The backstage world of the Nobel Prize is the subject of two new pieces in Metascience, by the historian of science Richard Burkhardt, Jr (on the early 70s awards) and the Nobellist Martin Chalfie (on the reputational consequences of winning).
Both pieces now available online: tinyurl.com/59vhu4n6
"A primary merit of the work is the heuristic clarity it brings to a field often clouded by conceptual slippage."
For more from Daniele Pizzocaro's review of a new philosophical study of absolute magnitudes, see link.springer.com/article/10.1...
"Science doesn't self-correct because it follows a magical method guaranteeing truth. Rather, it self-corrects because scientific communities cultivate dispositions toward criticism and revision."
Byron Hyde's double review of Bárdos & Tuboly and Fernandez-Beanato: tinyurl.com/5e8v5eh7
Operationism in Psychology's "distinctive contribution is to elevate descriptive and taxonomic work in psychology to first-class epistemic status and to dispel caricatures of operationism as a failed positivist relic."
Thomas Spiteri's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
"Revisiting the Eclipse of Darwinism offers a stimulating re-appraisal of a historiographic category that, for all its limitations, continues to influence how we see the history of evolutionary theory today."
Elizabeth Schulz's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
@yixuanli623.bsky.social
Science Interrupted calls "for a science that embraces fragility as a productive force by the establishing of environments open to uncertainty and adaptability, while recognising the agency and capacity of groups too often marginalised or overlooked."
Yixuan Li's review: tinyurl.com/mpptnp2k
Energy in the Early Modern Home "challenges linear and simplistic images of an easy transition to a 'material modernity', and instead reveals the effectiveness of cultural anchors, social differences and conventions."
Margareth Lanzinger's review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
In Rebecca Lemov's Instability of Truth, truth "is not there to be stable or unstable, but is continuously created, affirmed and promoted. In this new study, it is people who emerge as unstable."
Read Roger Smith's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
In Disputed Inheritance, "the inheritance being disputed is, as expected, Mendel’s 1866 paper [....] But there is a second inheritance that is also being disputed in Radick’s book—cultural inheritance—and that is a riveting and important battle."
Scott Gilbert's review here: tinyurl.com/2uftxzrb
@kevinlala.bsky.social @princetonupress.bsky.social
Evolution Evolving "has this rare quality of leaving the reader not only better informed, but also better equipped to see evolutionary problems from an entirely new vantage point."
Read Simon Oklholm's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
"Historians of science interested in the 1980s [...] can profitably learn from one another by comparing how scientists of different stripes moved through the greedy waters they swam in."
Joseph Martin's review of Greedy Science: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
In Rivals, Lorraine Daston "shows again and again how well she understands both the roles of social and disciplinary elites and the power politics of science."
Mitchell Ash's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Peter Bowler's Evolution for the People "does justice to all of the hard work that has been put into excavating the lives and works of popularizers of evolution."
Read Bernard Lightman's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
"There are times when one could hear Morgan Freeman’s voice dubbed in saying something like, “Little did Einstein realize that the problem was not with this approach...""
Read Steven Gimbel's review of recent Einsteiniana: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
"The American Phage Group (APG) is arguably one of the most famous, almost mythic, biological research groups of the twentieth century."
Neeraja Sankaran reviews a biography of founding APG member, Salvador Luria, and a history of the group itself: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The stories told in Women in the History of Quantum Physics "add new knowledge to how quantum physics was cultivated by marginal figures sometimes under difficult circumstances."
Read Helge Kragh's review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
We are excited to announce the publication of Volume 34, Issue 3 of Metascience!
Access the full issue here: link.springer.com/journal/1101...
Access the Table of Contents here: hpsleeds.wordpress.com/2025/11/28/m...
"Here is an exciting new way to think about the century that produced Darwinism."
Janet Browne's review of Martin Hewitt's Darwinism's Generations: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
@vicmanch.bsky.social
Staffan Müller-Wille's essay review of Gunnar Broberg's The Man Who Organized Nature here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
@princetonupress.bsky.social
"Reading the book, one can simply enjoy being taken on a tour through the bewildering diversity of projects and ideas that preoccupied Linnaeus throughout his life [...] The biography, however, also challenges some widely held assumptions about Linnaeus."
@bolman.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social
"Lab Dog is a landmark study. Brad Bolman’s history of what might seem a niche subject is, in fact, an original and illuminating exploration of key aspects of the biological and biomedical sciences in the twentieth century."
Read Michael Worboys' review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
"Neil Barton's main thesis in Iterative Conceptions of Set is that there is a tension at the heart of the iterative conception, whose resolution requires us to decide between at least two independently plausible but mutually exclusive principles of set-construction."
Read Daniella McCahey’s review here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
@matthewswiseman.bsky.social @uoftpress.bsky.social
In Matthew Wiseman's Frontier Science, "the Arctic – or the more nebulous geographical term “the North” (33–35) – takes centre stage as the crux in the relationship between science and the Canadian military […] both as a natural laboratory and as a borderland that required protection."
Find Jean Marc-Wolff's review of the book here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
@princetonupress.bsky.social
Myles W. Jackson's "Broadcasting Fidelity" is "a beautiful academic study on the genesis and life of a complex technical object, well located in the interweaving of its scientific, technical, social, cultural and political contexts and attentive to the play of its various actors."
