Twenty-first-century biology rejects genetic determinism, yet an exaggerated view of the
power of genes in the making of bodies and minds remains a problem. What accounts for …

This paper presents a survey of the literature on the problem of contingency in science. The
survey is structured around three challenges faced by current attempts at understanding the …

Since the late 1980s, presentism has seen a resurgence among some historians of science.
Most of them draw a line between a good form of presentism and typical anachronism, but …

In the context of rural land conservation, neoliberalisation involves an increasingly wide
range of changes in formal and informal institutional arrangements. These affect the …

Textbook presentations of genetics have changed remarkably little since their earliest days.
Typically an initial chapter introduces Mendel's pea-hybridization experiments and the …

This paper offers an epistemological framework for the debate about whether the results of
scientific enquiry are inevitable or contingent. I argue in Sections 2 and 3 that inevitabilist …

Having coined the word 'eugenics' and inspired leading biologists and statisticians of the
early twentieth century, Francis Galton is often studied for his contributions to modern …

When it comes to knowledge about the scientific pasts that might have been–the so-called
'counterfactual'history of science–historians can either debate its possibility or get on with …

Could all or part of our taken-as-established scientific conclusions, theories, experimental
data, ontological commitments, and so forth have been significantly different? Science as It …

This paper depicts Ian Hacking's 'styles of reasoning'as conditions of possibility. After
distinguishing between possibilities and causes, it articulates the implicit stratigraphical …