Peter J. Bowler
Encyclopedia
- for the English environmental campaigner and country diarist, see Pete BowlerPete BowlerPeter "Pete" Bowler was an English environmental campaigner, natural historian, wildlife photographer, journalist and politician...
.
History of science and technology
The history of science and technology is a field of history which examines how humanity's understanding of the natural world and ability to manipulate it have changed over the centuries...
who has written extensively on the history of evolutionary thought
History of evolutionary thought
Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity, in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese as well as in medieval Islamic science...
, the history of the environmental sciences, and on the history of genetics
History of genetics
The history of genetics started with the work of the Augustinian friar Gregor Johann Mendel. His work on pea plants, published in 1866, described what came to be known as Mendelian Inheritance...
. His 1984 book, Evolution: The History of an Idea is a standard textbook on the history of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
, and was substantially revised in 2003 and a 25th anniversary edition came in 2009. His 1992 book The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 describes the scientific and social challenges to Darwinism which led many to abandon the theory in the first part of the twentieth century.
Peter Bowler holds a BA from the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
an MSc from the University of Sussex
University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....
and a PhD from the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
. In the 1970s he taught at the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Universiti Sains Malaysia is a public university with its main campus in Penang, Malaysia. There are three branch campuses: one in mainland Penang , one in Kelantan on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, and a offshore collaboration with a university in India...
, Penang. He is currently a professor in the history of science
History of science
The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....
at Queen's University Belfast, and is an elected Fellow
Fellow of the AAAS
Fellow of the AAAS is an honor accorded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to distinguished persons who are members of the Association. Fellows are elected annually by the AAAS Council for "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications [which] are...
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
and a corresponding member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences. He was President of the British Society for the History of Science 2004-6.
His current interests are in the development and implications of Darwinism
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
, the history of the environmental sciences, science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
and religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
(especially twentieth century), and popular science writing.
Current research is on the production of popular science literature in early twentieth-century Britain, with particular emphasis on the role played by professional scientists. Bowler discusses the attempts by Victorian scientists to promote science for public understanding and the increasing accessibility of popular science works.
Professor Bowler has been a vocal critic of creationism
Creationism
Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...
in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
. He has made numerous appearances on local radio, including interviews with William Crawley
William Crawley
-Television presenter:He recently presented Blueprint, a three-part television natural history series, which ran from 31 March 2008, as the centre-piece of the most ambitious multi-platform broadcasting project in the history of BBC Northern Ireland. The Blueprint season united TV, radio and online...
on BBC Radio Ulster shows TalkBack and Sunday Sequence - here he defended evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
and highlighted the non-scientific nature of creationism.
Select publications
- Q&A Darwin: Off the Record (with foreword by Richard Dawkins) (Duncan Baird, 2010).
- Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2009).
- Evolution: the history of an idea (4th ed., California, 2009).
- 'Darwin's Originality', in Science (9 January 2009: Vol. 323. no. 5911, pp. 223 – 226) DOI: 10.1126/science.1160332
- 'Experts and publishers: writing popular science in early twentieth-century Britain' in British Journal for the History of Science, xxxix (2006).
- (With I.R. Morus) Making modern science: a historical survey (Chicago, 2005).
- 'The spectre of Darwinism: popular images of Darwinism in early twentieth-century Britain' in A. Lustig, R.J. Richards and M. Rose (eds), Darwinian Heresies (Cambridge, 2004).
- Reconciling science and religion: the debate in early twentieth-century Britain (Chicago, 2001).
- Life’s splendid drama: evolutionary biology and the reconstruction of life’s ancestry, 1860–1940 (Chicago, 1996).
- Charles Darwin: the man and his influence (Cambridge, 1996).
- The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)