The representation of the American territory and the controversy between Jefferson and Buffon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Franco-American confrontation of scientific reports on nature reveals that the Lewis and Clark Expedition was not so essentially a conquering move as previously asserted because it was conceived mostly within the context of a scientific survey with the aim to prove or disprove Buffon’s contention that the American climate was that of paradise (hot and humid), and that the absence of hardship fostered mediocrity if not degeneration. In his admiration for Buffon, Thomas Jefferson strove to bring his observations to the attention of the French naturalist, beginning with his own publication on Virginia botanical surroundings, and with his observations on large American animals that included the Mammoth, whom he thought still alive because of his respect for creationism. The fact that large animals were roaming the continent disproved that degeneration was the fate of its inhabitants, degeneration implying a diminutive size. As well, “Indians” were not any lesser than other human beings (since creationism excluded evolution one way or the other, and he saw no evidence of degeneracy in any kinds of beings from America). He did foresee that they might benefit from their adoption of British forms of governance and religion so that perhaps, in due time, they could establish their own “nations”.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".