Lorraine Daston

The​ kinds of catastrophe that loom largest in today’s collective imagination tend to be compact and spectacular: the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, with a 180-decibel boom heard more than three thousand kilometres away; the tsunamis of 2011 that reared up to a height of forty metres before inundating the Japanese coast; the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which claimed some 300,000 lives;...

Perhaps​ you too have planted a hydrangea in your garden, its blossom as blue as blue can be while still in its pot from the nursery, only to watch its colour muddy and turn ever pinker as the plant’s roots sink into alkaline soil. This is an example of the way the visible character of an organism can be modified by its immediate environment – in this case, soil pH. Many other...

Linnaeus accepted the evidence of the astonishing specimens sent to him from far and wide as well as what the microscope revealed of the life teeming in a drop of water. The same Linnaeus who made short work of hydras and unicorns embroidered his own field notes with fanciful mythological references.

On the morning of 30 April 1865, Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, head of the British Meteorological Department, slit his throat. Because Fitzroy had been the captain of the Beagle, which several decades earlier had carried the young Charles Darwin around the world to conduct the research that eventually bore fruit in On the Origin of Species (1859), and because he was a devout evangelical, some...

There has probably never been a society that did not erect barriers to certain kinds of knowledge. Moralists since Greek and Roman antiquity have frowned on busybodies who pry into their neighbours’ private lives; medieval Christian theologians condemned necromancers who wanted to discover the secrets of demons; today we fret about state surveillance of citizens and certain kinds of...