A mediados del siglo XX, la invención y disponibilidad de nuevas drogas psicodélicas, y el creciente discurso cultural en torno a ellas, coincidieron con los de la televisión, las cintas de vídeo y la informática. Las tecnologías psicodélicas y la electrónica crecieron juntas, y quienes usaban o pensaban en una a menudo implicaban a la otra. Cuando Sony y otros fabricantes japoneses desarrollaron nuevos magnetoscopios portátiles a finales de los años sesenta, por ejemplo, surgieron nuevas comunidades de artistas a su alrededor, primero en Estados Unidos y Canadá, y después en Europa, Asia, el norte de África y América Latina. Por primera vez, declararon estos entusiastas, mucha gente podía hacer su propia televisión, rompiendo el oligopolio de la radiodifusión. Al describir las implicaciones psicológicas y sociológicas de esta nueva tecnología, muchos la compararon con las drogas psicodélicas.

This is a syllabus for The Evolution Debates, a course offered for four units of credit in spring 2017 as HIST 255g at the University of Southern California. This course will explore the history of ideas about evolution and human origins from about 1800 to the present. We’ll focus on debates and controversies, both within biology and geology and at intersections of science, religion, and politics, as well as famous incidents like Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and the Scopes Monkey Trial. More broadly, we’ll study the development of evolutionary theory, the histories of creationism and theistic evolutionism, and the roles of debates about human evolution’s political consequences in the histories of eugenics and scientific racism.

This is a General Education course in the category of Humanistic Inquiry. We’ll use the history of evolutionary thought to understand how scientists, theologians, and others have thought about what it means to be human and to live together in organized societies—and about how we became such social animals. In the process, we’ll interpret not only scientific texts for both professional and popular audiences, but also novels, visual art, film, and works of philosophy and theology. We’ll read carefully in order both to understand how arguments work and how the ideas of evolutionary thinkers have been shaped by the particular times, places, and experiences in which they lived, as well as by changing media and systems of publishing and scientific communication.

The course will meet for lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, 9 to 9:50, from January 9 to April 28, in Von Kleinsmid Center room 102. I will be available for office hours on Mondays from 10:00 to 12:00 in Social Sciences Building room 281, and encourage you to come by and talk.

Assignments

This course is organized around substantial reading assignments of primary sources, which is to say texts written by biologists, geologists, philosophers, theologians, and other participants in the evolution debates. We’ll discuss readings during every class, so please read everything assigned before the class meeting it’s listed under. Each week I will expect you post a short reaction to the reading by Sunday (or by Tuesday on weeks when the class doesn’t meet on Monday) using Blackboard’s blog feature. You can use this as an opportunity to raise questions, to comment on arguments you found particularly surprising or compelling, or to suggest ways the reading might relate to previous readings or forthcoming assignments.

You are required to buy two books, both of which are also available at the USC Bookstore. Please buy these specific editions, so we can refer to the same page numbers and editor’s notes:

• Selections from Darwin’s Origin of Species: The Shape of the Argument, edited by Nicholas Maistrellis, Green Cat Books edition (2009).
• H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, edited by Stephen Arata, Norton Critical Edition (2008).

All other required readings for the course will be available online; for the first half of the semester, we’ll mostly be reading texts available through the web repository HathiTrust (and linked to below). When we get to more recent texts, I’ll make scanned copies of the excerpts we’re reading available to you.

My lectures will provide historical context for these readings, introduce you to debates between historians about their significance, and describe the roles of historical figures beyond those whose work you’re reading. You’re therefore not required to read a textbook for the course, but if you’d like one to refer to or to follow along in for an additional perspective on this history, I’ve included page numbers below for relevant sections of Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, third edition (2003), which is available from the USC Bookstore and on reserve at Leavey Library’s circulation desk, and listed with them some other books for further reading or as sources for writing papers. Two other useful reference sources will be the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, each of which is useful for finding introductory information on particular scientists and philosophers and citations for books and articles that provide more detailed information.

Your first substantial writing assignment, due February 10, will be a paper approximately five pages long in which you develop your own analysis of a review of The Origin of Species, contextualizing it in the life of its author, with attention to their other scientific, religious, political, and philosophical interests and commitments, and in the editorial agenda of the publication in which it appears. We’ll spend some time in class looking at different ways you might find such reviews and research their authors and publications.

Your second writing assignment, due April 7, will be an online exhibit on a particular book in the evolution debates as a material text. In this exhibit, you’ll demonstrate what you can learn from looking at a physical book about its intended audience and how it was meant to be read. We’ll spend some time in class in advance of this assignment thinking about books in precisely this way, and will visit the USC Libraries’ Special Collections to look at original editions of books on evolution including some of those we’ve read ourselves. You’ll also have an opportunity to present the book you’re thinking about to the class on March 3.

Your last essay assignment, of approximately five pages and due April 28, will be to analyze what was at stake in a particular controversy about evolution. What did the people involved care about? What did they want to persuade others of? How did they use the idea of evolution to do so?

Additionally, there will be a midterm exam during class on March 10 and a final exam on May 5. These exams may involve short answer questions, longer essay questions, or a combination. In any case, the purpose will be more to evaluate your understanding of how ideas about evolution and its scientific, social, and religious consequences have changed over time, and less to test your memory of specific names or dates.

Your grade for the course will be based 15% on each of the two essays, 15% on the online exhibit, 15% on each of the two exams, 10% on reading responses, and 15% on your engaged and insightful participation in class.

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

• Monday, January 9: What Are the Evolution Debates?

  • Reference: Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, third edition (2003), 1–26.

Is Nature Stable or Changing?

• Wednesday, January 11: The Great Chain of Being and the System of Nature

  • Charles Bonnet, The Contemplation of Nature (1764), translated and abridged in John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (1777), volume 4, 49–51, 58–62, 87–96.
  • Carl Linnaeus, A General System of Nature (1735–1768), revised by Johann Friedrich Gmelin (1788–1793) and translated by William Turton (1800), volume 1, 1–11.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 48–71; Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966; 1970); Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History” (1993).

• Friday, January 13: Evolution in an Age of Revolutions

  • Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (1809), translated by Hugh Elliot (1914), 1–8, 35–46, 68–70, 106–114.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 71–95; Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (1989).

• Monday, January 16: No class for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

• Wednesday, January 18: No class

• Friday, January 20: Natural Theology

  • Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), 11–17, 356–371.
  • William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), 1–21, 454–459, 467–469, 473–481.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 96–106.

• Monday, January 23: Catastrophe and Uniformity

  • Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813), translated by Robert Kerr (1815), 5–17.
  • Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, volume 1 (1830), 1–4; volume 2 (1832), 18–32; volume 3 (1833), 1–7.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 106–134; Charles Coulston Gillespie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850 (1951); Martin S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (2005) and Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (2008).

• Wednesday, January 25: Popular Evolutionism

  • Robert Chambers, The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), 113–119, 145–147, 153–161, 174–178, and 268–291.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 134–140; James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2000).

Darwin and Wallace’s Answers

• Friday, January 27: The Voyages of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace

  • Charles Darwin, Journal and Remarks (1839), 453–457, 461–465.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 141–155; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995).

• Monday, January 30: “One Long Argument”

  • Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), edited by Nicholas Maistrellis, Green Cat Books edition (2009), 5–7, 13–26, 31–42, 47–65, 71–77, 83–94, 99–105.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 155–176; Piers Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (2014), 1–65; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002).

• Wednesday, February 1: The Reception of Darwinism

  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 177–202; Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (1958); David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (1973); The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, edited by Thomas F. Glick (1974); Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (1999); The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, edited by Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (2008).

• Friday, February 3: Introduction to Special Collections

  • Meet in USC Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library room 206.

Is Darwinism Atheistic?

• Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 202–207; James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (1979); Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (1988).

• Monday, February 6: Anti-Evolutionism

  • Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? (1874), 1–2, 40–48, 52–53, 168–178.

• Wednesday, February 8: Christian Darwinism

  • George Frederick Wright, “Concerning the True Doctrine of Final Cause or Design in Nature,” Bibliotheca Sacra 34 (1877): 357–385.

• Friday, February 10: The Evolution Debates in Special Collections

  • Meet in USC Special Collections.
  • Paper due contextualizing a review of The Origin of Species.

How Did Humans Evolve?

• Monday, February 13: Monogenism and Polygenism

  • Louis Agassiz, “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races,” Christian Examiner 49 (1850): 110–113, 126–128, 136–138, 141–145.
  • Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered (1854), 9–10, 12–18, 34–35.
  • Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), volume 1, 9–10, 220–227.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 207–216, 292–297.

• Wednesday, February 15: Sexual Selection

  • Darwin, Descent of Man, volume 1, 245–251, 263–266; volume 2, 301–302, 310–314.
  • Eliza Burt Gamble, The Evolution of Woman (1894), 19–31.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 313–315; Hale, Political Descent, 106–154; Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (1989); Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (2014).

• Friday, February 17: Herbert Spencer’s Universal Evolutionism

  • Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862), 146–174. (An earlier version of this chapter, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review 67 (1857), is also available.)
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 220–223; Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (2007); Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist, edited by Bernard Lightman (2015).

• Monday, February 20: No class for Presidents Day

The Politics of Evolution: Competitive or Cooperative?

• Wednesday, February 22: Individualism

  • Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1851), 16–38.
  • Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology (1864), volume 1, 443–445.
  • Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, volume 3 (1896), 608–611.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 274–277, 298–302; Hale, Political Descent, 66–105.

• Friday, February 24: Liberalism

  • Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence: A Programme,” Nineteenth Century, February 1888, 161–180.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 216–220; Hale, Political Descent, 155–221.

• Monday, February 27: Socialism

  • Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid Among Animals,” Nineteenth Century, September 1890, 337–349, 354; November 1890, 709–719.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 305–307, 315–317; Hale, Political Descent, 222–251; Daniel Todes, Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (1989).

• Wednesday, March 1: Communism

  • Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (1877), 3–18, 551–554.
  • Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), translated by Ernest Untermann (1902), 102–103, 116–119.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 284–292.

• Friday, March 3: Presentations on Special Collections

  • Meet in USC Special Collections.

The Eclipse of Darwinism: What Are the Mechanisms of Evolution?

• Monday, March 6: Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism

  • Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation (1868), translated by Edwin Ray Lankester (1876), volume 1, 280–292.
  • Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880), excerpted in H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), edited by Stephen Arata, Norton Critical Edition (2008), 160–163.
  • H.G. Wells, “Zoological Retrogression” (1891), excerpted in Wells, Time Machine, 133–135.
  • August Weismann, The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity (1892), translated by W. Newton Parker and Harriet Rönnfeldt (1893), ix–xv.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 224–256; Hale, Political Descent, 252–353; Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (1983).

• Wednesday, March 8: “The Deathbed of Darwinism”?

  • Alexander Patterson, The Other Side of Evolution (1903), vii–xix, 120–136.
  • Vernon Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day (1907), 1–7.
  • Reference: Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (1992; 2006).

• Friday, March 10: Midterm exam

• March 12–19: No class for spring break

• Monday, March 20: Evolutionary Fiction

  • H.G. Wells, Time Machine (1895), 1–71.

• Wednesday, March 22: Genetics and Eugenics

  • Francis Galton, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Macmillan’s Magazine, June 1865, 157–166.
  • William Bateson, “Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation,” Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 25 (1900): 54–61.
  • Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), iii–vi, 1–5.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 256–273, 307–313; Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (1995).

• Friday, March 24: No class

• Monday, March 27: Creative Evolution

  • Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911), ix–xv, 84–97, 163–165, 176–185, 251–271.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 317–322; R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914 (1988).

• Wednesday, March 29: The Scopes Monkey Trial and the Revival of Creationism

  • William Jennings Bryan, In His Image (1922), 86–94, 102–109, 122–127, 132–135.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 375–381; Numbers, Creationists; Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (1997); Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (2013).

The Evolutionary Synthesis: Is Evolution Progressive?

• Friday, March 31: Population Genetics and the Modern Synthesis

  • R.A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), vii–x, 256–258.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), 3–12.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 325–340; Vassiliki Betty Smokovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (1996); Robert D. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (1994).

• Monday, April 3: Evolutionary Progress

  • Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), 556–569, 575–578.
  • George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (1949), 240–246.
  • George Gaylord Simpson, “The Concept of Progress in Organic Evolution,” Social Research 41 (1974): 46–51.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 340–346; Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996).

• Wednesday, April 5: The Teilhardian Synthesis

  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1938/1955), translated by Bernard Wall (1959), 11–14, 27–28, 180–184, 237–245, 257–272, 291–299.
  • Peter Medawar, review of The Phenomenon of Man, Mind 70 (1961): 99–106.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (1967), 114–122, 133–137.

• Friday, April 7: No class

  • Online exhibit due on an evolutionary book as a material text.

• Monday, April 10: Scientific Creationism

  • John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood (1961), xix–xxii, xxv–xxix, 63–70.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” American Biology Teacher 35 (1973): 125–129.
  • Reference: Numbers, Creationists.

• Wednesday, April 12: The Evolution of Human Race

  • Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason: A Yankee View (1961), vii–viii, 1, 36–37, 40–41.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, “A Bogus ‘Science’ of Race Prejudice,” Journal of Heredity 52 (1961): 189–190.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (1962), 253–257, 266–271, 285–286.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, “A Debatable Account of the Origin of Races,” Scientific American, February 1963, 169–170, 172.
  • Richard Lewontin, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 381–387, 396–397.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 278–284, 302–305, 353–356; Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (1998); John P. Jackson, Jr., Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education (2005).

• Friday, April 14: Periodic Extinctions and Punctuated Equilibria

  • Niles Eldridge, “‘A Battle of Words,’” in The Third Culture, edited by John Brockman (1995), 120–125.
  • Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Models in Paleobiology, edited by Thomas J.M. Schopf (1972), 83–98, 108–115.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 347–353; David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (2012).

Adaptationism: Does Natural Selection Explain All Traits?

• Monday, April 17: Biology as an Information Science

  • George C. Williams, “‘A Package of Information,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 39–47.
  • Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), 1–11.
  • Richard Dawkins, “‘A Survival Machine,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 75–86.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 356–361.

• Wednesday, April 19: Sociobiology

  • E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology (1975), 3–6, 547–551, 559–565, 574–575.
  • Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People, “Sociobiology: Another Biological Determinism,” BioScience 26 (1976): 182, 184–186.

• Friday, April 21: The Descent of Woman

  • Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman (1972), 1–13, 26–33.
  • Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), 1–15, 189–191.
  • Reference: Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989); Erika Lorraine Milam, Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (2010).

• Monday, April 24: Critiques of Adaptationism

  • Stephen Jay Gould, “‘The Pattern of Life’s History,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 52–64.
  • Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 205 (1979): 581–597.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 361–374.

• Wednesday, April 26: The Revival of Natural Theology

  • Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), 1–9.
  • William A. Dembski, “The Logical Underpinnings of Intelligent Design,” in Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, edited by William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (2004), 311–329.
  • Michael J. Behe, “Irreducible Complexity: Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution,” in Dembski and Ruse, Debating Design, 352–355.
  • Kenneth R. Miller, “The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity,’” in Dembski and Ruse, Debating Design, 81–95.
  • Reference: Numbers, Creationists.

• Friday, April 28: Symbiogenesis

  • Lynn Margulis, “‘Gaia Is a Tough Bitch,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 130–140.
  • Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species (2002), xi–xvi, 11–23, 51–56, 201–205.
  • Paper due analyzing the stakes of a particular evolution controversy.

• Friday, May 5: Final exam from 8:00 to 10:00

If you’ve come here after asking yourself (or Google) what cybernetics is, I recommend starting with Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin Peters’ entry “Cybernetics,” from the International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, and Geoffrey Bowker’s “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70.” Ronald Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment is the synthetic history the field has been waiting for. William Aspray’s “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey” places cybernetics in the context of developments in computing and information theory, while Peter Galison’s “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision” is a classic account of the field’s military origins. The texts listed below survey the many forms cybernetics took in the decades that followed.

This bibliography is limited in three ways: It includes only books and articles which focus on cybernetics rather than the related histories of cyborgs and information theory; it includes only texts in English, though there are also substantial literatures on the subject in other languages; and it excludes articles and dissertations that have been superseded by books by the same authors. Within these limitations, I welcome references to additional books and articles. I last updated this list in April 2026.

The Big Picture (but mostly Anglo-American)

1. A. A. Verveen, “In Search of Processes: The Early History of Cybernetics,” Mathematical Biosciences 11 (1971).
2. Michael Apter, “Cybernetics: A Case Study of a Scientific Subject-Complex,” in The Sociology of Science, edited by Paul Halmos (University of Keele, 1972).
3. Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis (Wiley, 1978).
4. Geoffrey Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993).
5. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
6. Charles François, “Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 16 (1999).
7. Debora Hammond, The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory (University Press of Colorado, 2003).
8. Geoffrey Bowker, “The Empty Archive: Cybernetics and the 1960s,” in Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT Press, 2006).
9. Bernard Geoghegan, “The Historiographic Conceptualization of Information: A Critical Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30 (2008).
10. John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (MIT Press, 2008).
11. Philipp Aumann, “The Distinctiveness of a Unifying Science: Cybernetics’ Way to West Germany” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33 (2011).
12. Orit Halpern, “Cybernetic Sense,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
13. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2014).
14. Ronald Kline, The Cybernetics Moment; or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
15. Claus Pias, “The Age of Cybernetics,” in Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946–1954; The Complete Transactions (diaphanes, 2016).
16. Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (Norton, 2016).
17. Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin Peters, “Cybernetics,” International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (2016).
18. Elizabeth Petrick, “Building the Black Box: Cyberneticians and Complex Systems,” Science, Technology, and Human Values (2019).

Origins

1. Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (MIT Press, 1970).
2. William Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 7 (1985).
3. David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

United States

1. Peter Galison, “The Americanization of Unity,” Daedalus 127 (1998).
2. Peter Krieg, “The Human Face of Cybernetics: Heinz von Foerster and the History of a Movement That Failed,” Kybernetes 34 (2005).
3. Stuart Umpleby, “A History of the Cybernetics Movement in the United States,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 91 (2005).
4. Christopher Johnson, “Analogue Apollo: Cybernetics and the Space Age,” Paragraph 31 (2008).

Norbert Wiener

1. Steve Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (MIT Press, 1982).
2. Pesi Masani, Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 (Birkhauser, 1990).
3. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994).
4. Felix Geyer and Johannes van der Zouwen, “Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences,” Kybernetes 23 (1994).
5. David Jerison and Daniel Stroock, “Norbert Wiener,” The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (1997).
6. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (Basic Books, 2004).
7. Mara Mills, “On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove,” differences 22 (2011).
8. Benjamin Peters, “Toward a Genealogy of a Cold War Communication Science: The Strange Loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener,” Russian Journal of Communication 5 (2013).
9. Henning Schmidgen, “Cybernetic Times: Norbert Wiener, John Stroud, and the ‘Brain Clock’ Hypothesis,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).

Soviet and Comparative Studies

1. David Holloway, “Innovation in Science—The Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” Science Studies 4 (1974).
2. Peter Elias, “The Rise and Fall of Cybernetics in the US and the USSR,” The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (1997).
3. Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press, 2002).
4. David Mindell, Jérôme Segal, and Slava Gerovitch, “From Communications Engineering to Communications Science: Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union,” in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, edited by Mark Walker (Routledge, 2003).
5. Benjamin Peters, “Betrothal and Betrayal: The Soviet Translation of Norbert Wiener’s Early Cybernetics,” International Journal of Communications 2 (2008).
6. Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016).
7. Adam Leeds, “Dreams in Cybernetic Fugue: Cold War Technoscience, the Intelligentsia, and the Birth of Soviet Mathematical Economics,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46 (2016).
8. Diana Kurkovsky West, “Cybernetics for the Command Economy: Foregrounding Entropy in Late Soviet Planning,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Joshua Sanborn, “Cybernetics and Surveillance: The Secret Police Enter the Computer Age,” Kritika 23 (2022).

France and “French Theory”

1. Céline Lafontaine, “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory,’” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007).
2. Lydia Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010).
3. Jacob Krell, “What is the ‘Cybernetic’ in the ‘History of Cybernetics’? A French Case, 1968 to the Present,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
4. Vincent August, “Network Concepts in Social Theory: Foucault and Cybernetics,” European Journal of Social Theory 24 (2021).
5. Bernard Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2023)

Chile

1. Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011).
2. Martin Collins, introduction to forum on Cybernetic Revolutionaries, History and Technology 28 (2012).
3. Michael Dennis, “Scientific and Technical Knowledge and the Making of Political Order,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
4. Ronald Kline, “Beyond the Closed World,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
5. Tiago Saraiva, “The History of Cybernetics in McOndo,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
6. Eden Medina, author response to forum on Cybernetic Revolutionaries, History and Technology 28 (2012).

Biology

1. Donna Haraway, “The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology,” Radical History Review no. 20 (1979).
2. Donna Haraway, “The High Cost of Information in Post World War II Evolutionary Biology: Ergonomics, Semiotics, and the Sociobiology of Communications Systems,” Philosophical Forum 13 (1981–2).
3. Donna Haraway, “Signs of Dominance: From a Physiology to a Cybernetics of Primate Society, C.R. Carpenter, 1930–1970,” in Studies in History of Biology 6, edited by William Coleman and Camille Limoges (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
4. Donna Haraway, “A Semiotics of the Naturalistic Field, from C.R. Carpenter to S.A. Altmann, 1930–55,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989).
5. Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Body of a New Machine: Situating the Organism between Telegraphs and Computers,” in Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (Columbia University Press, 1995).
6. Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford University Press, 2000).
7. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor” in Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Harvard University Press, 2002).
8. Warwick Anderson and Ian MacKay, “The Science of Self,” in Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Ecology

1. Peter Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism, H.T. Odum, and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II,” Journal of the History of Biology 21 (1988).
2. Sharon Kingsland, “Defining the Ecosystem,” in The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890–2000 (John Hopkins University Press, 2005).
3. William Bryant, “Whole System, Whole Earth: The Convergence of Technology and Ecology in Twentieth-Century American Culture” (doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 2006).
4. Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics of Gaia: The Emergence of Second-Order Gaia Theory,” in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker (MIT Press, 2010).
5. Nancy Slack, “Good Friends: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson” in G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology (Yale University Press, 2010).
6. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in ’70s America (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Social Sciences

1. Steve Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953 (MIT Press, 1991).
2. George Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
3. Esther-Mirjam Sent, “Herbert A. Simon as a Cyborg Scientist,” Perspectives on Science 8 (2000).
4. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5. Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
6. Hunter Heyck, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
7. Stefanos Geroulanos and Leif Weatherby, “Cybernetics and the Human Sciences” special issue introduction, History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
8. Ronald Kline, “How Disunity Matters to the History of Cybernetics in the Human Sciences in the United States, 1940–80,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Poornima Paidipaty, “‘Tortoises All the Way Down’: Geertz, Cybernetics and ‘Culture’ at the End of the Cold War,” Anthropological Theory 20 (2020).

Gregory Bateson

1. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Prentice Hall, 1980).
2. John Tresch, “Heredity is an Open System: Gregory Bateson as Descendant and Ancestor,” Anthropology Today 14 (1998).
3. Leone Montagnini, “Looking for ‘Scientific’ Social Science: The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics in Bateson’s Itinerary,” Kybernetes 36 (2007).
4. Frank Thomas, Rebekah Waits, and Gail Hartsfield, “The Influence of Gregory Bateson: Legacy or Vestige?” Kybernetes 36 (2007).
5. William Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 67 (2008).
6. Erik Peterson, “Finding Mind, Form, Organism, and Person in a Reductionist Age: The Challenge of Gregory Bateson and C. H. Waddington to Biological and Anthropological Orthodoxy, 1924–1980” (doctoral dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2010).
7. Orit Halpern, “Schizophrenic Techniques: Cybernetics, the Human Sciences, and the Double Bind,” S&F Online 10 (2012).
8. Peter Harries-Jones, Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference (Fordham University Press, 2016).
9. Anthony Chaney, Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Sciences of Mind

1. Geir Kirkebøen, “From a Naked Emperor to Just Clothes: The Rise and Fall of Cybernetic Family Therapy,” Social Science Information 34 (1995).
2. James Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld, Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks (MIT Press, 1998).
3. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: The Origins of Cognitive Science, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton University Press, 2000).
4. Roberto Cordeschi, The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).
5. Tara Abraham, “From Theory to Data: Representing Neurons in the 1940s,” Biology and Philosophy 18 (2003).
6. Tara Abraham, “Cybernetics and Theoretical Approaches in 20th-Century Brain and Behavior Sciences,” Biological Theory 1 (2006).
7. Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
8. Rebecca Lemov, “Running Amok in Labyrinthine Systems: The Cyber-Behaviorist Origins of Soft Torture,” Limn 1 (2011).
9. Deborah Weinstein, “‘Systems Everywhere’: Schizophrenia, Cybernetics, and the Double Bind,” in The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy (Cornell University Press, 2013).
10. John Shiga, “Of Other Networks: Closed-World and Green-World Networks in the Work of John C. Lilly,” Amodern 2 (2013).
11. Chen-Pang Yeang, “From Modernizing the Chinese Language to Information Science: Chao Yuen Ren’s Route to Cybernetics,” Isis 108 (2017).
12. Danielle Judith Zola Carr, “‘Ghastly Marionettes’ and the Political Metaphysics of Cognitive Literalism: Anti-Behaviourism, Language, and the Origins of Totalitarianism,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
13. Christina Vagt, “Design as Aesthetic Education: On the Politics and Aesthetics of Learning Environments,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
14. Katja Guenther, “The Dancing Robot: Grey Walter’s Cybernetic Mirror,” in The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts

1. Michael Arbib, “Warren McCulloch’s Search for the Logic of the Nervous System,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2000).
2. Neil Smalheiser, “Walter Pitts,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2000).
3. Lily Kay, “From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind: Warren S. McCulloch’s Project in Neuroscience,” Science in Context 14 (2001).
4. Tara Abraham, “Integrating Mind and Brain: Warren S. McCulloch, Cerebral Localization, and Experimental Epistemology,” Endeavour 27 (2003).
5. Kenneth Aizawa, “Warren McCulloch’s Turn to Cybernetics: What Walter Pitts Contributed,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
6. Phil Husbands and Owen Holland, “Warren McCulloch and the British Cyberneticians,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
7. Alan Collins, “An Asymmetric Relationship: The Spirit of Kenneth Craik and the Work of Warren McCulloch,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
8. Tara Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (MIT Press, 2016).

Politics and Planning

1. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996).
2. Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
3. Jennifer Light, “Taking Games Seriously,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008).
4. Antoine Bousquet, “Cyberneticizing the American War Machine: Science and Computers in the Cold War,” Cold War History 8 (2008).
5. Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (Van Abbemuseum, 2009).
6. Matthew Ferish, “The Cybernetic Continent: North America as Defense Laboratory,” in The Contours of America’s Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
7. John Duda, “Cybernetics, Anarchism and Self-Organisation,” Anarchist Studies 21 (2013).
8. David Bates, “The Political Theology of Entropy: A Katechon for the Cybernetic Age,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Nicolas Guilhot, “Automatic Leviathan: Cybernetics and Politics in Carl Schmitt’s Postwar Writings,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
10. Joakim Parslow, “The Mechanical Atatürk: Cybernetics and State Violence in the Second Turkish Republic,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53 (2021).
11. Thomas Swann, “Anarchist Cybernetics,” Perspectives in Anarchist Theory 33 (2023).

Popular Culture and Counterculture

1. Ron Eglash, “Cybernetics in American Youth Subculture,” Cultural Studies 12 (1998).
2. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
3. Bruce Clarke, “From Information to Cognition: The Systems Counterculture, Heinz von Foerster’s Pedagogy, and Second-Order Cybernetics,” Constructivist Foundations 7 (2012).
4. Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro, “How Cybernetics Connects Computing, Counterculture, and Design,” in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, edited by Andrew Blauvelt (2015).

Art

1. Mary Louise Lobsinger, “Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Canadian Center for Architecture, 2000).
2. Edward Shanken, “Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s,” in From Energy to Information, edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Henderson (Stanford University Press, 2002).
3. Maria Fernandez, “Gordon Pask: Cybernetic Polymath,” Leonardo 41 (2008).
4. Maria Fernandez, “Detached from HiStory: Jasia Reichardt and Cybernetic Serendipity,” Art Journal 67 (2008).
5. Etan J. Ilfeld, “Contemporary Art and Cybernetics: Waves of Cybernetic Discourse within Conceptual, Video and New Media Art,” Leonardo 45 (2012).
6. Etienne Benson, “Environment between System and Nature: Alan Sonfist and the Art of the Cybernetic Environment,” communication +1 3 (2014).

Film and Video

1. David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007).
2. Zabet Patterson, “From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney,” Grey Room no. 36 (2009).
3. Andrew Syder, ““Shaken Out of the Ruts of Ordinary Perception”: Vision, Culture and Technology in the Psychedelic Sixties” (doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, 2009).
4. Kris Paulsen, “Half Inch Revolution: The Guerilla Video Tape Network,” Amodern 2 (2013).
5. Carolyn Kane, “The Tragedy of Radical Subjectivity: From Radical Software to Proprietary Subjects,” Leonardo 47, no. 5 (2014).
6. Peter Sachs Collopy, “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s” (doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2015).
7. Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

Sound and Music

1. Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950–1980,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35 (2010).
2. Jonathan Sterne, “Nature Builds No Telephones” and “Perceptual Coding and the Domestication of Noise,” in MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2013).
3. Christopher Haworth, “Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Resonance 2 (2021).
4. Deirdre Loughridge, “Daphne Oram: Cyberneticist?” Resonance 2 (2021).
5. Eamonn Bell, “Cybernetics, Listening, and Sound-Studio Phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958),” Resonance 2 (2021).
6. Clara Latham, “The Sound Machine in the Body: Cybernetics and the Theremin,” Resonance 2 (2021).
7. Eric Drott, “Music and the Cybernetic Mundane,” Resonance 2 (2021).
8. Theodore Gordon, “‘Androgynous Music’: Pauline Oliveros’s Early Cybernetic Improvisation,” Contemporary Music Review 40 (2022).