From sunspots to the Southern Oscillation: confirming models of large-scale phenomena in meteorology

The epistemic problem of assessing the support that some evidence confers on a hypothesis is considered using an extended example from the history of meteorology. In this case, and presumably in others, the problem is to develop techniques of data analysis that will link the sort of evidence that can be collected to hypotheses of interest. This problem is solved by applying mathematical tools to structure the data and connect them to the competing hypotheses. I conclude that mathematical innovations provide crucial epistemic links between evidence and theories precisely because the evidence and theories are mathematically described.     

Embodied Odysseys: Relics of stories about journeys through past,present, and future

This paper argues that the heritage represented by a museum should be seen not just in its individual objects but also in the relationships between them. The Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers and the Science Museum in London, the earliest great European science museums, were deeply concerned with the relationship between science and practice. The foundation speeches of the Deutsches Museum emphasised the concern with both past and future. Such ancestry provided hard-to-escape templates within which collections were built up over the subsequent century and more. Thus the Science Museum’s biotechnology collection developed at the very end of the twentieth century and albeit based on detailed historical research reflects the same concerns with science–technology relations as could be seen in the 1876 Loan Exhibition which started off the Science Museum. The physical presence of such carefully-structured accumulations of objects could embody and reinforce the reality of such categories as pure and applied science.     

The type specimens and type localities of the orangutans,genus Pongo Lacépède, 1799 (Primates: Hominidae)

Uncertain type localities undermine orangutan nomenclature. Bequeathed to the British Museum, the holotype of Pongo pygmaeus, according to Hans Sloane’s catalogue, came from Borneo and died in China. The historical evidence makes Banjarmasin its most probable type locality. William Montgomerie, Assistant Surgeon at Singapore from 1819–1827, and Senior Surgeon from 1832, supplied the holotype of Simia morio. In 1836 an adult female orangutan reached Singapore alive from Pontianak, Borneo. The holotypes of S. morio, S. hendrikzii, S. straussii and P[ithecus] owenii probably had the same origin, as pirate attacks endangered visits to other Bornean coasts. Absent from Brunei and north Sarawak, Malaysia, throughout the Holocene, orangutans occur there only as Pleistocene subfossils at Niah. Pan vetus (the Piltdown mandible) probably came from Paku, Sarawak. We identify Pongo borneo Lacépède, 1799 as an objective senior synonym of P. wurmbii Tiedemann, 1808, correcting its type locality from Sukadana to near Pontianak. This is the earliest name for the western subspecies (previously thought nominotypical) unless Pithecus curtus, probably from the Sadong River, Sarawak, represents a separate subspecies. If so, the name Pongo borneo would transfer to the southern population west of the Kahayan River, genetically distinguished at species level from the Sumatran orangutan, P. abelii.