Journal of the History of Biology最新文献

This article revisits the question of Alfred Russel Wallace's relationship to eugenics and explores the basis of Wallace's consistent rejection of attempts to label him a eugenicist. Whereas some scholars have identified an 'ambiguity' or 'tension' between Wallace's hereditarianism and his libertarianism and maintained - despite Wallace's statements to the contrary - that he was, in some senses, a eugenicist, this article argues that Wallace's oft-repeated claims he was not a eugenicist are fully justified. By exploring Wallace's relationship with Francis Galton using a hitherto neglected correspondence between the two concerning the establishment of a proposed laboratory, and Wallace's criticism of non-Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms in the writings of William Bateson and others, this article situates Wallace's opposition to eugenics in his broader ultra-Darwinian agenda. The article concludes by arguing that it is misleading to characterise Wallace as a eugenicist, and that doing so tends to obscure and confuse our understanding of his thought.

There's something strange about Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Biologically, Freud was a Neo-Lamarckian, who believed in both the modification of organisms through need and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, in Civilization, Freud argued that because human nature is immutable, society has dim odds of improving substantially. Lamarckians, of course, rejected that any species-nature is immutable, as species can always be transformed via the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In fact, many of Freud's Viennese contemporaries-such as Wilhelm Reich, Julius Tandler, and Paul Kammerer-took their Lamarckism to license precisely the sorts of radical social projects Freud deemed impossible. Thus the Freud of Civilization helped himself to a rigid view of human nature which, given his associated biological views, he seemingly ought to have rejected. In this paper, I explain this apparent inconsistency, and suggest Freud resolved it in the following way: Freud was not merely a Lamarckian, but also a strong and peculiar kind of recapitulationist, who believed stages of psychological development both recapitulate phylogeny, and "remain with us" throughout both individual lives and future species-history. I suggest Freud's recapitulationism supposed a certain inertia: what occurred in phylogenetic history cannot un-occur, and therefore there are aspects of our nature which we cannot un-acquire. In this way, Freud reached a rigid conception of human nature despite his Lamarckism.

Tree diagrams are the prevailing form of visualization in biological classification and phylogenetics. Already during the time of the so-called Systematist Wars from the mid-1960s until the 1980s most journal articles and textbooks published by systematists contained tree diagrams. Although this episode of systematics is well studied by historians and philosophers of biology, most analyses prioritize scientific theories over practices and tend to emphasize conflicting theoretical assumptions. In this article, I offer an alternative perspective by viewing the conflict through the lens of representational practices with a case study on tree diagrams that were used by numerical taxonomists (phenograms) and cladists (cladograms). I argue that the current state of molecular phylogenetics should not be interpreted as the result of a competition of views within systematics. Instead, molecular phylogenetics arose independently of systematics and elements of cladistics and phenetics were integrated into the framework of molecular phylogenetics, facilitated by the compatibility of phenetic and cladistic practices with the quantitative approach of molecular phylogenetics. My study suggests that this episode of scientific change is more complex than common narratives of battles and winners or conflicts and compromises. Today, cladograms are still used and interpreted as specific types of molecular phylogenetic trees. While phenograms and cladograms represented different forms of knowledge during the time of the Systematist Wars, today they are both used to represent evolutionary relationships. This indicates that diagrams are versatile elements of scientific practice that can change their meaning, depending on the context of use within theoretical frameworks.

This paper offers an historical introduction to Pere Alberch's evolutionary thought and his contributions to Evo-Devo, based on his unique approach to experimental teratology. We will take as our point of reference the teratogenic experiments developed by Alberch and Emily A. Gale during the 1980s, aimed at producing monstrous variants of frogs and salamanders. We will analyze his interpretation of the results of these experiments within the framework of the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology (or "Evo-Devo"). The aim is understand how Alberch interpreted teratological anomalies as highly revealing objects of study for understanding the development of organic form, not only in an ontogenetic sense-throughout embryonic development-but also phylogenetically-throughout the evolution of species. Alberch's interpretation of monsters reflects the influence of a long tradition of non-Darwinian evolutionary thought, which began in the nineteenth century and was continued in the twentieth century by people such as Richard Goldschmidt, Conrad H. Waddington, and Stephen Jay Gould. They all proposed various non-gradualist models of evolution, in which embryonic development played a central role. Following this tradition, Alberch argued that, in order to attain a correct understanding of the role of embryological development in evolution, it was necessary to renounce the gradualist paradigm associated with the Darwinian interpretation of evolution, which understood nature as a continuum. According to Alberch, the study of monstrous abnormalities was of great value in understanding how certain epigenetic restrictions in development could give rise to discontinuities and directionality in morphological transformations throughout evolution.