“Natural Disasters and Public Science: Earthquakes from Lisbon to Istanbul”

Geert Vanpaemel (KU Leuven)

This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of public science as a specific type of science-based discourse immersed in political and social culture. It differs from academic science in its epistemological foundations, in the structure of its arguments as well as in the measure of engagement affecting the parties involved. Although public science moves on a continuous scale between the academy and the public sphere, its essential features may be so different from academic standards that scientists may feel ill at ease in this new environment. The current paper attempts to delineate more clearly the boundaries between academic and public science by analyzing the early modern debates on earthquakes as a particular type of natural disasters. These debates were fueled on the one hand by scientific knowledge derived from Aristotle’s Meteorology and Cartesian cosmology, but were framed on the other hand by the immediate needs of the surviving communities, either on a political, social or religious level. The focus will be on the modes of selection and presentation of information, on the use and the nature of authority, and on the measure of congruence or divergence between scientific understanding and popular beliefs.

“Growing Patriotism: The Royal Economic Society of Guatemala, Agricultural Science, and Local Autonomy in the Late Colonial Period”

Scott Doebler (Pennsylvania State University)

From 1796 to 1800, members of the short-lived Royal Economic Society of Guatemala (Real Sociedad Económica de los Amantes del País de Guatemala) carried out—among other activities—agricultural and botanical experiments with the intention of creating useful contributions to the economic well-being of the region. This paper examines archival material related to these botanical and agricultural experiments as well as print sources of their semiannual public meetings. Responding to the Bourbon Reforms, the organization’s members mobilized Spanish Enlightenment discourses to bolster their credibility, to justify developing new agricultural methods, to legitimate their scientific projects, and to co-opt indigenous knowledge into the service of empire. The meetings displayed the rhetoric of ardent patriotism with practical scientific and industrial innovations, yet local elites subtly used these developments to seize a measure of control over the reforms. The organization offered avenues to criticize existing imperial structures, to undermine royal monopolies, and to access international learning networks. Agricultural and botanical science served larger political projects and furthered elite efforts to win greater local autonomy under the guise of useful imperial improvement. It was precisely this prying of control from traditional peninsular power structures that seems to have caused the operations of the organization to be suspended in 1800, only to be restarted in 1810 in the political vacuum that eventually led to independence, only this time with an even more intense discourse of local patriotism and autonomy.

“The Circulation of the Conflict Thesis as a Political Tool in Fin-de-Siècle Spain”

Jaume Navarro (University of the Basque Country)

Who should be in charge of “true” science in a country with a relatively meagre scientific tradition? This paper explores the ways the so-called conflict thesis circulated from its original Protestant, mainly Anglo- Saxon, milieus into the Spanish Catholic and anti-Catholic cultures of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I shall discuss the sources from which the clerical and anti-clerical intelligentsia received the arguments in their respective attempts to appropriate the legitimacy and control of science. Seldom were the likes of John Draper or Andrew White and their naturalism and materialism derived from a specifically Protestant tradition of natural theology, but Germans like Haeckel, French sociology and literary criticism as well as the anti-modernist crusade promoted by the Vatican that provided the arguments on both sides of the camp. The Spanish situation at the turn of the century, with the loss of Cuba and the Philippines to the Americans, triggered a climate of general pessimism and mutual blame in which the lack of technological and scientific culture was attributed to the excesses of clericalism, monarchism, liberalism or socialism. Except for a few exceptions, all camps in conflict presented themselves as promoters of “true” science in an attempt to legitimize their political and social agendas.

“'Monographs on the Universe': Ernst Haeckel’s Evolutionary Monism in American Context, 1866- 1883”

Daniel Halverson (Case Western Reserve University)

Ernst Haeckel was one of the nineteenth century’s most famous and influential scientists, and science popularizers. According to one historian of biology, he was “the chief source of the world’s knowledge of Darwinism” in his time. He was also one of the chief sources of the world’s knowledge of what has come to be called, in our time, the “conflict thesis” in the history of science and religion. At the same time, he endeavored to set up his own Darwinian-romantic theology, the forgotten religion of monism, in the place of Christianity. This paper makes use of new information technologies to gather documents which have been largely inaccessible in the past, on account of the difficulty of finding and sorting them. It aims at a comprehensive discussion of Haeckel’s influence in the United States at this time – with lay people, with clerical audiences, and with other scientists. I find that Haeckel’s ideas met with a poor reception in the United States, because they faced a steep “cultural gradient,” as between the monarchical, romantic, and sharply anti-Catholic values prevalent in Haeckel’s native Prussia, and the democratic, empirical, and mildly anti-Catholic values prevalent in the United States. In the “struggle for their existence,” Haeckel’s evolutionary monism faced superior competition from evolutionary world-explanations which originated within an Anglo-American context, and which were, in consequence, better “adapted,” so to speak, to their “environment.”