From Professional to Expert: William Morton Wheeler
Keywords:
expert, William Morton Wheeler, Myrmecology, professional, amateurAbstract
William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937) was an American scientist who spent the last 37 years of his life studying ants. He worked on matters of collecting, description, taxonomy and especially on their social behavior. This discipline, named myrmecology by Wheeler, was developed between 1880 and 1930, during an important transformation in the American biological sciences which led to the shaping of several distinct research areas. During this process, a discursive distinction emerged between two different ways of doing science: the professional and the amateur, constituting a dichotomy confronting two styles of scientific practice. Within this context, our aim is to show in which sense treating Wheeler as an expert allows us to observe some aspects of his work and the process of disciplinary formation in the field he contributed to establish, that are obscured when a strict dichotomy professional-amateur is used.
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