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26 results

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  • Evaluating the influences of temperature, primary production, and evolutionary history on bivalve growth rates

  • James Saulsbury, David K. Moss, Linda C. Ivany, Michał Kowalewski, David R. Lindberg, James F. Gillooly, Noel A. Heim, Craig R. McClain, Jonathan L. Payne, Peter D. Roopnarine, Bernd R. Schöne, David Goodwin, Seth Finnegan
  • Journal: Paleobiology / Volume 45 / Issue 3 / August 2019
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 August 2019, pp. 405-420
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  • Organismal metabolic rates reflect the interaction of environmental and physiological factors. Thus, calcifying organisms that record growth history can provide insight into both the ancient environments in which they lived and their own physiology and life history. However, interpreting them requires understanding which environmental factors have the greatest influence on growth rate and the extent to which evolutionary history constrains growth rates across lineages. We integrated satellite measurements of sea-surface temperature and chlorophyll-a concentration with a database of growth coefficients, body sizes, and life spans for 692 populations of living marine bivalves in 195 species, set within the context of a new maximum-likelihood phylogeny of bivalves. We find that environmental predictors overall explain only a small proportion of variation in growth coefficient across all species; temperature is a better predictor of growth coefficient than food supply, and growth coefficient is somewhat more variable at higher summer temperatures. Growth coefficients exhibit moderate phylogenetic signal, and taxonomic membership is a stronger predictor of growth coefficient than any environmental predictor, but phylogenetic inertia cannot fully explain the disjunction between our findings and the extensive body of work demonstrating strong environmental control on growth rates within taxa. Accounting for evolutionary history is critical when considering shells as historical archives. The weak relationship between variation in food supply and variation in growth coefficient in our data set is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the increase in mean body size through the Phanerozoic was driven by increasing productivity enabling faster growth rates.

  • 20 - THE SCIENCE OF LIGHT AND COLOR, SEEING AND KNOWING

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Published online: 05 September 2013
  • Print publication: 07 October 2013, pp 485-511

  • Summary

    Sophisticated theories of light, color, and vision were produced in the ancient Greek world, committed to writing and transmitted in treatises by Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, and others. Perspectiva represented in the thirteenth century by influential standard texts that treated the physics and mathematics of light, color, and vision. Although scholars in early-medieval Christian Europe had only fragmentary access to the Greek traditions, the major Greek works were translated into Arabic after the advent of Islam and stimulated scholarly activity within the Islamic world in each of the areas of Greek achievement. The intellectual life of Europe was enriched and transformed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the translation of Greek and Arabic books into Latin. Nobody contributed more to the development of the science of Perspectiva in the West than Roger Bacon. Rainbows, spectacular natural phenomena as well as symbols of God's promise to Noah, could be overlooked by medieval scholars claiming an interest in light and vision.

  • 10 - SCIENCE AND THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Published online: 05 September 2013
  • Print publication: 07 October 2013, pp 268-285

  • Summary

    This chapter presents several methodological precepts that are required for the success of the relationship between religion and the natural sciences during the Middle Ages. The person who most influentially defined the proper attitude of Christians toward pagan learning was Augustine. Augustine most copiously illustrated the exegetical utility of the natural sciences, while revealing his own command of pagan scientific literature, in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, where he brought it to bear on the interpretation of the biblical Creation story. The motivation for writing about the natural world was supplied by the handmaiden formula. The overwhelming majority of medieval scientific achievements were produced by scholars who subscribed to the Augustinian formula of science as the handmaiden of theology and the church. The church became the patron of the sciences through its support of schools and universities, many of which were under its authority and protection.

The Cambridge History of Science
  • Volume 2, Medieval Science
  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank
  • Published online: 05 September 2013
  • Print publication: 07 October 2013
  • This volume in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of science in the Middle Ages from the North Atlantic to the Indus Valley. Medieval science was once universally dismissed as non-existent - and sometimes it still is. This volume reveals the diversity of goals, contexts and accomplishments in the study of nature during the Middle Ages. Organized by topic and culture, its essays by distinguished scholars offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of medieval science currently available. Intended to provide a balanced and inclusive treatment of the medieval world, contributors consider scientific learning and advancement in the cultures associated with the Arabic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew languages. Scientists, historians and other curious readers will all gain a new appreciation for the study of nature during an era that is often misunderstood.

  • 1 - The fate of science in patristic and medieval Christendom

  • from Part I - Historical interactions
  • Edited by Peter Harrison, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion
  • Published online: 28 July 2010
  • Print publication: 24 June 2010, pp 21-38

  • Summary

    “The pagan party . . . asserted that knowledge is to be obtained only by the laborious exercise of human observation and human reason. The Christian party asserted that all knowledge is to be found in the Scriptures and in the traditions of the Church; that, in the written revelation, God had not only given a criterion of truth, but had furnished us with all that he intended us to know. The Scriptures, therefore, contain the sum, the end of all knowledge. The clergy, with the emperor at their back, would endure no intellectual competition. / [O]ne finds a combination of factors behind 'the closing of the Western mind': the attack on Greek philosophy by [the apostle] Paul, the adoption of Platonism by Christian theologians and the enforcement of orthodoxy by emperors desperate to keep good order. The imposition of orthodoxy went hand in hand with a stifling of any form of independent reasoning. By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of 'mystery, magic, and authority.'” / A widespread myth that refuses to die, illustrated by these two quotations, maintains that consistent opposition of the Christian church to rational thought in general and the natural sciences in particular, throughout the patristic and medieval periods, retarded the development of a viable scientific tradition, thereby delaying the Scientific Revolution and the origins of modern science by more than a millennium. Historical scholarship of the past half-century demonstrates that the truth is otherwise.

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