In this paper I address C. A. Coulson's teaching activities, writing textbooks and delivering popular science lectures, as well as his popular lectures on religion and the ‘scientific’ sermons delivered in his capacity as a lay preacher of the Methodist Church. I will pay particular attention to his thoughts on science. His commitment to forging a way to reconcile science and religion was built upon a reflection on the aims and methods of science within the broader framework of science's role in post-Second World War society. By noting that Coulson valued chemistry, mathematics and science in general, as a kind of religious activity, I argue that he wrote masterful textbooks and delivered popular science lectures as lay sermons. These were activities which Coulson pursued energetically to build a community of science adepts and proselytes. And winning young, and indeed not so young, people to science meant teaching them one of the languages that could be used to reach God. In the same way, I extend my argument to his popular lectures on religion and his ‘scientific’ sermons and claim that they should be viewed as popular science lectures addressed to an audience that was often ignorant, or even suspicious, of science.

What follows shall provide an introduction to a predominantly philosophical and polemical, but historically revealing, paper on the foundations of the theory of probability. The leading Russian probabilist Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin (1894–1959) (see fig. 1) wrote the paper in the late 1930s, commenting on a slightly older, but still competing approach to probability theory by Richard von Mises. Together with the even more influential Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov (1903–1987), who was nine years his junior, Khinchin had revolutionized probability theory around 1930 by introducing the modern measure-theoretic approach, which is still standard today and which allowed for a sufficiently general treatment of important new notions such as “stochastic processes.” This development had its first culmination in Kolmogorov's booklet, Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, written in German in 1933, which has exerted an enormous influence world wide.

Argument

The article describes a special type of scientific and philosophical “non-conformism” as exemplified in the versatile work of Richard von Mises (1883–1953). While the historical impact of von Mises' practical and organizational work in applied mathematics is beyond doubt, it is shown that von Mises' insistence on cognitive connectibility of various scientific domains was not, in the end, successful although it stimulated the theoretical discussion considerably. Von Mises developed a principally critical attitude towards what he considered “one-sided” in several streams of modernity and tended to be “anti-modern” even in those of his activities which belonged to “modernism.” Reasons can be found in his biographical experiences, in particular in his unorthodox academic education and repeated emigrations. Thus biographical research has considerable potential for historical explanation. The paper delves into the existing premises and sources for a scientific biography of Richard von Mises which is yet to be written, and publishes in the appendix a revealing biographical sketch (1959) authored by von Mises' widow, the applied mathematician Hilda Geiringer.

Argument

The paper focuses on a research project launched by Norwegian psychiatrists immediately following World War II. The project sought to investigate the roots of quislingism (collaboration with the Nazis) through psychiatric research on the collaborators. Considered with hindsight, however, the methodology of the project seems puzzlingly shallow. The paper discusses whether this was due to a general lack of adequate methodology in the contemporaneous sciences, or whether the explanation must be sought in the project's social and historical context. Ultimately, I conclude that considerable weight must be placed on the latter explanation, and that the general political ostracism of the collaborators in the postwar years played a major role in the psychiatrists' attitude.

Fleeming Jenkin's swamping argument (1867) is re-examined in relation to subsequent criticisms of its assumptions. Jenkin's original argument purported to show that, under blending inheritance, natural selection could not operate on ‘sports’ or ‘single variations’. A serious flaw in Jenkin's model was exposed in a forgotten paper in 1871. Darwin accepted Jenkin's ‘flawed’ conclusion, though he did not fully understand the argument. Both Jenkin and Darwin regarded the swamping argument as a barrier to evolution within a single lineage. A completely different interpretation of the phrase ‘swamping argument’, first put forward by Romanes in 1886, identified it with the problem of the role of free intercrossing in preventing speciation. The latter problem also underlies current debate about the possibility of sympatric speciation and is as serious under particulate as under blending inheritance. Jenkin's argument depended on the assumption of blending inheritance; when modified to remove the ‘flaw’ in his model, it ceased to present a barrier to the operation of natural selection within a lineage, provided that the mutation rate was high enough to maintain adequate genetic variability under blending.

Argument

The recent development of molecular genetics has created concern that society may experience a new eugenics. Notions about eugenics and what took place in the 1930s and 1940s are actively shaping questions about which uses of the new genetics should be considered illegitimate. Drawing upon a body of historiographical literature on Scandinavian eugenics, this paper argues that the dominant view of eugenics as morally and scientifically illegitimate is not tenable when it comes to the uses of compulsion, political motivation, and scientific acceptability. In spite of a general condemnation of eugenics, health authorities today are trying to prevent individuals with deviant behavior from reproducing or at least from rearing children. This may not be argued with reference to the risk of transmitting defective genes, but rather the risk of producing undesirable social problems. Drawing on a Foucauldian approach, the paper concludes that eugenics and new genetics should be seen as two historically specific forms of biopower.