Abstract
Many (including the author) argue that reading the classics in the field should be part of a scientist’s education. However, how you read the classics can be very different depending on whether you read them as a historian or as a practicing scientist. This point will be made by comparing two readings of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and by looking at the use that Stephen Jay Gould made of the history of science in his quest to promote his scientific ideas.
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Notes
I am greatly indebted to the editor of this journal for help in identifying sources that insist on the importance of the history of science in science education. If a knowledgeable person accuses me of plagiarism in this first section, I can only reply “It’s a fair cop!”.
The condescending treatments of Darwin along these lines are legion. Look at Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959).
Ernst Mayr is in the sights of both of them.
This is from the Critique of Pure Reason (first edition, A, 1781; second edition, B, 1787)
Intuition and concepts … constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. Thoughts without [intensional] content (Inhalt) are empty (leer), intuitions without concepts are blind (blind). It is, therefore, just as necessary to make the mind's concepts sensible—that is, to add an object to them in intuition—as to make our intuitions understandable—that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers, or capacities, cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only from their unification can cognition arise. (A50-51/B74-76).
References
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Ruse, M. Teaching the Classics: The Origin of Species as a Case Study. Sci & Educ 22, 2255–2265 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9547-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9547-4