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This paper builds upon a recent corpus of popular science that has elevated previously unsung members of the biosphere—"worts." It argues that the corpus constitutes a new natural theology, a search for meaning in the biosphere, and suggests a theological underpinning to what its authors intuit: that worts give meaning. To do this, the paper draws on Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think (2013) and its examination of meaning as a ubiquitous feature of the multispecies ecosystem. Following on from Kohn, two key arguments are made. First, Kohn's posthuman anthropology is compatible with a Thomist treatment of organisms in terms of their distinct, life-orientated telos. Second, the current context of potential human extinction puts a life-orientated telos in a new light, reviving the validity of teleological thinking. Sharing the fate of nonhuman subjects, rather than treating them as scientific objects, authors and readers of the new natural theology find meaning among worts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fans of science fiction offer an unusual opportunity to study that rare bird—a "public" view of science in history. Of course science fiction fans are by no means representative of a "general" public, but they are a coherent, interesting, and significant group in their own right. In this article, we follow British fans from their phase of self-organization just before World War II and through their wartime experiences. We examine how they defined science and science fiction, and how they connected their interest in them with their personal ambitions and social concerns. Moreover, we show how the war clarified and altered these connections. Rather than being distracted from science fiction, fans redoubled their focus upon it during the years of conflict. The number of new fanzines published in the midcentury actually peaked during the war. In this article, we examine what science fiction fandom, developed over the previous few years, offered them in this time of national trial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by reviewing the historical construction of ‘SciArt’, and the way in which its supposed interdisciplinarity often shaded into science communication. Early discussions about the complementarity of art and science were conceived in terms of epistemology, notably the qualities of imagination and curiosity. The paper moves on to discuss how, during the current decade, Art and Science (A&S) discourse has altered due to changes in the cultural politics of both its constituent fields, emerging as a ‘transdiscipline’ characterized by ‘creativity’. Eighteen in-depth surveys with leading practitioners in A&S form a substantial part of the research material, yielding an evaluation of what the disciplinary, economic and cultural implications of this changed discourse may be. Though potentially angled towards the solution of ‘wicked’ problems, transdisciplinarity also sacrifices the specific critical expertise of art, fetishizes tech at the expense of science and selectively ignores institutional problems inherent in funding and power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, the BSHS hosted two major online events, the first of their kind in our collective experience. The first, a Twitter conference, was planned and accomplished before COVID-19 had quite been established as a serious global issue. The conference was planned, rather, as an innovation in travel-free conferencing, something that has been on the BSHS agenda since the IPCC report of 2018, calling for net-zero-carbon activity in all areas by 2050. As we discussed the Twitter conference, and watched the amazing energy, intellect and resourcefulness of its planners and hosts, we quickly saw that online delivery offered other advantages too – chiefly, wider participation. The pandemic offered the society a chance to take these lessons very boldly into the most important event of our scholarly calendar, which usually takes the form of an in-person annual conference, but this time was executed as an online festival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mental Evolution in Animals (1883), George Romanes wrestled with the relationship between brain size and intelligence. He could not quite bring himself to say that a creature with a brain so tiny as the ant's was truly complex in its psychology. However, Romanes was radically out of step with the psychological developments that were shortly to follow, starting in continental Europe and spreading to the US. Beginning with the Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel, theorists began to dissociate ants' psychology from their (limited) physical brains. As in the nineteenth century, the family Formicidae continued to provide one of psychology's greatest riddles, but ants' minds now became dispersed across the colony, rather than residing in the individual brain. This paper explores how that physical unseating of the mind interplayed with human concerns of the twentieth century, and with the differing ontologies of human psychology associated with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines two Regency modes of reading: one drawn from the political philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), and the other from the gentleman of science William Whewell (1794-1866). Bentham's readings are presented as an experiment in radical democracy that was almost, but not quite, effaced by the idealist mode introduced one generation later by Whewell. These modes of reading, and the textual judgements that they entailed, are used to help understand the epistemology of scientific evidence in the Regency era. It is claimed that both literary and scientific judgements were, at root, political, and furthermore that judgement in the courtroom formed their model. Multiple levels of nested and epistolary fiction enabled readers to rehearse and attend to political arguments about the nature of scientific evidence: evidence that, in an era of high political tension, decided the case about nothing less than their own selfhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, the body was seen as both an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic entity. In the former case, its individual development, it was manifestly changeable, developing from embryo to maturity and thence to a state of decay. But in the latter case, concerning its development as a species, the question was an open one. Was its phylogenetic nature a stationary snapshot of the slow process of evolution, or was this too mutable? Historians have emphasised that the question of acquired inheritance remained open into the twentieth century; this paper explores how various constructions of the individual as a phylogenetic episode—a stage in the race’s evolution—related to representations of the body in the same period. A discussion of the work of the brothers Josef and Karel Čapek offers a contextualised answer to the question of bodily representation. Karel Čapek (1890–1938) explored the nature of the ‘average man’ through two different organisms, the robot and the amphibian, epitomes respectively of corporeal permanence and plasticity. Josef Čapek (1887–1945), along with other members of the Group of Plastic Artists, explored visual representations of the body that challenged cubist Bergsonian norms. In so doing, he affirmed what his brother also held: that despite the constrictions imposed by the oppressive political conditions in which the Czechs found themselves, the individual body was a fragile but fluid entity, capable of effecting change upon the future evolution of humankind. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Trophallaxis, the process of feeding by mutual regurgitation amongst insects, was named by the North American entomologist William Morton Wheeler in 1918. I argue that entomologists, both before and after 1918, saw mutual feeding as an integral part of the behavioral whole of the nest, and moreover related its explanatory power to theories about human society. In particular, feeding behavior was seen as the key to the riddle of the origin of sociality. I show how entomologists' precise interpretations of trophallaxis varied and explore the increasingly functional, sociological, and economic constructions of the phenomenon that they developed—without breaking with earlier tradition—into the early 1930s. The article ends by demonstrating how Aldous Huxley's bleak vision of humanity in the novel Brave New World, and its ambiguous prescription for meaningful life amidst the trappings of modernity, has much in common with metaphors generated by those studying ants. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the symbolism of ants in the article 'The Empire of the Ants' published by H.G. Wells in 'The Strand Magazine.' Psychological metaphors of savage/insectan threat; Relation of the social-colonial ant with the human inhabitants in the imperial colonies; Analysis on the domesticity of ants; Nature and implications of different mentalities for human and insect.

It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]