Daedalus articles from September 2005

Daedalus archives from September 2005

Limiting science: a biologist's perspective.
September 22, 2005... Contemporary research in molecular biology has grown up in an era of almost complete permissiveness. Its practitioners have been allowed to decide their own priorities and have met with virtually no restraints on the types of work they can do....

Fear & loathing of the imagination in science.
September 22, 2005... Recently a reader responded with dismay to a New Yorker article by historian Daniel J. Kevles about the charge of scientific fraud brought by Margot O'Toole against Thereza Imanishi-Kari. What distressed this reader was not so much the issue of...

Physics & history.
September 22, 2005... I am one of the few contributors to this issue of Daedalus who is not in any sense a historian. I work and live in the country of physics, but history is the place that I love to visit as a tourist. Here I wish to consider, from the perspective...

Civil religion in America.
September 22, 2005... While some have argued that Christianity is the national faith, and others that church and synagogue celebrate only the generalized religion of "the American Way of Life," few have realized that there actually exists alongside of and rather...

Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight.
September 22, 2005... Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders,...

How did economics get that way & what way did it get?
September 22, 2005... My exposure to economics as a discipline began in September 1940 when I enrolled as a freshman in the elementary economics course at Harvard College. I will try in this essay to make sense of the evolution of economics over a span of more than...

Reciprocal measures for arms stabilization.
September 22, 2005... There has been a widespread change in the thinking on arms control in the last year or so. Much of it is due to the focus of attention on "measures to safeguard against surprise attack" (to use the official terminology). Although this subject...

The two worlds of race: a historical view.
September 22, 2005... Measured by universal standards the history of the United States is indeed brief. But during the brief span of three and one-half centuries of colonial and national history Americans developed traditions and prejudices which created the two...

Politics, pedagogy & gender.
September 22, 2005... In the mid-nineteenth century the public education system of the United States drew its corps of teachers from the nation's population of young women. In contrast, European public education remained a male-dominated enterprise until well into...

Cultural China: the periphery as the center.
September 22, 2005... The inscription of the Tang's basin reads, "If one day you truly renew yourself, day after day you will renew yourself; indeed, renew yourself every day." In the "Announcement to the Prince of Kang" it is said, "You shall give rise to a...

Indian traditions & the Western imagination.
September 22, 2005... This essay is concerned with Western images of Indian intellectual traditions and the interactions between those representations and a contemporary "internal" understanding of Indian culture. (1) I focus particularly on the elementary...

On Emerson.
September 22, 2005... On the evening of October 8, 1958 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences made its first award of the Emerson-Thoreau Medal to Robert Frost in recognition of his long and distinguished contribution to the creative arts. His response...

Innovation & repetition: between modern & postmodern aesthetics.
September 22, 2005... It is not by chance that modern aesthetics and modern theories of art (and I mean by "modern" those born with Mannerism, developed through Romanticism, and provocatively restated by the early twentieth-century avant-gardes) have frequently...

An argument about beauty.
September 22, 2005... 1 Responding at last, in April of 2002, to the scandal created by the revelation of innumerable cover-ups of sexually predatory priests, Pope John Paul II told the American cardinals summoned to the Vatican, "A great work of art may be...