University of Haifa

University of California, Irvine

University of Alberta

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

State University of New York College of Optometry

Bryn Mawr College

California Institute of Technology

Lebanon Valley College

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Lowell Observatory

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Santa Fe Institute

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Environmental Resources Management

Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society held at Philadelphia for promoting useful knowledge

Carlos Chagas Filho, 12 September 1910· 16 February 2000

Floyd Ratliff, 1 May 1919 - 13 June 1999.

George Wald, 18 November 1906 - 12 April 1997.

"The poor man's riches, the rich man's bliss": regimen, reform, and the Journal of Health, 1829-1833.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn, 18 July 1922-17 June 1996

Paul Ehrlich and his Magic bullets--revisited.

Salvador E. Luria (13 August 1912-6 February 1991).

Roger Wolcott Sperry (20 August 1913-17 April 1994).

Demography in early Philadelphia, 1690–1860

Ogilvie, M. B. & Choquette, C. J. Nettie Maria Stevens (1861-1912): her life and contributions to cytogenetics. Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. 125, 292-311

Christian Wolff's prolegomena to empirical and rational psychology: translation and commentary.

Two refugee chemists in the United States, 1794: how we see them.

The 1699 diary of Gershom Bulkeley of Wethersfield, Connecticut.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904-August 18, 1990).

Giuseppe Montalenti (13 December 1904-2 July 1990).

William Bosworth Castle (October 21, 1897-August 9, 1990).

Psychology at Victorian Cambridge-the unoffical laboratory of 1887-1888

The Animadversiones of Ippolito Francesco Albertini (1748) on cardiac and precordial diseases which cause dyspnea.

From amateurs to professionals in American science: the controversy over the proceedings of an 1853 scientific meeting

Education and sex: the medical case against higher education for women in England, 1870-1900

Domestic Production and Foreign Trade: The American Capital Position Re-Examined

HE WORD PHILOMORPH was coined in the 1960s by a group of people who met from time to time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss form in nature, science, and art. One of the leaders of that group was Cyril Stanley Smith. Some of my own instincts and principles in research derive directly from Smith, so I have called myself a philomorph on this occasion. Smith reacted against the direction taken by physics—particularly solid state physics—in the twentieth century. He said that its "logical, analytical, reductionist" approach was far too narrow. Its paragon was the single crystal. Only very well defined and controlled local depar- tures from its perfect regularity were considered to be respectable sub- jects for research. Yet Smith saw that his own subject of metallurgy threw up a vast range of fascinating complex forms, mostly on the meso- scopic length scale—micrometres or greater—rather than the atomic scale of nanometres, which was the solid state physicist's preoccupa- tion. The phenomena that he admired, such as the patterned steel of a Damascus sword—a product of art, artifice, and nature—were of great utility and aesthetic value. As topics for research, these things had all the attributes that were abhorrent to many of his colleagues. They were often accidental, inci- dental, capricious. They were history-dependent (for which he coined the word funeous , after a character in a Borges story who tragically lost the capacity to forget). They were metastable, rather than repre- senting true thermodynamic equilibrium. And they were not directly related to the primary physical laws such as Schrödinger's equation. Furthermore his method was playful and eclectic rather than planned and focussed, and laid great emphasis on the power of anal- ogy. He even called it "holistic," but this may be misleading today. This was no New Age outcast from modern science: he wanted to broaden it, rather than to supplant it.

A Philomorph Looks at Foam 1

Geomorphic effects of urbanization in forty-one years of observation

NSCRIBED IN STONE on the Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copan is a description of Ruler 13, Waxaklahun Ub'aah K'awil, dying on 3 May AD 738 with k'a'ay u-?-sak-ik', "his breath expired in I war" (Stuart 2005, 385). After this evocation of the ruler's last breath, the inscription continues as a poetic lament in the form of a triplet: mi-'temple', mi-'altar', mi-kab'-ch'e'n? translated as "no pyramid, no altar, no earth/cave" (Hull 2003, 464) (fi g. 1). The "no" in these clauses was written by the Maya scribe with the partially visible quatrefoil glyph (T173). 1 In the Classic Maya inscriptions scribes also used this same glyph (T173) along with several other variants to write a sign that functioned as zero in their calendrics and mathematical calculations (fi g. 2). How to read this mi—"no"—and other Maya signs for zero is the topic of this essay. From the third to the fi fteenth century, in stone inscriptions and bark-paper screenfold manuscripts, the Maya calculated and repre-sented extraordinarily vast expanses of time, from the past through the present and into the future. In multiple parallel calculations they fol-lowed and recorded historical events and the movements of the sun, moon, Venus, and several other bodies in the sky. To record these com-plex calculations, they adopted and devised different written calendars and almanacs, several of which are written in a base-twenty place-value notation system that includes a visualized symbol for zero. With preci-sion and clarity, this zero was used as a placeholder in a system that al-lowed the Maya to grow their numbers exponentially.

[ 51 ] Maya Concepts of Zero

Sir Christopher Charles Booth 22 June 1924 13 July 2012

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach 17 January 1922 - 8 May 2012

Robert Joy Glaser 11 September 1918 - 7 June 2012

Evolution of Whales from Land to Sea

Can viruses make us human?

Jefferson's contributions to American ornithology are discussed.

Jefferson's Ornithology Reconsidered

Two Chips Off the Same Block: Benjamin Franklin's Library Company and Philosophical Society and the Saga of Their 275-Year Relationship

Cadet David Moniac: a Creek Indian's schooling at West Point, 1817-1822.

History of Medical Imaging

The gene.

The Brain and Its Self

In the early 1920s, determinist conceptions of biology helped to transform Better Babies contest into Fitter Families competitions with a strong commitment to controlled human breeding. While the earlier competitions were concerned for physical and mental standards, the latter contests collected data on a broad range of presumed hereditary characters. The complex behaviors thought to be determined by one's heredity included being generous, jealous, and cruel. In today's context, the popular media often interpret advances in molecular genetics in a similarly reductive and determinist fashion. This paper argues that such a narrow interpretation of contemporary biology unnecessarily constrains the public in developing social policies concerning complex social behavior ranging from crime to intelligence.

Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families: archival resources and the history of American eugenics movement, 1908-1930

Owsei Temkin (6 October 1902 - 18 July 2002).

Circe, Cassandra, and the Trojan pigs: Xenotransplantation

Lee J. Cronbach.

Carl Pfaffmann: 27 May 1913 - 16 April 1994.

Smithsonian Institution

XLAB Göttingen

NASA - Ames Research Center

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