HSTS 419: Studies in Scientific Controversy (4 Credits)
Prerequisite: Upper division standing
Instructor: Jacob Hamblin
Email: [email protected]
Office #: 541-737-3421
Catalog description
Course focuses on accounts of scientific discoveries that have been controversial, to
understand the rational, psychological, and social characteristics which have defined the
meaning and procedures of the natural sciences. Case studies are used from the 18th
through 20th centuries. (H) (SS) (Bacc Core Course) (Writing Intensive Course)
Learning Outcomes
1. Identify the ways in which scientific ideas have become controversial among
scientists and laypersons.
2. Assess the implications of scientific ideas in scientific practice and in society
at large.
3. Analyze relationships among science, technology, and society using critical
perspectives or examples from historical, political, or economic disciplines.
4. Analyze the role of science and technology in shaping diverse fields of study
over time.
WIC Learning Outcomes
1. Articulate in writing a critical perspective on issues involving science,
technology, and society using evidence as support.
2. Develop and articulate content knowledge and critical thinking in the
discipline through frequent practice of informal and formal writing.
3. Demonstrate the ability to compose a document of at least 2000 words
through multiple aspects of writing, including brainstorming, drafting, using
sources appropriately, and revising comprehensively after receiving
feedback on a draft.
Baccalaureate Core Learning Outcome: Synthesis category of Science, Technology,
and Society
1. Analyze relationships among science, technology, and society using critical
perspectives or examples from historical, political, or economic disciplines.
2. Analyze the role of science and technology in shaping diverse fields of study over
time.
3. Articulate in writing a critical perspective on issues involving science,
technology, and society using evidence as support.
This course is offered through Oregon State University Extended Campus. For more information, contact:
Web: ecampus.oregonstate.edu
Email: [email protected] Tel: 800-667-1465
Evaluation of Student Performance
Undergraduate students will be evaluated on the following assignments: Online
discussion (20%); Two midterms (30%); Article review assignment (30%); Final
exam (20%)
Grading scale: A (94-100); A- (90-93); B+ (87-89); B (84-86); B- (80-83); C+ (7779); C (74-76); C- (70-73); D+ (67-69); D (64-66); D- (60-63), F (0-59)
Article Review Assignment
See separate document (available in Blackboard) on this assignment.
Discussion
There will be two separate discussion boards. One is for your weekly, graded
“response” to a question I’ve posed. Anyone is welcome to comment on your
response, and I encourage you to discuss as much as you want, but make sure your
initial posting is substantial enough to be graded. The second discussion board is
for ungraded, general discussion.
Learning Resources
Course readings are listed below for each week. All are available on Blackboard.
Week One: What Makes a Revolution?
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response
Required reading for discussion:
Patricia Fara, “Joseph Priestley: Doctor Phlogiston or Reverend Oxygen?”
Endeavour 34:3 (2010), 84-86.
John G. McEvoy, “Continuity and Discontinuity in the Chemical Revolution,”
Osiris 4 (1988), 195-213.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
Paul Thagard, “The Conceptual Structure of the Chemical Revolution,”
Frederic L. Holmes, “The ‘Revolution in Chemistry and Physics:’ Overthrow of
a Reigning Paradigm or Competition between Contemporary Research
Paradigms?” Isis 91 (2000), 735-753.
Week Two: Is Science a Reflection of Society?
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Article Review #1
This course is offered through Oregon State University Extended Campus. For more information, contact:
Web: ecampus.oregonstate.edu
Email: [email protected] Tel: 800-667-1465
Required reading for discussion:
Gabriel Finkelstein, “Why Darwin was English,” Endeavour 24:2 (2000), 7678
Greta Jones, “Alfred Russell Wallace, Robert Owen and the Theory of Natural
Selection,” British Journal for the History of Science 35:1 (2002), 73-96
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
Sean Quinlan, “Heredity, Reproduction, and Perfectibility in Revolutionary
and Napoleonic France, 1789-1815,” Endeavour 34:4 (2010), 142-150.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Lysenko’s ‘Michurinist’ Genetics,” Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists 8 (1952), 40-44.
Week Three: Disputes on Display
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Peer Review #1
Required reading for discussion:
J. Donald Fernie, “The Great Debate,” American Scientist 83:5 (1995), 410-413
J. Vernon Jensen, “Return to the Wilberforce-Huxley Debate,” British Journal
for the History of Science 21 (1988), 161-179.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
Jeroen van Dongen, “Reactionaries and Einstein’s Fame: ‘German Scientists
for the Preservation of Pure Science,’ Relativity, and the Bad Nauheim
Meeting, Physics in Perspective 9:2 (2007), 212-230.
Lawrence Badash, “Rutherford, Boltwood, and the Age of the Earth: The
Origin of Radioactive Dating Techniques,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 112:3 (1968), 157-169.
Week Four: Humanity on Trial
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Midterm #1
Required reading for discussion:
Judith Grabiner and Peter D. Miller, “Effects of the Scopes Trial,” Science
185:4154 (1974), 832-837.
Jeffrey P. Moran, “Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American
Elites, Science, and Fundamentalism,” Journal of American History 90:3
(2003), 891-911.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
Eliza Slavet, “Freud’s ‘Lamarckism’ and the Politics of Racial Science,” Journal
of the History of Biology 41:1 (2008), 37-80.
Piers J. Hale, “Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia: William
Morris, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw,” Journal of the History of
Biology 43:1 (2010), 17-66.
This course is offered through Oregon State University Extended Campus. For more information, contact:
Web: ecampus.oregonstate.edu
Email: [email protected] Tel: 800-667-1465
Week Five: What is Knowable?
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Article Review #2
Required reading for discussion:
Stephen G. Brush, “The Chimerical Cat: Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics in
Historical Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 10 (1980), 393-447.
Mark Walker, “National Socialism and German Physics,” Journal of
Contemporary History 24 (1989), 63-89.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
Cathryn Carson, “Science as Instrumental Reason: Heidegger, Habermas,
Heisenberg,” Continental Philosophy Review 42:4 (2009), 483-509.
Kristian Camilleri, “Constructing the Myth of the Copenhagen Interpretation,”
Perspectives on Science 17:1 (2009), 26-57.
Week Six: Priority in the Scientific Community
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Peer Review #2
Required reading for discussion:
Patricia Fara, “Spying for the Enlightenment,” Endeavour 35:2-3 (2011), 4647.
Elisabeth Crawford, Ruth Lewin Sime, and Mark Walker, “A Nobel Tale of
Postwar Injustice,” Physics Today 50:26 (1997), 26-33.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
Lynne Osman Elkin, “Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix,” Physics Today
56:3 (2003), 42-49.
Mario Biagioli, “From Ciphers to Confidentiality: Secrecy, Openness, and
Priority in Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 45:2
(2012), 213-233.
Week Seven: Tainted Evidence
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Midterm #2
Required reading for discussion:
David Bogod, “The Nazi Hypothermia Experiments: Forbidden Data?”
Anaesthesia 59 (2004), 1155-1159.
Jing-Bao Nie, “The United States Cover-up of Japanese Wartime Medical
Atrocities: Complicity Committed in the National Interest and Two
Proposals for Contemporary Action,” The American Journal of Bioethics
6:3 (2006), W21-W33.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
This course is offered through Oregon State University Extended Campus. For more information, contact:
Web: ecampus.oregonstate.edu
Email: [email protected] Tel: 800-667-1465
Paul A. Lombardo, “Eugenics, Medical Education, and the Public Health
Service: Another Perspective on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80:2 (2006), 291-316.
Sharon R. Kaufman, “The World War II Plutonium Experiments: Contested
Stories and Their Lessons for Medical Research and Informed
Consent,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 21:2 (1997), 161-197.
Week Eight: Gendered Science
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Essay Review (3
articles)
Required reading for discussion:
Teresa Rees, “The Gendered Construction of Scientific Excellence,”
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 36:2 (2011), 133-145.
Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in
Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” American Historical Review 98:2
(1993), 382-411.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
Carolyn Merchant, “ ‘The Violence of Impediments’: Francis Bacon and the
Origins of Experimentation,” Isis 99:4 (2008), 731-760.
Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Gender/Science System: or, Is Sex to Gender As
Nature Is To Science?” Hypatia 2:3 (1987), 37-49.
Week Nine: Pathological Science
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Peer Review #3
Required reading for discussion:
Irving Langmuir, “Pathological Science,” Physics Today 42:10 (1989), 36-48.
Peter W. Huber, “Pathological Science in Court,” Daedalus 119:4 (1990), 97118.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
James Rodger Fleming, “The Pathological History of Weather and Climate
Modification: Three Cycles of Promise and Hype,” Historical Studies in
the Physical and Biological Sciences 37:1 (2006), 3-25.
James L. Levine, “Early Gravity-Wave Detection Experiments, 1960-1975,”
Physics in Perspective 6 (2004), 42-75.
Week Ten: Is a Scientist a Citizen?
What is due by Friday at 5pm: Discussion board response, Finished Essay
Review
This course is offered through Oregon State University Extended Campus. For more information, contact:
Web: ecampus.oregonstate.edu
Email: [email protected] Tel: 800-667-1465
Required reading for discussion:
Barry Commoner, “Scientific Statesmanship,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
19:8 (1963), 6-10.
“The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” Humanist 65:4 (2005), 25-27.
Linus Pauling, “Peace on Earth: The Position of the Scientists,” Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists 23:8 (1967), 46-48.
Encouraged reading for discussion, exams, and review assignment:
Lawrence Badash, “From Security Blanket to Security Risk: Scientists in the
Decade After Hiroshima,” History and Technology 19:3 (2003), 241256.
FINAL EXAM is due on Friday of finals week
Statement Regarding Students with Disabilities:
Accommodations are collaborative efforts between students, faculty and Disability
Access Services (DAS). Students with accommodations approved through DAS are
responsible for contacting the faculty member in charge of the course prior to or during
the first week of the term to discuss accommodations. Students who believe they are
eligible for accommodations but who have not yet obtained approval through DAS
should contact DAS immediately at 737-4098.
Honor Code: All students are expected to be honest and ethical in their academic work.
Academic dishonesty is defined as an intentional act of deception in one of the following
areas: cheating-- use or attempted use of unauthorized materials, information or study
aids; fabrication-- falsification or invention of any information; assisting-- helping
another commit an act of academic dishonesty; tampering-- altering or interfering with
evaluation instruments and documents; plagiarism-- representing the words or ideas of
another person as one's own. See also http://oregonstate.edu/admin/stucon/achon.htm .
Student Evaluation of Teaching:
We encourage you to engage in the course evaluation process each term – online, of
course. The evaluation form will be available toward the end of each term, and you
will be sent instructions through ONID. You will login to “Student Online Services”
to respond to the online questionnaire. The results on the form are anonymous and
are not tabulated until after grades are posted.
This course is offered through Oregon State University Extended Campus. For more information, contact:
Web: ecampus.oregonstate.edu
Email: [email protected] Tel: 800-667-1465