J Hist Biol
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Historical Article
Between Social and Biological Heredity: Cope and Baldwin on Evolution, Inheritance, and Mind.
In the years of the post-Darwinian debate, many American naturalists invoked the name of Lamarck to signal their belief in a purposive and anti-Darwinian view of evolution. Yet Weismann's theory of germ-plasm continuity undermined the shared tenet of the neo-Lamarckian theories as well as the idea of the interchangeability between biological and social heredity. Edward Drinker Cope, the leader of the so-called "American School," defended his neo-Lamarckian philosophy against every attempt to redefine the relationship between behavior, development, and heredity beyond the epigenetic model of inheritance. ⋯ Particular attention is dedicated to the debate he had with James Mark Baldwin before the publication of Baldwin's own "A New Factor in Evolution" (1896d). I argue that Cope's criticism was partly due to the fact that Baldwin's theory of social heredity threatened Cope's biologistic stance, as well as his attempt to preserve design in nature. This theoretical attitude had a remarkable impact on Baldwin's arguments for the theory of organic selection.
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Biography Historical Article
'Tipping the Balance': Karl Friedrich Meyer, Latent Infections, and the Birth of Modern Ideas of Disease Ecology.
The Swiss-born medical researcher Karl Friedrich Meyer (1884-1974) is best known as a 'microbe hunter' who pioneered investigations into diseases at the intersection of animal and human health in California in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, historians have singled out Meyer's 1931 Ludwig Hektoen Lecture in which he described the animal kingdom as a 'reservoir of disease' as a forerunner of 'one medicine' approaches to emerging zoonoses. In so doing, however, historians risk overlooking Meyer's other intellectual contributions. ⋯ However, while Burnet's and Smith's contributions to this scientific field have been widely acknowledged, Meyer's have been largely ignored. Drawing on Meyer's published writings and private correspondence, this paper aims to correct that lacuna while contributing to a reorientation of the historiography of bacteriological epidemiology. In particular I trace Meyer's intellectual exchanges with Smith, Burnet and the animal ecologist Charles Elton, over brucellosis, psittacosis and plague-exchanges that not only showed how environmental and ecological conditions could 'tip the balance' in favor of parasites but which transformed Meyer thinking about resistance to infection and disease.
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Editorial Historical Article
Introduction: environmental history and the history of biology.
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Historical Article
Revisiting the "quiet debut" of the double helix: a bibliometric and methodological note on the "impact" of scientific publications.
The object of this paper is two-fold: first, to show that contrary to what seem to have become a widely accepted view among historians of biology, the famous 1953 first Nature paper of Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA was widely cited--as compared to the average paper of the time--on a continuous basis from the very year of its publication and over the period 1953-1970 and that the citations came from a wide array of scientific journals. A systematic analysis of the bibliometric data thus shows that Watson's and Crick's paper did in fact have immediate and long term impact if we define "impact" in terms of comparative citations with other papers of the time. In this precise sense it did not fall into "relative oblivion" in the scientific community. The second aim of this paper is to show, using the case of the reception of the Watson-Crick and Jacob-Monod papers as concrete examples, how large scale bibliometric data can be used in a sophisticated manner to provide information about the dynamic of the scientific field as a whole instead of limiting the analysis to a few major actors and generalizing the result to the whole community without further ado.
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Historical Article
Civic biology and the origin of the school antievolution movement.
In discussing the origins of the antievolution movement in American high schools within the framework of science and religion, much is overlooked about the influence of educational trends in shaping this phenomenon. This was especially true in the years before the 1925 Scopes trial, the beginnings of the school antievolution movement. There was no sudden realization in the 1920's--sixty years after the Origin of Species was published--that Darwinism conflicted with the Bible, but until evolution was being taught in the high schools, there was no impetus to outlaw it. ⋯ Antievolution legislation was part of a broader response to the ideologies of the new biology field, and was a reaction not only to the content of the new subject, but to the increasingly centralized control and regulation of education. Viewing the early school antievolution movement through the science-religion conflict is an artifact of the Scopes trial's re-creation of its origins. What largely caused support for the school antievolution movement in the South and particularly Tennessee were concerns over public education, which biology came to epitomize.