A Cultural History of Heredity III: 19Th and Early 20Th Centuries

MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2005 PREPRINT 294 Conference A Cultural History of Heredity III: 19th and Early 20th Centuries Table of Contents Introduction Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger 3 Mendel’s impact Raphael Falk 9 The Biometric Sense of Heredity: Statistics, Pangenesis and Positivism Theodore M. Porter 31 Sources of Johannsen´s Genotype Theory Nils Roll–Hansen 43 Inheritance of Acquired Characters: Heredity and Evolution in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany Wolfgang Lefèvre 53 Darwinism versus Evo–Devo: a late–nineteenth century debate Jeffrey H. Schwartz 67 Message in a Bottle: The Business of Vaccines and the Nature of Heredity after 1880 Andrew Mendelsohn 85 The Chromosomal Theory of Heredity and the Problem of Gender Equality in the Work of Theodor and Marcella Boveri Helga Satzinger 101 Hugo de Vries's transitions in research interest and method Ida H. Stamhuis 115 Herbert Spencer’s two editions of the Principles of Psychology: 1855 and 1870/72. Biological heredity and cultural inheritance Snait B. Gissis 137 Writing Heredity: Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks Ulrike Vedder 153 Heritage – Appropriation – Interpretation: The Debate on the Schiller Legacy in 1905 Stefan Willer 167 From pedigree to database. Genealogy and Human Heredity in Germany, 1890–1914 Bernd Gausemeier 179 Bismarck the Tomcat and Other Tales: Heredity and Alcoholism in the Medical Sphere, The Netherlands 1850–1900 Stephen Snelders, Frans J. Meijman and Toine Pieters 193 A Changing Landscape in the Medical Geography of ‘Hereditary’ Disease: Syphilis, Leprosy, and Tuberculosis in Hawai‘i (1863-1903) Philip K. Wilson 213 How Cultural Is Heritage? Humanity’s Black Sheep from Charles Darwin to Jack London Marianne Sommer 233 Race and Kinship in Anthropology: Morgan and Boas Staffan Müller–Wille 255 Introduction Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger The contributions to this volume were prepared for the workshop “A Cultural History of heredity III: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” that took place at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science January 13-16, 2005. The workshop was part of a long-term interdisciplinary project dedicated to the cultural history of heredity. Concentrating in turn on a succession of time periods in chronological order, this series attempts to uncover and relate to each other the agricultural, technical, juridical, medical, and scientific practices in which knowledge of inheritance was materially anchored and in which it gradually revealed its effects.1 The two previous workshops took place in May 2001 and January 2003, each devoted to what we identified as ’historical epochs’ in the history of hereditary thought.2 What follows is a summary of the results reached so far in our project, of the questions we wanted to address with the third workshop, and the answers suggested to these questions by the contributions collected in this preprint.3 In his book “The Logic of Life”, François Jacob already pointed out that the concept of reproduction, and by extension, that of heredity were virtually absent from speculations about generation until the eighteenth century. This we found largely corroborated. It may be worthwhile to stress that heredity as a biological concept originated as a metaphor: prior to the nineteenth century it was used as a synonym of “inheritance” in legal contexts only, a sense which it since then has lost. It was only in the early nineteenth century, in medical contexts, that metaphors of heredity began to gain currency. To be sure: Phenomena that nowadays would count as hereditary had by no means gone unnoticed before. It seems, however, to be a simple matter of historical fact that these phenomena were not addressed in terms of inheritance. The conceptual reason for this was the lack of some fundamental distinctions in pre-modern theories of generation. Before the end of the eighteenth century hereditary transmission was not a domain regarded as separate from the contingencies of conception, pregnancy, embryonic development, parturition, and even lactation. Similarity between progenitors and their descendants was thought to come about as a result of the similarity in the constellation of causal factors involved in each act of generation. Parental organisms were thought to actually make their offspring, without the intervention of a specific hereditary substance transmitted from generation to generation. So if speculations into generation did not provide the context in which biological heredity originated, what did? When Buffon, Maupertuis, and Kant were addressing heredity in the second half of the eighteenth century, they were referring, alongside the discourses of natural history and breeding, to a discourse of highly idiosyncratic origin, namely the Latin-American system of racial 1 See http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/HEREDITY/ for further information on the project. 2 Contributions to the ﬁrst two workshops have been documented in the Max Planck Institute’s preprint series (no. 222 and 247). 3 A more extensive summary of the resultsfrom the project so far, including a bibliography, has been published as in the Max Planck Institute’s preprint series no. 276. 3 Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger classification, known as las castas, and usually presented in paintings arranged in a tabular form. This scheme was primarily based on a classification according to skin color, to a lesser degree also on hair form and eye color. Children resulting from mixed marriages were positioned in this scheme in analogy to the simple mechanism of color mixing, implying “blending” as the causal relation connecting traits of parents with traits of their offspring. The castas classification originated from attempts in early colonial Latin America to find a measure by which legal and social status could be allocated, while colonial society experienced constant flux due to intermarriages and migration. This indicates an important general result of our project: the problem that biological heredity came to address was not the constancy of species; it were the patterns and processes that structure communal life at a sub-specific level. This shift of attention was associated with a mobilization of early modern life within various largely independent cultural domains, all of which also saw a growing concern with hereditary phenomena towards the end of the eighteenth century: Breeding new varieties for specific marketable characteristics, the exchange of specimens among botanical and zoological gardens, experiments in fertilization and hybridization of plants and animals, the dislocation of Europeans and Africans that accompanied colonialism, and the appearance of new social strata with their particular pathologies in the context of industrialization and urbanization, all of these processes interlocked in relaxing and severing cultural and natural ties to provide the material substrate for the emerging concept of heredity. The various domains in which the knowledge regime of heredity took shape during the eighteenth century did not cohere, however, after the model of an overall “influence” that a fundamental idea of heredity gained over them. Rather, conjunctions between them came about by a kind of domino effect that mobilization in one field had on another. The growth of a class that depended on mobile property evoked a culture of leisure collecting and breeding. The import of plants for collection purposes of natural history in turn inspired attempts at their acclimatization for economic purposes. Several, highly specific, and largely independent cultural sub-fields were thus subsequently conjoined to form a field of phenomena which only eventually, in the mid-nineteenth century, came to be addressed by the concept of biological heredity. Although this makes it difficult, even impossible, to draw a general picture of the historical development that led to the formulation of full-fledged theories of heredity in the mid-nineteenth century, it is possible, in hindsight, to characterize the result of that development. As a point of departure, let us take Darwin’s theory of pangenesis. Two aspects of that theory, if compared with premodern theories of generation, are remarkable. First of all, Darwin endorsed a view of heredity that abstracted, to some extent at least, from the personal relation between parents and their offspring. While conceding an inheritance of acquired properties, Darwin believed that the true carriers of the properties to be inherited are not the parents themselves, but submicroscopic entities — “invisible characters” as he called them — which circulate, from generation to generation, among individuals within one and the same species. Secondly, Darwin’s theory of heredity shows a peculiar inversion in comparison with early modern theories of generation: while the latter emphasize the vertical dimension of lineal descent — where ancestral organisms bring forth their offspring — Darwin invoked an image where the horizontal dimension dominates, the dimension of a common reservoir of dispositions, passed down from the sum total of ancestors, 4 Introduction redistributed in each generation among individuals, and competing now, in the present, for their realization. We take these two aspects, which accord well with the long term development of Western European kinship systems as social anthropologists have reconstructed them, to be the fundamental hallmarks of modern hereditary

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