Nineteenth-century Biology Research Articles

The Liminal Nature of the “Eclipse of Darwinism” as a Critical Phase in the History of Evolutionary Biology

The term “eclipse of Darwinism” was popularized by Julian Huxley, who used it to describe the period before the emergence of the evolutionary synthesis. The idea of the “eclipse” was later criticized, because it was used to show the superiority of the synthesis over earlier evolutionary theories. This historiography was opposed by Peter Bowler and Mark Largent. According to Bowler, Darwin was not a central figure in nineteenth-century biology. Rather, most naturalists worked within a different evolutionary paradigm. Largent suggested replacing the term “eclipse” with “interphase of Darwinism”, which would better reflect its nature as a preparatory phase for the creation of the synthesis. However, the philosophical presuppositions on which these interpretations were built, while helping them to avoid the errors of their predecessors, also led to new problems. The problems with the interpretations of the “eclipse” can be explained by its “liminal” character. Liminality is an intermediate period between the old and the new. Because of its transgressivity, a liminal period is hard to integrate within a given structure and is mostly excluded from the latter. When analyzing works of historians dealing with the “eclipse” we encounter a common tendency towards excluding this period from historical narratives.

Review: The Materiality of Architecture and Metamorphism: Material Change in Architecture

Review: <i>The Materiality of Architecture</i> and <i>Metamorphism: Material Change in Architecture</i>

The Kantian account of mechanical explanation of natural ends in eighteenth and nineteenth century biology

The rise of the mechanistic worldview in the seventeenth century had a major impact on views of biological generation. Many seventeenth century naturalists rejected the old animist thesis. However, the alternative view of gradual mechanistic formation in embryology didn’t convince either. How to articulate the peculiarity of life? Researchers in the seventeenth century proposed both “animist” and mechanistic theories of life. In the eighteenth century again a controversy in biology arose regarding the explanation of generation. Some adhered to the view that life is a physical property of matter (e.g. Buffon), others saw living entities as the result of the development of pre-existing germs (e.g. Bonnet). Naturalists, lacked a convincing account that could guide their research. In interaction with leading naturalists of his time Immanuel Kant articulated an approach to explaining generation. Kant’s account, delineated in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the power of judgment) (1790), is a combination of Newtonian non-reductionist mechanism in explanation, and a concept of natural end comparable to Stahl’s formal conception of organic bodies. It consists of two claims: a) in biology only mechanical explanation is explanatory, and b) living entities contain some original organisation, which is mechanically unexplainable. In the nineteenth century this approach influenced naturalists as Müller, Virchow, and Von Baer, in their physiological research. Dissatisfied with a sheer mechanistic or, on the other hand, a sheer teleological approach, they appreciated the Kantian account of mechanical explanation of natural ends. In Germany, in the second halve of the nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel reopened the debate about abiogenesis, which still continuous.

Introduction: sketches of a conceptual history of epigenesis.

This is an introduction to a collection of articles on the conceptual history of epigenesis, from Aristotle to Harvey, Cavendish, Kant and Erasmus Darwin, moving into nineteenth-century biology with Wolff, Blumenbach and His, and onto the twentieth century and current issues, with Waddington and epigenetics. The purpose of the topical collection is to emphasize how epigenesis marks the point of intersection of a theory of biological development and a (philosophical) theory of active matter. We also wish to show that the concept of epigenesis existed prior to biological theorization and that it continues to permeate thinking about development in recent biological debates.

Organizing the Marketplace

This essay engages a classic debate about the way nineteenth-century biology was informed by contemporaneous developments in political economy, and vice versa. However, rather than argue for a convergence between classical liberalism and Darwinian evolution, this essay traces the way that the concept of organization moved between both fields of discourse. Compared to the theory of evolution by natural selection, the logic of organization was far more teleological and, often, authoritarian. Instead of asserting that competition for access to scarce resources among autonomous agents yields adaptive outcomes in the population at large, it held that organic entities inexorably tend to develop from a state of simplicity to one of complexity. Moreover, it stressed the production of hierarchical structures wherein the whole was privileged over its constitutive parts, in biology as well as society. It is my thesis that the logic of organization proved especially attractive in debates about the transition from free-market to corporate capitalism, providing a powerful means to describe, discuss, and dispute the centralization, rationalization, and bureaucratization that contemporary observers often took to be characteristic of a distinctly modern political economy.

Biological and Social New Orders

In this paper, I examine the intertwined science, politics, and religion of a major figure of nineteenth-century French biology, the Parisian professor of histology Charles Robin (1821–1885). Historiography generally associates his name with France’s rejection of the cell theory formulated by Schwann and then Virchow in the 1830s–1850s. One of the main factors put forward is the influence of Comtean positivism. Here, I propose to go beyond this historiography and discuss not only convergences but also divergences between Robin’s and Comte’s visions of the organism and society. Moreover, I analyze Robin’s research agenda in light of the political ideas he defended as a republican in the context of the emergence of the Third Republic. At first sight, Robin’s political activity (marked by his late tenure as senator) may initially appear disconnected from his scientific agenda. However, I argue that Robin’s approaches to different areas of knowledge (biology, sociology, politics, and metaphysics) were mutually supportive and lent one another authority, especially through the parallel structure and shared vocabulary of their discourses. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Robin’s biological materialism, combined with his outspoken anticlericalism, constitutes a political stance, and show how the concept of “solidarity” helped him to cast a new light on the relations between the parts and the whole, both in biology and social policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AND BIOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE AND GERMANY edited by Lynn K. Nyhart and Florence Vienne.

William Whewell’s philosophy of architecture and the historicization of biology

William Whewell’s work on historical science has received some attention from historians and philosophers of science. Whewell’s own work on the history of German Gothic church architecture has been touched on within the context of the history of architecture. To a large extent these discussions have been conducted separately. I argue that Whewell intended his work on Gothic architecture as an attempt to (help) found a science of historical architecture, as an exemplar of historical science. I proceed by analyzing the key features of Whewell’s philosophy of historical science. I then show how his architectural history exemplifies this philosophy. Finally, I show how Whewell’s philosophy of historical science matches some developments in a science (biological systematics) that, in the mid-to late-nineteenth century, came to be reinterpreted as a historical science. I comment briefly on Whewell as a potential influence on nineteenth century biology and in particular on Darwin.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Darwinian and Jacksonian evolution

Background: The appearance of evolutionary ideas in the nineteenth century had a pivotal impact on clinical neurology. Darwinism evoked a strong reaction but ultimately became the most important idea in nineteenth century biology. Jacksonian evolutionary neurophysiology, while not Darwinian, produced a consistent bedside science.

The average and the normal in nineteenth-century French medical discourse

The concept of normal in nineteenth-century medical thought was by no means as straightforward as is often supposed. The notions of ‘norm’, ‘normal’ and ‘normativity’ were not historically stable, and the use of those terms in modern theoretical talk stands to gain in precision by taking account of their troubled genealogy. Many French scientific authors of the nineteenth century put the normal at or near the heart of their epistemology without actually defining it. Quetelet was concerned to define the type through statistics, and then apply it as a norm in the assessment of specific cases of pathology. Broussais took pathologies as his object of study, but used an unexplicated concept of the normal to define their range. Both Comte and Bernard sought to first establish a science of the normal state and then use that as the base of clinical comparison for pathology. In the most general terms, nineteenth-century biology and medicine wanted and needed the ‘type’. The type was, after all, the normal vested with the authority of science. However, the type was never quite to hand. This article engages in a deconstructive reading the point of which is to show how fraught and sometimes how vacuous the concept of the normal could be in nineteenth-century French medical thought. It then goes on to discuss Canguilhem's historical epistemology of the normative and refers to Foucault's use of Canguilhem.

Cell theory, specificity, and reproduction, 1837–1870

The cell is not only the structural, physiological, and developmental unit of life, but also the reproductive one. So far, however, this aspect of the cell has received little attention from historians and philosophers of biology. I will argue that cell theory had far-reaching consequences for how biologists conceptualized the reproductive relationships between germs and adult organisms. Cell theory, as formulated by Theodor Schwann in 1839, implied that this relationship was a specific and lawful one, that is, that germs of a certain kind, all else being equal, would produce adult organisms of the same kind, and vice versa. Questions of preformation and epigenesis took on a new meaning under this presupposition. The question then became one of whether cells could be considered as autonomous agents producing adult organisms of a given species, or whether they were the product of external, organizing forces and thus only a stage in the development of the whole organism. This question became an important issue for nineteenth-century biology. As I will demonstrate, it was the view of cells as autonomous agents which helped both Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to think of inheritance as a lawful process.

Modern nature: the rise of the biological perspective in Germany

In Modern Nature, Lynn K. Nyhart traces the emergence of a 'biological perspective' in late nineteenth-century Germany that emphasized the dynamic relationships among organisms, and between organisms and their environment. Examining this approach to nature in light of Germany's fraught urbanization and industrialization, as well as the opportunities presented by new and reforming institutions, she argues that rapid social change drew attention to the role of social relationships and physical environments in rendering a society - and nature - whole, functional, and healthy. This quintessentially modern view of nature, Nyhart shows, stood in stark contrast to the standard naturalist's orientation toward classification. While this new biological perspective would eventually grow into the academic discipline of ecology, Modern Nature locates its roots outside the universities, in a vibrant realm of populist natural history inhabited by taxidermists and zookeepers, schoolteachers and museum reformers, amateur enthusiasts and nature protectionists. Probing the populist beginnings of animal ecology in Germany, Nyhart unites the history of popular natural history with that of elite science in a new way. In doing so, she brings to light a major orientation in late nineteenth-century biology that has long been eclipsed by Darwinism.

The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine (review)

Reviewed by: The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine Hannah Decker (bio) The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine. By Mitchell B. Hart. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x + 264 pp. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the conception of the Jews as having unhealthy, diseased bodies was widely held within European—and to some extent general Western—culture. This has been well documented in various publications, perhaps most frequently by Sander Gilman.1 Mitchell Hart, the author of the book under present review, has also contributed to the literature on Jewish pathology.2 But now Hart has written a book about authors who considered Jews to be healthy, covering approximately the century from 1850–1950. The rise of bacteriology and other subfields of microbiology in the nineteenth century raised awareness in Western societies of germs and other pathogens. Therefore, there arose an interest among attentive populations in what they had to do to be healthy and not succumb to the dangers [End Page 237] around them. (Of course, these scientific discoveries led antisemites to now vilify Jews as "bacilli.") In this context, scientists of microbiological discoveries, like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, became celebrities. Both non-Jewish writers as well as Jewish ones took a piercing look at Jews and asked why had they survived for so long a time as a "race." (Jews as a race was another new scientific and eventually political preoccupation.) The conclusion was that "ancient Hebrew society had already possessed much of the medical wisdom of modern practitioners" (31). In this light, there were a number of authors who redefined Moses as a microbiologist and "sanitarian" and urged all Western peoples to follow the hygienic practices he laid out for Jews in his law code. These authors also viewed the rabbis of the Talmudic period and medieval Jewish thinkers as contributing to Jewish health so that as a result Jews were immune to tuberculosis and other illnesses. This immunity, of course, did not exist, although Jews promulgated the allegation as a tool to combat antisemitism. Some Jewish writers even had the goal of rebutting those who "insisted on the racial and cultural superiority of Greeks/Aryans" (55). In addition, eugenicists and social Darwinists pointed to the longevity of the Jewish race as an example of a people whose laws had sound eugenic principles that had kept them "pure." Abraham, Moses, and the rabbis were translated into ancient versions of the Darwinists and eugenicists, like Francis Galton and Charles Davenport, on the issues of struggle and natural selection and Jewish health and survival. In particular, it was concluded that "the ghetto had prepared Jews for the Darwinian struggle for existence and produced positive eugenic qualities" (132). I would like to make two comments on Hart's work. The first is that in The Healthy Jew, he unearths some interesting and valuable information about the influence of nineteenth-century biology on the conception of Jews, as well as on a particular variety of antisemitism. But the constant repetition of this information is wearisome. As I thought about writing this review, I could not help ponder that Hart might have better served his audience with a lengthy journal article. He might even have reached a broader audience in the right journal, beyond the borders of Jewish history, where the wider implications of his subject would be more quickly known. My second comment is that Hart does not address an important issue. The primary and secondary literature on Jews as dirty and diseased is extensive. Hart's evidence of the opposite sometimes relies on long expositions of a few books, in spite of what is in his bibliography. I, and other readers I am sure, would like to know what the balance was. I think Hart is in a good position to write in the future about this, and [End Page 238] I hope he does. We know that Nazi antisemitic rhetoric won out for a while in certain important sectors. But ultimately, what impression were German, French, British, and American audiences left with, and what is the legacy of these competing views today? Hannah Decker University of Houston...

Skin Aesthetics as Incarnation: Gilles Deleuze’s Diagram of Francis Bacon

FRANCIS BACON'S ABSTRACT STRATEGIES to represent the surface of the furies' skin in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and the flayed bodies of Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) can be intercepted by Gilles Deleuze's treatment of the painter's oeuvre according to notions of descent (fall) and flesh (meat)--two elements contained in his underused notion of incarnation. Incarnation brings to mind the idea of descent (the spirit coming down) and flesh (the spiritual clothed in skin). term is seldom used by Deleuze, a materialist philosopher, but when it comes up in his corpus it is concerned with the virtual and the actual and, most importantly, with the concept of the diagram, which has implications of systematic scale in his philosophy. Descent implies a movement in time and flesh, a destination. Between the two, skin filters the fall into sensation. Skin is the liminal membrane that articulates the dimension of time in the concept of incarnation. Adding time to incarnation provides a fuller picture of the complexity of the concept. Skin is not simply a receptacle but an elastic organ progressing through time, as Bacon shows with his figures shifting from one panel of his triptychs to the next, with the torsions that he puts his figures through, and with the oft-used circular zones endowed with arrows that illustrate movement and directionality in time. Also, Bacon's violent, sombre, and horror-laden aesthetics are an apt terrain onto which to bring Deleuze's particular refinement of time through the notion of morose time. Morose time deploys a dynamic dimension in a figure teeming with potential and adds to his already rich analysis of Bacon's oeuvre. juxtaposition of a modern British painter and his French poststructuralist commentator opens a strange space populated by religious imagery and mythical creatures, namely crucifixions and furies. To these are added a rhinoceros skin and incarnations into meat, cephalopods turning into quadrupeds, Bodies without Organs and masochists. There are also bones and skin and a head split in half by an ocean. Accordingly, to navigate this polymorphic crowd, the essay is divided into five parts. first section is a description of Bacon's work. second section explains incarnation through analogy, essence, and the virtual/actual duality. third section demonstrates the topological (diagrammatical) transformation of a fish into a crucified body according to the virtual mechanics of nineteenth-century biology. fourth section shows the morose time at work on the surface of the skin between the virtual and the actual. Finally, the last section proposes a diagrammatic duality of the surface of the skin. 1. Studies of Furies Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is at the centre of all this. A triptych painted toward the end of the Second World War, it is based on the three furies whose screeches torment those racked by guilt. They were referred to as The Kindly Ones (Eumenides) because calling them The Angry Ones (Erinyes) would lead to insanity: The Kindly Ones--Les bienveillantes, as in the title of Jonathan Littell's novel depicting the brutality of the Holocaust from the perspective of a Nazi SS officer. Calmly recounting his actions as a man going through the banality of evil; dealing with the flesh in a detached manner, he is nevertheless caught by the titular furies as Soviet and Allied troops enter Berlin. appearance of the furies at the end of the novel coincides with Bacon's depiction of furies in the triptych at the end of war. novel's pages scream behind the print as the soft title on the cover appeases the copy of the book. euphemism designating the horrors of World War 11 resolutely underlines the unspeakable. What else is euphemistically designated not by some gradation on the original term that should not be spoken but by its absolute contrary? …

Physiologists, physicians, and physical educators: Nineteenth century biology and exercise, hygienic and educative*

When W.M. Conant (out-patient surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital) addressed the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1894 he spoke for many of his contemporaries when he declared that the two aims of exercise were the hygienic and the educative. The former was concerned primarily with muscular, circulatory and digestive functions. The latter emphasized the nervous system, brain and by extension ‘the mind’; how the organism grew; and how ‘character’ was formed. Growing interest in such matters was fostered by a recognition of the need to improve the nation's health and was facilitated by developments in the biological sciences. Expansionist tendencies and a perceived need for strong, virile and resolute leaders also became factors. Whereas systemized forms of gymnastics might be valuable, sports such as rowing, baseball and football were deemed to be more so. For those physicians, physiologists, and others who emphasized hygienic and educative (sometimes referred to as educational) goals, the new gospel of strenuous activity partook of, yet differed from, the glorified accounts of athletics that appeared in the popular press. They, too, stressed physical vigour and ‘moral courage’ but within limits not to be exceeded by an overemphasis on ‘contest victory’. United States Commissioner of Education William T. Harris, whose remarks had opened the well-attended 1889 Boston Conference on Physical Training, was among many who considered physical education, then a new profession dedicated to the study and care of the body and aimed at the perfection of the individual, to be important. Developments in evolutionary biology, physiological psychology and especially psychological studies such as G. Stanley Hall and his students began to produce in the 1890s were significant in moving physical education increasingly towards a psycho-social orientation by 1906.

Hybrids, pure cultures, and pure lines: from nineteenth-century biology to twentieth-century genetics

Prompted by recent recognitions of the omnipresence of horizontal gene transfer among microbial species and the associated emphasis on exchange, rather than isolation, as the driving force of evolution, this essay will reflect on hybridization as one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century biology. I will argue that an emphasis on horizontal exchange was already endorsed by ‘biology’ when it came into being around 1800 and was brought to full fruition with the emergence of genetics in 1900. The true revolution in nineteenth-century life sciences, I maintain, consisted in a fundamental shift in ontology, which eroded the boundaries between individual and species, and allowed biologists to move up and down the scale of organic complexity. Life became a property extending both ‘downwards’, to the parts that organisms were composed of, as well as ‘upwards’, to the collective entities constituted by the relations of exchange and interaction that organisms engage in to reproduce. This mode of thinking was crystallized by Gregor Mendel and consolidated in the late nineteenth-century conjunction of biochemistry, microbiology and breeding in agro-industrial settings. This conjunction and its implications are especially exemplified by Wilhelm Johannsen’s and Martinus Beijerinck’s work on pure lines and cultures. An understanding of the subsequent constraints imposed by the evolutionary synthesis of the twentieth century on models of genetic systems may require us to rethink the history of biology and displace Darwin’s theory of natural selection from that history’s centre.

Darwin, Tegetmeier and the bees

The Origin of species is often seen as a turning point in nineteenth-century biology, but arguments that commenced before its publication were not immediately resolved by its publication. In this paper, I examine the debate about bee cell construction; whether bees built hexagonal cells or not, and how this instinct could evolve. Bees were of particular importance to natural theologians as examples of God’s design in nature. Other naturalists sought to explain their complex behaviour without invoking design, but there was still no agreement on how bees were able to make their cells so perfect. The work of Charles Darwin and William Tegetmeier on this subject sought to settle the controversy; yet their experiments and arguments did not convince everyone in the apiarian world.

The age of model organisms.

Nineteenth-century biology embraced the complexity and variety of living things. In the twenty-first century, biologists have returned to these attributes of life with functional and comparative genomics. We could not have done so without the intense study of 'genetically domesticated' model organisms in the twentieth century. The focus on the universality and simplicity of biological systems promoted by these studies is now fading, together, arguably, with the importance of model organisms themselves.

Matthias Jakob Schleiden (1804-1881): The History of Jewish Interest in Science and the Methodology of Microscopic Botany

As one of the originators of the cell theory, the German botanist Matthias Jakob Schleiden is a key figure in the development of nineteenth-century biology. His numerous writings include a study on Judaism and the history of science. Not only does Schleiden's appraisal of Judaism contrast with the academic antisemitism of his time, it also breaks with the anti-Judaism of his philosophical mentors, Kant and Fries. Schleiden's apology for Judaism is shown to be deeply rooted in his ideas about scientific progress, especially his methodology of microscopic botany. Judaism is considered as analogous to modern laboratory science.

Freud's Hatchet Man in an Age of Deidealization

Freud’s Hatchet Man in an Age of Deidealization Eli Zaretsky When Freud died in exile in 1939, he was already a legend. By the 1950s, he exerted a grip on many imaginations comparable to that of the great figures—Dostoyevsky, Moses, Leonardo—about whom he wrote. There had always been critics and dissenters, of course, but they remained in the minority. In the 1970s and 80s, however, several substantial works called for a downward revision in his standing. Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1971) challenged Freud’s originality by situating his discoveries in the context of nineteenth century dynamic psychiatry. Frank Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979) did the same with nineteenth century biology. Adolf Grünbaum’s The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1986) rejected Freud’s claims to scientific standing on philosophical grounds. Despite their criticism, these books were all respectful and complex engagements with Freud’s thought. In this respect, they are unlike the later spate of anti-Freud writings, especially Frederick Crews’s articles in The New York Review of Books (1994 and 1993). No earlier critique had the immediate and dramatic impact of Crews’s. In part, this was the result of Crews’s unprecedented tone of disdain and contempt. One commentator called them “iconoclastic reaction[s] against [Freud’s] iconic status” (Goodheart 1995). It is perhaps not widely realized how effective these articles have been in at least temporarily vitiating Freud’s reputation, and how many people, perhaps especially among the young, now regard Freud as disproved, old hat, sexist, conservative, replaced by Foucault and the like. Crews performed his function—that of hatchet man—very effectively, but hatchets do not fell great trees unless many axe blows have first prepared the way. These axe blows did not primarily come from the scholars, such as Ellenberger, Sulloway, or Grünbaum, whom Crews cited, but [End Page 385] more importantly from social movements and cultural revaluations whose passions Crews effectively and disingenuously manipulated. The purpose of this article is to situate Crews’s attack in the context of those movements and changes. The attack on Freud is about much more than Freud. At stake is a whole set of hopes and possibilities to which Freud, and psychoanalysis, are historically linked, sometimes reluctantly. Crews’s attack on Freud’s person is, in fact, an attack on Freud’s imago; as such it was an attempt to reconfigure the multitudinous lines of thought and emotion that imago condenses. By defying Freud’s authority, especially contemptuously, Crews seeks to claim that authority for himself. On its basis he advances a series of assumptions concerning the nature of morality and personal integrity, the character and value of modern knowledge (i.e., science) and the relevance of the welfare state to modern “technologies of the self” or “therapy.” I will show that his narrow and ungenerous views on all of these matters reflect a time of diminished possibilities in which optimism and the belief in progress are at a low point. Above all, the Crews episode reflects the significance of “post-feminism”: confusion over the meaning and future place of the feminist and gay movements. To argue these points, I will first supply the historical context so strikingly absent from Crews’s account. Next, I need to discuss the specifics of Crews’s criticisms, and I need to refute them. Situating Crews’s attack in its historical context raises the question of whether our culture at this time can actually tolerate the analytic enterprise when the fullness of its vision is noted. But it also opens the way, finally, for a positive discussion concerning the role that psychoanalysis might play in the culture now emerging. How did Freud become such a commanding figure in modern Western culture? In part, I believe it was because of the subject matter Freud addressed. Freud mapped out and for a while presided over an historically new realm that emerged in the West during his lifetime—that of personal life. Earlier, the family was the basic economic unit in society. This meant that personal identity was rooted in one’s place in the system of production. The advance of industry separated...