Journal of the History of Biology最新文献

This study investigates nineteenth century natural history practices through the lens of the Actor-Network Theory, which posits that scientific practice is shaped by an intricate network of interactions between human and non-human actors. At the core of this research is the analysis of correspondence between Charles Darwin and his collaborators during the Cirripedia Project, which unveils a complex landscape of negotiations with illustrators, funders, specimen owners, and translators, among other stakeholders and interested parties. The study goes beyond the final outcomes of scientific research, delving into behind-the-scenes interactions, and hidden constructions, shedding light on the complex dynamics and actors that conventional scientific narratives often overlook. In general, this approach provides a detailed and insightful view of the underlying processes of nineteenth-century scientific practice, underscoring the importance of epistolary correspondence as a central element in producing scientific knowledge at the time, and in particular it reveals to us how much Darwin was himself involved in the production of his famous work on barnacles. By emphasizing the intricacies of research, this study enriches our understanding of Darwin's work as well as natural history practices in the 19th century, highlighting the complexity and diversity of actors and agents involved in shaping scientific knowledge.

Ernst Brücke's 1861 essay Die Elementarorganismen has often been cited as a watershed in the history of physiology as well as in the history of cell theory. In its time it was widely read as a reform of animal cell theory, shifting the concept of the cell away from Schleiden and Schwann's original cell schema of a membranous vesicle with a nucleus, and towards the protoplasm theory that had developed in botany, centered on the cell's living contents. It was also notorious for its arguments against the necessity of both the nucleus and the cell membrane. An English translation of "The Elementary Organisms" is presented for the first time in this journal issue, with annotations and illustrations, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-024-09773-9 . Brücke's essay was not only an intervention into cell theory: historians can read it as a continuation of debates on the nature of the organism and theories of organization, and as an epistemological meditation on the microscope. In addition, although Brücke was known as a founder of the Berlin school of organic physics, "The Elementary Organisms" shows how he combined an avant-garde physicalist physiology with a much older tradition of comparative anatomy and physiology. The following introductory essay will provide a scientific biography of Ernst Brücke up to 1863, with background on debates on biological organization, cell theory, and muscle histology.

In 1861 the physiologist Ernst Brücke (1819-1892) published "The Elementary Organisms," calling for a major reform of the definition of the animal cell. An English translation of Brücke's essay is presented here for the first time. In this translation the numbered footnotes 1-9 are Brücke's own; alphabetical endnotes A-HH are my own annotations, with additional references to works cited by Brücke. Figures referenced by Brücke but not included in his original essay are also provided. I have also presented an introductory essay to my translation that provides background on Brücke and his arguments: "The Schema and Organization of the Cell," https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-024-09774-8 , in this same issue of the Journal of the History of Biology.

William Lawrence Tower's work on the evolution of the Colorado Potato Beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata), documenting the environmental induction of mutation and speciation, made him a leading figure in experimental genetics during the first decade of the 20th century. His research program served as a model for other experimental evolution studies seeking to demonstrate the environmental modification of inheritance. Tower enjoyed the support of influential figures in the field, despite well-known problems that plagued Tower's earlier academic career. The validity of his genetic work, and other findings reported by Tower, were later challenged. The Tower affair illustrates how questionable and possibly fraudulent scientific practices can be tolerated to explore certain experimental directions and theoretical frameworks, particularly at the frontier of expanding disciplines. When needed, those explorations can be forestalled or extinguished by exploiting conspicuous vulnerabilities of rogue practitioners. In Tower's case, both unrefuted allegations of scientific misconduct and personal problems dissolved his institutional support, leading to a swift ouster from academic science. Tower's downfall discredited soft inheritance and neo-Lamarckian conceptions in the field of experimental genetics, facilitating the discipline's embrace of a hard inheritance model that featured a hereditary material resistant to environmental modification.

While model organisms have had many historians, this article places studies of humans, and particularly our development, in the politics of species choice. Human embryos, investigated directly rather than via animal surrogates, have gone through cycles of attention and neglect. In the past 60 years they moved from the sidelines to center stage. Research was resuscitated in anatomy, launched in reproductive biomedicine, molecular genetics, and stem-cell science, and made attractive in developmental biology. I explain this surge of interest in terms of rivalry with models and reliance on them. The greater involvement of medicine in human reproduction, especially through in vitro fertilization, gave access to fresh sources of material that fed critiques of extrapolation from mice and met demands for clinical relevance or "translation." Yet much of the revival depended on models. Supply infrastructures and digital standards, including biobanks and virtual atlases, emulated community resources for model organisms. Novel culture, imaging, molecular, and postgenomic methods were perfected on less precious samples. Toing and froing from the mouse affirmed the necessity of the exemplary mammal and its insufficiency justified inquiries into humans. Another kind of model-organoids and embryo-like structures derived from stem cells-enabled experiments that encouraged the organization of a new field, human developmental biology. Research on humans has competed with and counted on models.

This study situates Henry Havelock Ellis's sexological research within the nineteenth-century evolutionary debates, especially the discussion over sexual selection's applicability to humanity. For example, Ellis's monograph on sexual behavior, Sexual Inversion (1897), treated inborn homosexuality as a natural variation of evolutionary mechanisms. This book was situated within a longer study of human sexuality in relation to evolutionary selection. His later works dealt even more directly with Charles Darwin's concept of selection, such as Sexual Selection in Man (1905). Through Sexual Selection in Man, Ellis asserted that sexual attraction stemmed from a physical cause rather than an innate aesthetic sense. I argue that Ellis's best-known historical publications, including his work on sexual inversion, were intended to intervene in the contemporary evolutionary debates. This analysis also identifies a specific point where evolutionary theory informed the foundation of sexology as a scientific discipline.

The case of the Juke family is one of the most notable episodes of the history of eugenics in the USA. The Jukes were initially brought to the fore in the 1870s by a famous investigation that aimed at estimating the interplay of heredity and environment in determining the problems of poverty and crime. This inquiry triggered a harsh confrontation between two polar interpretations of the study, an "environmentalist" one and a "hereditarian" one. It was with the later reassessment of the case made by the Eugenics American Office (ERO) in the 1910s that the controversy was considered closed with the victory of the eugenicists' hereditarian stance. As a result, the family was made a living proof of the alleged hereditary nature of crime and pauperism and a case study in support of the eugenicists' plea for the sterilization of people deemed the bearers of hereditary defectiveness. In this article, I explore the role played by pedigrees and other diagrammatic representations in the eugenicists' appropriation of the meaning of the case of the Juke family and the role played by this appropriation in asserting the superiority of the ERO's method of work over rival approaches.