because we are right up on where we have to have but John Jackson's talk on rhetoric and history and philosophy of science. Thank you again, Isabel, it's fantastic. Very good. John Jackson is a professor in the James Madison College of Public Affairs at Michigan State University. He specializes in the history, philosophy and rhetoric of the scientific study of race. His work has appeared in ISIS, philosophy of science, rhetoric society quarterly and other journals. He's the author or editor of six books, the most recent of which is Darwinism, Democracy and Race, co-written with David DePew. Hello everyone, my name is John Jackson. I'm a professor in the James Madison College of Public Affairs at Michigan State University. And I have had the honor of being one of David DePew's co-authors on our recent book. I guess it's four years old now, Darwinism, Democracy and Race. And I want to speak on the rhetoric in the history and philosophy of science. David and I share more than just co-authorship. We met in 2002 at a workshop he put together at the University of Iowa. And we found ourselves in this unique position. I was trained as a historian of science. He was trained as a philosopher of science. And because of the arc of our academic careers, we both found ourselves in departments of communication where we were introduced or reintroduced to the discipline of rhetoric and found out how rhetoric can help us both in our work and our shared interests in the history and philosophy, particularly of biology. So my goal for today is to go through these four, I guess five topics on what we mean, what I mean by the history and philosophy of science often talked about just with the initials, HPS. And my first point here is that there is an ongoing tension within HPS as a distinct discipline that I will outline for you. Talk about how HPS appeared before Thomas Kuhn's important work, the structure of scientific revolutions first published in 1962 and a second edition in 1970. Perhaps the most important philosophy of science book written in the post-war period and added to our vocabulary, not just in the academy but beyond the academy with its talk of paradigms and paradigm shifts and things like that. Talk about HPS after Kuhn and then intervene in that idea through the notion of rhetorical argumentation as a way forward for HPS, that if HPS adopted more strategies as outlined in rhetorical argumentation, it could show new insights into the discipline of HPS that would solve some of those tensions I've outlined in the first point. And then finally, I'm gonna talk some about David DePue's contribution in bringing rhetorical argumentation into HPS. So that's our agenda for today. So this is the first topic. When I say there's a tension within HPS, what am I talking about? What is the tension that I'm trying to address? Well, this quotation from the first editorial note in a new journal in 1970, The Studies in History and Philosophy of Science outlines it fairly well. And I'm not going to read this for you word for word. But the idea here is, is that there is a hope or a goal that historically informed and philosophically sensitive scholarship can reveal things about the practices and theories of science that would otherwise be hidden. The problem is, is that each of these disciplines, history and philosophy of science are also freestanding disciplines. And merging them together, and anyone who's done interdisciplinary work knows this is the case, merging together two disciplinary approaches in a single work is beset with dangers. And the danger in this case is that philosophy of science is looking for generalities, looking for normative features of science in order to pass judgment on science as being philosophically sound or not. Historians of science don't have that emphasis. They're interested in thick descriptions of scientific practices or theories, the actual lives and institutions of science, which may not be philosophical in nature. And I just point out my own training as a historian, when I look at this quotation, I get a little, you know, what is this minutiae of this dismissive minutiae of historical scholarship part of me says. That's the point, right? The point is to get into the details. Details are important. We shouldn't gloss over them. And then I check myself and realize that's my own disciplinary training. And I'm reminded of my work with David, where I would send him three or four pages of incredibly detailed descriptions of a particular scientific paper or experiment that I thought was really important. We need all this detail in there and he would be able to take it and meld it into a kind of a beautifully crafted paragraph that in fact distilled everything that was important over my three pages. And this is an example of his strengths in philosophy checking my over eager approach to the minutiae of historical scholarship. So this is the problem, right? We have two different disciplines trying to write together but often getting pulled in opposite directions because of the demands of the discipline. And I can't help be reminded of Alice through the looking glass when the white queen officer a job as my lady's made because you get jam every other day. And Alice politely declines and says I don't even like jam. And the queen says the rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, never jam today because it's jam every other day and today isn't any other day you know. And this is kind of what HPS is like. You can drop down into this literature almost any year you want and you can find oh history and philosophy science used to work so much better and now it's falling apart jam yesterday. We have to do something to make it better jam tomorrow. They're never satisfied with the state of the field as it exists. So let's talk about this. Let's talk about what HPS and this is before HPS almost had a name as a disciplinary standing but against kind of a common interpretation I hold that in fact history and philosophy of science were melded together better before Thomas Kuhn than after Thomas Kuhn's famous book. What do I mean by that? Well, the founder in many senses of the history of science as a freestanding discipline was George Sartin a Belgian scholar who came to the United States and landed at Harvard fleeing World War I who set out a vision for the field and Sartin was in very many ways a 19th century positivist. He really admired August Kuhn who put forth positivism named positivism as the growth of positive knowledge over time and Sartin was fully committed to this view and particularly the idea that science knowledge is a unified whole. Everything is connected to everything else. And so if you sit down to write science if you look at the second quotation here and he articulates this various ways in the 19 teens that the only rational way to subdivide this history is not to cut it all up according to countries and scientists but only according to time. And so Sartin would write these enormous volumes each covering 50 years of world history. So the history of science because of this positivist vision of Sartin was doing world history far before historians in general at least in the West were doing world history which started around the 1970s or so. But this idea that science is progressive Sartin took for granted and the goal of the history of science was to show the progressiveness of science and to show the unity of knowledge. Philosophers meanwhile starting in the 1920s and 1930s adopted a different form of positivism often called logical empiricism. So this philosophical quest which was also positivist in nature was to essentially re-describe science using the terms of logic. Logic had undergone a tremendous revolution at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and these philosophers thought their job was to offer rational reconstruction of scientific knowledge that we take physics in particular in fact exclusively physics and rationally reconstruct it using logical notation to show that it is in fact a rational enterprise. And one of these Hans Reichenbach one of these logical empiricists in this book in 1938 describes rational reconstruction as a fictive construction a better way of thinking than actual thinking. They did not believe or argue that scientists actually behaved in this way. Scientists did whatever scientists did it was a philosopher's job to pass normative judgment using the machinery of logic on science itself. And one reason this doesn't work very well I've always been struck this is from a Rudolph Karnap one of the great logical positivists all of whom fled Nazi Germany in the 30s because they were all internationalists and socialists but he Karnap came to this country and actually replaced Reichenbach at UCLA upon Reichenbach's death Karnap spent some years at the Institute for Advanced Study and there's this kind of wistful passages in his autobiography here on the right talking about how he just couldn't communicate with the physicists whose work he deeply admired because his work in the rational reconstruction of physics physics was so removed from what physicists were doing that in fact they couldn't even understand one another because Karnap's project was so removed from physics as actually conducted by physicists. And so here is a central problem for this idea of philosophers passing normative judgments onto physics that are completely if not absolutely separated from the actual practice of science which would seem to be a problem. All of this changes after the foundational work of Thomas Kuhn in 1962. And I'm not going to go through all of Kuhn's idea here of scientific revolutions Kuhn was a physicist at Harvard told by James Conan the president of Harvard to how about if you come up with a class that we can teach scientific methods to non-scientists and Kuhn has this idea. Well, let's go read some history of physics and what we will find out is that science progresses very nicely through the ages and sits down to read Aristotle's physics and is kind of dumbfounded by what he has found. This is nothing like modern physics this is completely different from modern physics. And in fact, maybe if we thought philosophically about how science has changed over time we might find things like Aristotelian physics does not translate in any straightforward way into Newtonian physics or Newtonian physics into Einsteinian physics. And this quotation on the right is the famous opening line of Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions which is the idea that if we look to the history of science we can ground our philosophical understandings in that history. And the idea is so you remember that the opening quotation I showed you from Buchdahl and Loudon was from 1970 there was this flowering of this notion of history and philosophy of science, HPS as its own discipline in Kuhnian footsteps here. How did it work out? Well, jam tomorrow, jam yesterday. So let's look. This was one of my professors actually who passed away a few years ago and I learned a great deal about the history of the philosophy of science from Ronald Geer. And he sounds not and not uncommon reaction to HPS which is there is no clear cut way that historical case studies could lead to certain philosophical conclusions. And until we unpack those specific ways that historical case studies can bring out general philosophical conclusions this is a futile sort of thing to do. And again, my historian training wants to rebel at this notion of case studies. Historians often would say we don't write case studies this isn't a case study. This is an historical account of specific events that appeared in time and space and are not in fact case studies of any larger general point that can only be achieved by you philosophers ripping the context from our finding and trying to apply it a historically to something else. Which is what L. Pierce Williams wrote in 1975. Should philosophers be allowed to write history? No, this is a rather notorious review he did of a biography of Michael Faraday written by Joseph Agassi. Williams had written his own biography of Faraday and found that Agassi's biography Agassi was a paparian so committed to the philosophy of science as expounded by Carl Popper that he twisted Faraday's research, his physics, his ideas in order to fit it into this paparian paradigm. Historians would argue that this is a mistake then at some point your philosophical conclusions should not be driving your historical research because what you do then is you go in and you try to find examples to prove your philosophy true rather than giving us an accurate account of what someone like Faraday actually did. This is an extreme but maybe not a typical response from historians to philosophers writing history of science. Meanwhile, Stephen Brush, historically informed physicist and in fact produced Good Histories of Physics publishes another rather notorious article should the history of science be rated X. One of the things Kuhn talked about is if you look at science textbooks textbooks written for the teaching of science they often begin with little potted histories of genetics or botany or quantum physics or whatever the science is. There's usually a little opening chapter there that presents the history of the discipline and of course this is a triumphant sort of history that leads us up until today. And Kuhn was a very harsh critic of what these textbook histories that in fact made hash. I'll Pierce Williams words of the actual kind of best historical accounts, the historical accounts with the best evidence and things like that. And Brush's point is that scientists shouldn't be reading this stuff, right? We're trying to train scientists here. And if you start telling budding scientists that this is due to social factors or this is due to prejudices of scientists or in fact that the classic experiment that proved X to be the case, in fact it was much messier and was much less clear cut that proved X was the case. And that is in fact an idea that came much later than the actual experiment itself. This is not a good way to teach scientists how to do science. And so you get this kind of three way poll between the need to inculcate scientists, which is these textbook histories supposedly did versus the actual work of historians of science who were upset at the philosophers who were mad at the, you know, it just, and a lot of this is clearly boundary work. A lot of this is kind of saber rattling at the borders of your discipline to make sure that, you know, you're not in the union, you shouldn't be doing this. And so I don't want to overstate this. There is a genuine intellectual problem here, but there's also a lot of worrying about one's own disciplinary credibility at the same time. And I will also say that, you know, brush produced very good histories of physics. At least that's my memory. It's been a while since I've looked at them. There are scientists who write good histories. There are historians who do good philosophy, but in general, as a rule, this pole between two disciplinary methodological requirements is a very real one and continues to be negotiated within HPS. So these quotations, the first two are from, these are my introduction when I was in graduate school to the discipline of HPS, which was almost, you know, Steve Fuller declared dead and Michael Roos, a very famed, a very good HPS scholar. Not perfect, but good. Not perfect like the rest of us. I was hoping to do HPS kind of work and it was confronted with this sort of thing upon my entry to graduate school. And this last quotation here just shows that this is an ongoing tension in HPS. The methodological standards of either discipline work against each other in a significant way. So that's the tension that I'm trying to address and that's the attention that I think David was well aware of when he entered into the Department of Communication at the University of Iowa and was maybe not introduced, but reintroduced to rhetorical traditions. So here's the need. The need in HPS is we need a theory of argument that makes normative judgments possible because that's what philosophy is all about. Philosophy is all about making a normative judgment about soundness of argument, rationality of argument, that idea, but that judgment cannot be divorced absolutely from actual scientific practices, which was the problem with logical empiricism, right? Your standards of judgment come from outside scientific practices. Science seems to work, so your judgment does not seem to be relevant if it's not logically valid, logical empiricist. Our buildings aren't falling down and our airplanes are flying. So we need to make normative judgments. Those judgments have to emerge out of scientific practice, but you can't just reduce your judgments to a description of scientific successes or failures. So when historians sit down to describe the past in detail, you cannot simply describe what went on and leave it at that where you need to be able to make some sort of judgment about what you have recounted. Where do those standards of judgment come from? How do we get to those standards of judgment? My answer, and I think David's answer is rhetorical argumentation provides us such a theory. So let me say some things about rhetorical argumentation right there, it's big and purple. Rhetoric has bad name. Oh, that's mere rhetoric. It's time to separate rhetoric from reality. That's not the kind of rhetoric we're talking about. Rhetoric is actually an ancient discipline, one of the first disciplines in the Western tradition. Aristotle wrote one of the first treatises on rhetoric. Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing any given situation, all available means of persuasion. Rhetoric is about persuasion. It's about how I convince you to adopt my point of view versus your point of view. But notice the other thing that Aristotle is emphasizing here in any given situation. What will persuade in one situation might not persuade in another situation. And you need to adjust your rhetoric, your argument to acknowledge in this situation, this is the way I will argue. In that situation, I will argue a different way. The quotations on the right are from one of, I think one of the better, if not the best, argumentation theorists in the post-war world, David Zarevsky at Northwestern University, who points out that rhetorical argumentation tended to construct theories as needed to explain or solve problems. It comes out of practice, rather than standing outside practice and trying to judge it in this way. And this goes back to Aristotle as well. Aristotle talked about deliberative rhetoric as you might find in a policy-making body such as Congress versus forensic rhetoric, which you would find in a courtroom versus apodictic rhetoric, which you might find in a speech at a funeral or a graduation or some sort of celebratory rhetoric, right? And he's developing theories of rhetoric in response to those different kinds of situations because those different kinds of situations are what exist on the ground. This second quotation from Zarevsky talks about this notion of fields and argument, field specific and contingent sorts of things. Where does Zarevsky get that idea? From this book. A book that was almost ignored by the philosophical community, but adopted, this is a quotation from Thulman, it's adopted by the communication community. Thulman writes this book in 1958. The philosophers don't like it, but it's selling like hotcakes in the United States. How can that be? It's because rhetoricians are picking up on it. Here's a work in epistemology that seems to be tied to the rhetorical tradition of recognizing situated addressed discourse versus one size fits all sorts of rationality. One of my other mentors, Bob Scott, opens the door further with a ethical view towards what it means if we say rhetoric produces knowledge. And these quotations, men may have recourse to universal ideals in which you are willing to affirm their faith, but every time you speak them, you've entered into the contingencies of speaking here and now. Might be right, might be wrong. It's primarily an ethical argument, which the second quotation makes clear. So where does David's work fit into this? David's work is, there's a lot of it. So I'm going to focus on three pieces. When David arrives at the University of Iowa, the project on the rhetoric of inquiry is still going strong. It starts in 1980, started by people outside rhetoric by historian, a political scientist and an economist who was looking to rhetoric because they were seeking different ways to talk about what it was their disciplines did. And David arrives in a very fertile ground for a developing rhetoric. And I'm just going to look at three pieces by David that show the expanding scope of his work. The first is from the Cambridge guide to Darwin. And if you read this quotation, what you see here is David talking about the real rhetorical situation that Darwin faced. So David here is not looking at, Darwin wrote a book, it got received and this is kind of his view of the rhetorical situation. Rather he is looking at this last sentence here, this discursive interaction. Darwin, if we look at six editions of the origin of species, Darwin is engaging in a process of responding to critics, anticipating response to critics and the only way to understand the situatedness of the origin of species is in this larger rhetorical context in which the interaction, the process of communication is central rather than the subject oriented, well, Darwin said this, a respondent said that, David is looking at the interaction itself which is I think the heart of the ontology of the rhetorical situation. One step larger, the rhetoric of evolutionary theory in which he takes the ideas he expanded in that first article, one step further into the modern synthesis, that's what the MS here is in this quotation. Yes, there is room for solid experimentation, observation, mathematical analysis, but also rhetorical criticism which cut even the most fertile theories down to proper size by showing they explain and when they do not. The situation, the situated discourse, this theory works in this situation, this other theory works in that situation and re-describing kind of the scientific process as one of rhetorical criticism that more accurately reflects both the historical record and gives us standards by which to judge whether or not the rhetorical criticism was justified or not, that comes out of the rhetorical situation rather than being imposed on it from the outside. And the final piece I will look at is the book that I wrote with David, this book was his idea. He came to me and said, I have this idea for a book, I'd like you to write it with me and I was thrilled and it was a wonderful sort of a process for me. I was flattered and thrilled that he did this for me. This sentence in the middle of the under these conditions, facts do not speak for themselves. They need someone to speak for them and for the larger visions they're asked to stand for. That once you have reached that stage of understanding facts do not speak for themselves, they are spoken for. They are spoken for by someone to someone else in a specific time, in a specific place. And then you are in a position to enact the goal and the wishes of HPS to understand that argumentation is in fact important, but argumentation that is situated and addressed is the proper mode of understanding scientists and science. And I'll leave you with this thought that this David's work is an exemplar of how rhetorical argumentation could be the jam HPS gets today. Thank you for your attention. And I hope we have a good conversation now. Thank you very much, John. And Isabel is going to moderate the question and answer session. Great. Okay, so yeah, thank you so much. This was fascinating and also really informative for me, just personally speaking. And I'm gonna give people a minute to either use the raise hand function or type a question in the Q and A box. And I guess that while I give people that time, maybe I could start with a question and then I'll go to Chris who's already raised his hand. So I guess my question is just about, I think how much credit you're giving Koon here and whether sort of you describe this dividing line where it's sort of like there's this like pre-lapsarian period where, I mean, that was also rhetorical at some degree, but like in the soft sense. And then there's this like period where and then what you describe afterwards is this kind of like disciplinary like you talked about like kind of boundary work where like can history and philosophy work together at all because are there just too much, two different of standards for what counts as rigor or whatever. And I guess my question was A, is Koon, does Koon get the credit and B, are there external factors like even like within the sciences that change? Do you think basically, do you think with the transformations in science which I know is like extremely big term whether that's like Cold War science, whether that's transformations in life sciences is anything about the object change? I mean, I know it does, but does that have an effect on this unity or disunity within HPS? Yeah, that's my question and then I'll go to Chris after you. Yeah, does Koon get the credit and or blame it for what's going on here? Well, it's interesting idea because if you look at some place like the University of Indiana, which has an HPS program, it started in 1958, I think. So two years before Koon and the leader of that was N. R. Hansen. And so I think you're absolutely right to say that Koon might have been writing the wave rather than causing a great break with the past. In fact, I think that's probably the right reading of Koon at this stage, ironically enough. Nonetheless, I think it's definitely true that Koon was enormously influential in terms of refiguring what a field could look like. Well, Koon, and I guess along with Hansen you have to go with Kwan, right? After 1953 and the two dogmas of empiricism and the end of determination of theories by evidence, all of a sudden you're kind of forced into naturalized if you're a philosopher and an epistemologist, aren't you forced into some sort of naturalized epistemology where epistemology no longer stands prior to empirical inquiry and you have to have a pragmatic sort of answer to that. And once you have committed yourself to that as a philosopher, history of science might become a good place for you to look. Now, unfortunately, I think at the same time in the 70s and 80s, the history of science as a discipline was changing kind of radically. It was moving away from a history of ideas and more towards institutional histories and that sort of thing. One of my mentors, another one of my mentors in graduate school, Sally Colstad, there was a big fight in the 70s and the 80s about whether or not the proper term was history of science in America or American science because the latter term seemed to indicate that American science was distinguishable from science elsewhere because it's in America and we have to locate it here and that has, you mentioned the Cold War, right? That sort of idea versus a universalistic kind of positivist science that happens to be in America but it's still science and it would look the same if it was in Germany, which I think causes a lot of tension. As for changes in the sciences themselves, I don't know, I don't know how to answer that, that's... Yeah, I mean, it's a crazy question, but yeah. Well, when I work with David, I always make him answer the hard questions, so yeah. I only meant like the object also changes a lot in the period you discuss, not just the discipline. Yeah, yeah. Chris, yeah. So I'm gonna actually have Betty ask her question because I ask a lot of questions. So, Betty, go ahead. Not a question, it's a comment sort of straddling Isabel's initial query about John's reconstruction of Coon and what happens afterwards and my memory is pretty close to identical. And the reason that I had the reaction that I had to the question about paradigm shift and I responded with Margaret Masterman's famous paper is that because I'm a student of L. Pierce Williams. Oh my goodness. And what people always say, oh, she's a pro-vine. When I go, yes, but I'm the only person who ever graduated from Cornell University who worked with both of them because nobody could work with both of them and no one could work with, you know, I mean, this is just a Cornell scene but John's reconstruction is pretty well as I remember it. Now, John, Pierce and his generation I think had very complicated views that his audience towards philosophy. Pierce actually believed that the two should go hand in hand but they were done badly. He hated Agassiz because Agassiz wrote a bad biography. I mean, it's, you know, they were competing with each other. And I do think Pierce's biography, it got the friser. It's still a magnificent contextual biography of Faraday. As an addition, I just have to say that Pierce's favorite human being, you're gonna love this. The person he mourned the most was Norris Russell. Russell Hansen because he died on his way to Cornell, on his way to Pierce in that plane crash. But I remember every time that he would mention these names, he would miss stuff. So I think what you're looking at, I mean, I really like what you're doing because it speaks to me. It resonates with what I was taught and how I experienced it. The other point to come back to the question about Fuller and just to Isabel, what happens in the 1980s is it gets even worse because SSK, right? Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and various streams coming from Mannheim and people who are entering, what comes the Edinburgh School. And then you have different kinds of contextualism. And what happens to Pearson's generation is that they literally go out of their minds and we were banned in graduate school from reading a lot of the sociological literature. We could read some of the philosophy and we would be reading, we would read Lakatos, we would read Fire Aben, this quotation, the creeps and incompetence in the history of science. We'd laugh about that, but we were not allowed to read sociology. And when he developed this program at Cornell in the history and philosophy of science and technology, he insisted on teaching historiography because in history and philosophy of science because he didn't trust the philosophers to be integrating HPS in the way that they should be integrated. So just to come back, John, I think you hit the nail on the head with this period and what happens, it's very complicated and interesting. Well, I think your comment that nobody could work with Provine and Williams. I mean, I think that speaks to actually something that is very real, which is the politics of disciplines and the politics of departments, right? If you're a philosopher, you're expected to publish in philosophy journals. If you're a historian, you're expected to publish in history journals and those expectations are real ones and they impact people's lives and they impact what you are going to be writing. And in fact, I didn't start, I have a couple of philosophy articles and I didn't start doing those until tenure was no longer a concern and all that stuff. That's, and at the department level, of course, it's even more personal and more difficult. So I think that's a very real thing too that struggles against the unification of two different disciplinary perspectives. And as you know, I mean, I was in the history department for 14 years, tenured and promoted. You don't have a book out, you're dead meat. Well, any more, you don't have a book out, why should we hire you as assistant professor? One of my clearest members in the early 90s is, and I'm going to take his name somewhat in vain here, Ron Numbers from the University of Wisconsin was visiting, giving a talk and he, in the conversations, the bar afterwards, saying, yeah, we're hiring a new assistant professor. And our first question is, do you have a book contract or a book out? And if you don't, well, forget it. And this is 1992 or something like that. And Roger Stewart, the founder of my program in the history of science at Minnesota said, well, that's good to know, that's good to know. And all I could do is just think to myself, Roger, the first time you published a book, they promoted you to full. And that kind of, I mean, that kind of real life, back particularly on young scholars mitigates to some, there are what, how many HPS programs in the country where you could probably get a job. You need to have a strong disciplinary identity here or there. And that's just, that's just, it's a brutal, brutal job market. Can we read the question from the audience? Yeah, I was gonna say read the question from the audience. I would hate to end on that note. So a question from, personally speaking, James Hoffman says, would you agree with Steve Fuller that one of the failings of HPS was a lack of impact on the politics of science policy and so requiring something like social epistemology? I don't agree with Steve Fuller on very many things. Compared to what, I guess, would be my question. You can say what you want about Thomas Kuhn. One thing you can't say is that he didn't have an impact on the larger culture. That is not something you can say about, well, Steve Fuller or me or fire oven or, you know, I mean, it's very hard to make inroads in, I mean, I teach at a public policy college. And again, they're trying to make an impact upon science policy or something like that. It is a tricky thing. Not that it doesn't happen, but it's going to be an institutional sort of thing. The sort of program that is hosting us today, for example, is a good example of how humanities can make a real impact on science policy and how science operates. But that requires a true commitment on the part of institutions that I think we need more of. And HPS could definitely, I think, influence that kind of thing. And I think our program hosting us today is an example of some good things that can happen from that kind of work. So I will make just two quick comments to close this discussion because we really are at time and it's been a long day for everyone. So one note I will say is the difference between the reception of someone like Kuhn and someone like Michael Polanyi is really an interesting issue. And there's been some really good historical work on the relative reception of both of those authors whose arguments are quite close. And there's been a resurgence in the interest in the history of the philosophy of science, but that we need to do more of that. And I would also say, because Isabel and I have talked about this, in the 70s and 80s, you get something called intellectual history from the sort of Quitten Center, J.J. A. Pocock School, which addresses and approaches ideas in much the same way as rhetorical argumentation, but really don't work very much on science and on history of biology in particular. And it really is a disciplinary divide that you get, for example, with my mentor, Dorothy Ross, in the history of social sciences, but you don't get so much in the history of the biological sciences, say history of psychology and psychology and brain science. So there's a very complex picture about a series of engagements, particularly in the 1980s, and particularly in something called the Cambridge history of ideas that end of the Cambridge history of modern science that did not really occur, though I think is a very fascinating story. So any last comments from our panelists, any last comments from our remaining audience members that have been a long day? David, do you want to say something quickly? I just wanted to thank John for his talk, which captures, I think, pretty much what I had in mind. And also to say that working with him, I mean, basically it was a blast. I mean, we really, we had a good time. I want to say that the rhetoric approach isn't a kind of panacea because if you do this, you're going to have to kind of triangulate because you're going to get objections from historians, philosophers and rhetoricians. And that's great because then you try to correct it in accordance with what they say and your judgment. And that's the way I think it works well. I also want to thank Chris and for putting this together for all of you who've been there. It's just renewed old friends. I would love to be sitting down with a glass of wine with all of you. Also to thank Chris Wetterstrand, Devona, Gerald and all the other people on the staff who've made this a real beautiful smooth operation by paying attention to a lot of detail. So that's all I wanted to say. I appreciate this a lot. Thank you, David. So I have some brief closing remarks. It's mostly a thank you. So I'll say that today we have been treated to six rich and fascinating talks. And I think these lectures and our discussions have addressed some of the key themes and threads of David's work. And as many speakers have underscored, David has contributed so many discussions, so many disciplines. Really impossible to do any sort of complete justice to the range and depth of his work across many areas in the history and philosophy of biology. As intense and as varied as our discussions have been and as deep as our engagement has been with various topics, I just want to emphasize that we really are still just beginning to address many unchallenged frameworks from mechanism and vitalism to Darwinism, to the status of biology as a science which has come out great deal in its origins. And that for the history and philosophy of biology, the task is to continue this work of complexifying these histories while also keeping in mind contemporary relevances, particularly for scientists who are becoming, I think increasingly interested in the history and philosophy of science and in the history and philosophy of biology, you see many individuals who do both kinds of work. And this has been the case for many years and I'm really glad to see these kinds of inputs. And I think the imperative here is to really also think about what figures are we writing about? What figures are we reading? What canonical accounts and what speakers are we thinking about in our histories? And all of the presentations to one degree or another challenge people that we consider to be primary historical actors and people that we consider to be quote unquote peripheral. I always think is a very difficult and problematic label. And I think we've done much good work today and really on coverings and giving good examples of how to do this work. So in conclusion, I would really like to thank all of our invited speakers. All of you spent a great deal of time and energy working on your talks and pre-recording them. And it has been a new experience for many of you during this process that we try to make it as smooth and as engaging as possible for a conference of this complexity. I'd in particular like to thank David DePue who throughout has helped me conceptualize this meeting and to think about the topics to be covered and the figures to be addressed. And in closing, I'd especially like to thank my, and of course I'm very influenced by David's work so it's been quite an honor to do this. I'd especially like to thank my branch chiefs here at Bates, Alvaro and Senus, Geryl Simani, William May, the communications of the liaison branch and the NHGRI for providing a unique space for the history of genomics program which is the sponsor along with the Institute of this meeting. And I think we will have some events upcoming and I encourage all of you on the panel and all of you in the audience to keep a lookout for future meetings and future events. We would love to see you again. Thank you very much to the audience in particular for 33 or 34 really challenging questions. We couldn't have done this without you. So it's a bit late and so everyone have a nice Thursday. Thank you very much. Thank you. Nice rest of Thursday. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks Chris, Bravo David, Bravo Chris. Great to make big conference. Thank you all.