History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences最新文献

We performed a critical review of the historiographical studies on biogeography. We began with the pioneering works of Augustin and Alphonse de Candolle. Then, we analyzed the historical accounts of biogeography developed by (1) Martin Fichman and his history on the extensionism-permanentism debate; (2) Gareth Nelson and his critique of the Neo-Darwinian historiography of biogeography; (3) Ernst Mayr, with his dispersalist viewpoint; (4) Alan Richardson, who wrote a microhistory on the biogeographic model constructed by Darwin; (5) Michael Paul Kinch and the ideas discussed in the 19th century about the geographical distribution of living beings; (6) Janet Browne, who highlighted the importance of the pre-Darwinian naturalists; (7) Peter Bowler, who focused mainly on the influence of paleontology on biogeography; (8) James Larson, who looked into the practices of the naturalists of Northern Europe in the late 18th century; and (9) Malte Ebach, who like Larson, was more interested in analysing the practices rather than the ideas of naturalists who studied the geographical distribution of organisms. Finally, these works are compared with each other. There has not been a dominant paradigm in the construction of historical narratives of biogeography; however, they provide a useful context for understanding problems of biogeography that continue to be debated to this day.

Alan Hodgkin's and Andrew Huxley's mid-20th century work on the ionic currents generating neuron action potentials stands among that century's great scientific achievements. Unsurprisingly, that case has attracted widespread attention from neuroscientists, historians and philosophers of science. In this paper, I do not propose to add any new insights into the vast historical treatment of Hodgkin's and Huxley's scientific discoveries in that much- discussed episode. Instead, I focus on an aspect of it that hasn't received much attention: Hodgkin's and Huxley's own assessments about what their famous "quantitative description" accomplished. The "Hodgkin-Huxley model" is now widely recognized as a foundation of contemporary computational neuroscience. Yet Hodgkin and Huxley expressed serious caveats about their model and what it added to their scientific discoveries, as far back as their (1952d), in which they first presented their model. They were even more critical of its accomplishments in their Nobel Prize addresses a decade later. Most notably, as I argue here, some worries they raised about their quantitative description seem still to be relevant to current work in ongoing computational neuroscience.

Masui Kiyoshi (1887-1981), a prominent Japanese geneticist, is best known for inventing the sex-sorting method of chicks and his contributions to experimental genetics in Japan. Masui drew inspiration from Goldschmidt's sex determination theory and used chickens, transplantation techniques, and his own "chick sexing" methods in his scientific work. This paper examines the intersection of genetics and industrial breeding by tracing the evolution of Masui's experimental systems. During the early 20th century, poultry farming emerged as a significant industry in Japan, resulting in the development of standardized organisms and techniques for chicken farming. Masui, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, collaborated with the Imperial Zootechnical Experimental Station to use these organisms as models for sex determination theory while exploring their further industrial possibilities. First, the paper show how Masui viewed chickens as epistemological objects and transformed his anatomical discoveries into standardized industrial practices. Next, it describes how Masui's collaboration with German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt led to new academic questions about sex determination mechanisms and how he integrated his knowledge of chicken physiology into his research on "experimental gynandromorphs" to elaborate the theories. Lastly, the paper discusses the biotechnological ideals that Masui aimed to achieve and how they were co-constructed with his mass-production method of intersex chickens from the early 1930s. The trajectory of Masui's experimental systems highlights the dynamic relationship between agroindustry and genetics in the early twentieth century and demonstrates the 'biology of history' in which the biological processes of organisms intertwine with their epistemological history.

Organismal death is foundational to the evolution of life, and many biological concepts such as natural selection and life history strategy are so fashioned only because individuals are mortal. Organisms, irrespective of their organization, are composed of basic functional units-cells-and it is our understanding of cell death that lies at the heart of most general explanatory frameworks for organismal mortality. Cell death can be exogenous, arising from transmissible diseases, predation, or other misfortunes, but there are also endogenous forms of death that are sometimes the result of adaptive evolution. These endogenous forms of death-often labeled programmed cell death, PCD-originated in the earliest cells and are maintained across the tree of life. Here, we consider two problematic issues related to PCD (and cell mortality generally). First, we trace the original discoveries of cell death from the nineteenth century and place current conceptions of PCD in their historical context. Revisions of our understanding of PCD demand a reassessment of its origin. Our second aim is thus to structure the proposed origin explanations of PCD into coherent arguments. In our analysis we argue for the evolutionary concept of PCD and the viral defense-immunity hypothesis for the origin of PCD. We suggest that this framework offers a plausible account of PCD early in the history of life, and also provides an epistemic basis for the future development of a general evolutionary account of mortality.

Since the practice turn, the role technologies play in the production of scientific knowledge has become a prominent topic in science studies. Much existing scholarship, however, either limits technology to merely mechanical instrumentation or uses the term for a wide variety of items. This article argues that technologies in scientific practice can be understood as a result of past scientific knowledge becoming sedimented in materials, like model organisms, synthetic reagents or mechanical instruments, through the routine use of these materials in subsequent research practice. The proposed theoretical interpretation of technology is examined through a case where a model organism-Drosophila melanogaster-acted as a technology for investigating a contested biological effect of a mechanical instrument: Hermann J. Muller's experiments on X-ray mutagenicity in the 1920s. The article reconstructs how Muller employed two synthetic Drosophila stocks as tests for measuring X-rays' capacity to cause genetic aberration. It argues that past scientific knowledge sedimented in the Drosophila stocks influenced Muller's perception of X-ray-induced mutation. It further describes how Muller's concept of X-ray mutagenicity sedimented through the adoption of X-ray machines as a ready-made resource for producing mutants by other geneticists, for instance George Beadle and Edward Tatum in their experiments on Neurospora crassa, despite ongoing disputes surrounding Muller's conclusions. Technological sedimentation is proposed as a potential explanation why sedimentation and disputation may often coexist in the history of science.

The ancient, interlinked questions about the role of chance in the living world and the origins of life, gained new relevance with the development of molecular biology in the twentieth century. In 1970, French molecular biologist Jacques Monod, joint winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, devoted a popular book on modern biology and its philosophical implications to these questions, which was quickly translated into English as Chance and Necessity. Nine years later, Belgian thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine, 1977 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, published a popular book on the history and philosophy of natural sciences with Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Translated into English under the title Order out of Chaos and widely discussed, the whole book can be seen as a response to Monod on these biological and philosophical questions. This study will trace this intellectual controversy between two Nobel Prize winners defending two opposing scientific and philosophical visions of the living world, rooted in two different scientific disciplines.