MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2003 PREPRINT 247 Conference A Cultural History of Heredity II: 18th and 19th Centuries Table of Contents Introduction Hans-Jörg Rheinberger & Staffan Müller-Wille 3 Heredity old and new; French physicians and l’hérédité naturelle in early 19th century. Carlos López-Beltrán 7 The Sheep Breeders’ View of Heredity (1723-1843) Roger J. Wood 21 Characters written with invisible ink. Elements of Hybridism 1751-1875 Staffan Müller-Wille 47 Comments on the papers given by Roger Wood and Staffan Müller-Wille Raphael Falk 61 Acquired character: the (pre-genetic) material of the ‘self-made man’ Paul White 67 Kant on Heredity and Adaptation Peter McLaughlin 83 Inheritance of Acquired Characters in Lamarck’s and Geoffroy Saint Hilaire’s Zoology Wolfgang Lefèvre 93 Erasmus Darwin on Hereditary Disease: Conceptualizing Heredity in Enlightenment English Medical Writings Philip K. Wilson 109 Pathological Heredity as a Bid for Greater Recognition of Medical Authority in France, 1800-1830 Laure Cartron 123 Poor Old Ancestors: The Popularity of Medical Hereditarianism, 1770-1870 John C. Waller 131 Comments on the papers given by Phillip Wilson, John C. Waller, and Laure Cartron Gianna Pomata 145 Heredity, Milieu and Sin: the works of Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809-1873) Jean-Christophe Coffin 153 George Combe’s law of hereditary descent John van Wyhe 165 Majorat: Literature and the Law of Succession in the 19th Century Ulrike Vedder 175 “Victor, l’enfant de la forêt” – Experiments on the Heredity of Human Nature in Savage Children Nicolas Pethes 187 Program 211 Introduction The contributions to this volume were prepared for the second of a series of workshops 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. While the first workshop concentrated on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the second dealt with a time period demarcated by two classical publications: Immanuel Kant’s Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen (1775) and Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (1868).1 One of the major results of the first workshop was corroborated by the contributions to the second, namely that no general concept of heredity was underlying the discourse on life (including medicine, anthropology and the moral sciences) in the eighteenth century and that such a concept was only slowly emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century.2 Carlos López Beltrán illustrates this in his contribution to this volume by directing our attention to a decisive linguistic shift: while the use of the adjective hereditary can be dated back to antiquity in the context of nosography (maladies héréditaires), a transition to a nominal use (hérédité) took place only from the 1830s onwards, first among French physiologists, then in other European scientific communities. This shift indicates a reification of the concept, or, in López Beltrán’s words, the establishment of a “structured set of meanings that outlined and unified an emerging biological conceptual space […] produc[ing] the first appearance of our modern concept of biological heredity.” For the fields of natural history and breeding one can recognise a similar shift from the use of adjectives like ‘constant’ and ‘true’ to refer to characters that remain unchanged in the course of generations, to the recognition of ‘heredity’ or ‘inheritance’ as one of the central life forces.3 Alongside this development, one can observe the erosion of a set of very ancient distinctions in regard to observed similarities between parents and offspring: the distinction of specific vs. individual, paternal vs. maternal, normal vs. pathological similarities all gave way gradually to a generalised notion of heredity capturing relations among traits independent of the particular life forms they were part of.4 This can be viewed as the main outcome of the first two workshops on the cultural history of heredity, to which all contributions, in one way or the other, attest. At the same time, however, this result provides the central, historiographical problem for our project. How is it that a phenomenon that, from a contemporary perspective, appears to be of central importance, and in 1 For more details on the project and the workshops see http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Heredity/. The original program of the second workshop is reproduced at the end of this volume. 2 Results of the first workshop have been published in: A Cultural History of Heredity I: 17th and 18th Centuries, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science Preprint 222, Berlin 2002. 3 See Mclaughlin, Müller-Wille, and Wood, this volume. 4 See López Beltrán, McLaughlin, Müller-Wille, and Pomata in this volume; cf. Coffin, this volume, on the work of Bénédict Augustin Morel who, in the mid nineteenth-century, still upheld the distinction of normal vs. pathological heredity. 3 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger & Staffan Müller-Wille its effects appears to be so tangible in everyday life, was subjected to conceptualisation so late? This seems to be the most curious feature of the cultural history of heredity: while ‘heredity’ today belongs to the most fundamental concepts of the life sciences, it entered the scenes of inquiry into the phenomena of life only very late in history. The late emergence of heredity coincides, moreover, with the important transformation that the life sciences underwent in general around 1800 and that Michel Foucault and François Jacob have described so succinctly.5 Though both of these authors focussed on the concept of organisation in studying this transformation, it seems highly probable that the emergence of heredity represents an aspect of utmost significance for fully understanding this transformation.6 Most of what the essays assembled in this volume have to say on this point, leads to a solution of the historiographical problem just outlined that may come as a surprise. It is not that the concept of heredity emerged from a growing attention to regularities, a sort of fixation of the scientific mind on the laws of nature at the expense of the contingenices and complexities of real life. It seems, rather, that the emergence of heredity occurred within an epistemic space that unfolded while people, objects, and their relationships were set into motion.7 This means that it was a condition for distinguishing between inherited and environmentally induced traits in organisms, for example, that organisms were actually removed from their natural and (agri-) cultural habitats. Only then could an environmental difference express itself in a difference in traits, and only then could heritable traits manifest their steadiness against environmental changes. Breeding new varieties for specific marketable traits, the exchange of specimens among botanical and zoological gardens, experiments in fertilisation and hybridisation, the dislocation of Europeans and Africans that accompanied colonialism, and the appearance of new social strata in the context of industrialisation and urbanisation, all these processes interlocked in mobilising cultural and natural ties and thus provided, as will be explained in more detail in the following, the material substrate for the emerging concept of heredity. It is true, of course, that the principle of ‘like engenders like’ had been around since the earliest times of Greek poetry and philosophy, as an expression for what ought to happen as a rule.8 This ‘law’ remained unanalysed, however, so that it lacked the kind of inner structure that could have provoked the application of a metaphor that in its proper context, that of legal regulations of property transmission, possessed such complex semantics as ‘heredity’ did. And this, as Wolfgang Lefèvre demonstrates for the cases of Lamarck and Geoffroy St. Hilaire in this volume, remained valid for the preformationist and epigenetic theories of evolution up to the early nineteenth century. In a sense, even, both preformation and epigenesis – and both conceptions have a well- known, ancient legacy – excluded inheritance: according to preformation nothing is transmitted in generation because everything has been there from the beginning; according to epigenesis nothing is transmitted in generation because in each instant everything is built up from scratch. 5 Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, (Paris, 1966); François Jacob, La logique du vivant, (Paris, 1970). 6 Cf. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1: La volonté de savoir, (Paris, 1976). 7 This is emphasised in the comments by Raphael Falk and Gianna Pomata included in this volume. For a different perspective see Waller and van Wyhe in this volume. 8 See Erna Lesky, Die Zeugungs- und Vererbungslehren der Antike und ihr Nachwirken, (Wiesbaden, 1950); Hans Stubbe, Kurze Geschichte der Genetik bis zur Wiederentdeckung der Vererbungsregeln Gregor Mendels, (Cambridge, Mass., 1965; engl. transl. 1972). 4 Introduction As Peter McLaughlin points out in his contribution, it is in Immanuel Kant that we encounter a theory of propagation which is neither preformationist nor epigenetic – and in which, at the same time, conceptions of heredity began to unfold a manifold of specific meanings. “Anerben”,