Journal of the History of Biology最新文献

A 14th-century Persian medical manual known as the Tānksūqnāmah and commissioned by the vizier and physician Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadānī (1247-1318) explicitly states that blood "makes rounds" within the body, flowing from the liver to the heart, then to the lungs, and returning again to the liver. This account, grounded in a cosmological model that links bodily processes to celestial movements, does not correspond to Ibn al-Nafīs's philosophical description of pulmonary transit, nor does it anticipate William Harvey's (1578-1657) quantitative theory of systemic circulation, for it is rooted in an astrological understanding of motion and causality. Even though it draws on Chinese cosmology and medicine and the Graeco-Arabic medical heritage, the Tānksūqnāmah ultimately advances its own conception of blood movement-one that diverges from both-indicating a deliberate reinterpretation rather than simple continuity. The Tānksūqnāmah is therefore best understood as a product of Mongol-era Iran's unique cross-cultural milieu, where heterogeneous concepts were consciously recombined within a shared intellectual setting. Seen in this light, the text exemplifies how scientific ideas could emerge through reinterpretation in cultural and scientific contact zones rather than through the transmission and adaptation of knowledge within a single lineage.

Frank Lillie's discovery of the explanation of the development of the free-martin-a sexual abnormality in cattle-was an important contribution to studies of sexual differentiation in the early 20th century. Several historians have framed its significance in terms of a debate between geneticists and endocrinologists about what determines sex. I argue that this framing masks the real significance of the discovery. As an embryologist studying the physiology of development, Lillie studied whether and to what degree sexual development is plastic, not when and how it is initially determined. The important lesson he took away from the free-martin was that an embryo retains its ability to differentiate even after its sex has been initially determined. In other words, sex determination is not an "irreversible predestination." Understood this way, the free-martin discovery did not help to distinguish the relative importance of chromosomes or hormones in determining sex. Rather, it showed that sexual development can proceed in opposition to an individual's determined sex.

Romantic notions of nature, formulated around the turn of the 18th century, have shaped much of Western environmental consciousness and are often linked to the emergence of holistic ecology in the 20th century. Due to its perceived proximity to Romanticism, holistic ecology has played a complex and influential role in both environmental discourse and practice. This paper examines the extent to which key strands of holistic ecology, particularly the organismic ecology of Frederic Clements and the systems ecology of Eugene and Howard T. Odum, as framed by John Law's (2004) concept of "scientific romanticism," can be considered genuinely Romantic. Drawing on the history of ecology and philosophy, it compares the holistic assumptions of these ecological fields with those of philosophical Romanticism. The analysis reveals that, while both traditions draw from an organicist reservoir and share a commitment to naturalism, they diverge in critical ways. Philosophical Romanticism revitalized nature as a self-generating, creative force (natura naturans), whereas holistic ecology, never embracing such spiritual or aesthetic dimensions, oriented toward a more mechanistic image of nature (natura naturata). It evolved from Clements' Romantic motifs of unity and teleology to the Odums' cybernetic systems framework, aligned with technocratic rationality and the Newtonian worldview.