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  1. The Ibis: Transformations in a Twentieth Century British Natural History Journal.Kristin Johnson - 2004 - Journal of the History of Biology 37 (3):515-555.
    The contents of the British Ornithologists' Union's journal, "The Ibis," during the first half of the 20th century illustrates some of the transformations that have taken place in the naturalist tradition. Although later generations of ornithologists described these changes as logical and progressive, their historical narratives had more to do with legitimizing the infiltration of the priorities of evolutionary theory, ecology, and ethology than analyzing the legacy of the naturalist tradition on its own terms. Despite ornithologists' claim that the journal's (...)
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  • New presbyter or old priest? Reconsidering zoological taxonomy in Britain, 1750—1840.Harriet Ritvo - 1990 - History of the Human Sciences 3 (2):259-276.
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  • Joseph Dalton Hooker's Ideals for a Professional Man of Science.Richard Bellon - 2001 - Journal of the History of Biology 34 (1):51 - 82.
    During the 1840s and the 1850s botanist Joseph Hooker developed distinct notions about the proper characteristics of a professional man of science. While he never articulated these ideas publicly as a coherent agenda, he did share his opinions openly in letters to family and colleagues; this private communication gives essential insight into his and his X-Club colleagues' public activities. The core aspiration of Hooker's professionalization was to consolidate men of science into a dutiful and centralized community dedicated to national well-being. (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Significance of Temminck’s Work on Biogeography: Early Nineteenth Century Natural History in Leiden, The Netherlands. [REVIEW]M. Eulàlia Gassó Miracle - 2008 - Journal of the History of Biology 41 (4):677 - 716.
    C. J. Temminck, director of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (now the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden) and a renowned ornithologist, gained his contemporary's respect thanks to the description of many new species and to his detailed monographs on birds. He also published a small number of works on biogeography describing the fauna of the Dutch colonies in South East Asia and Japan. These works are remarkable for two reasons. First, in them Temminck accurately described the species composition (...)
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  • “Plants that Remind Me of Home”: Collecting, Plant Geography, and a Forgotten Expedition in the Darwinian Revolution.Kuang-chi Hung - 2017 - Journal of the History of Biology 50 (1):71-132.
    In 1859, Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810–1888) published an essay of what he called “the abstract of Japan botany.” In it, he applied Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to explain why strong similarities could be found between the flora of Japan and that of eastern North America, which provoked his famous debate with Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) and initiated Gray’s efforts to secure a place for Darwinian biology in the American sciences. Notably, although the Gray–Agassiz debate has become one of the most (...)
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  • The Fate of William Whewell’s Four Palætiological Domains: A Comparative Study.Koen B. Tanghe - 2019 - Perspectives on Science 27 (6):810-838.
    In 1847, the British polymath William Whewell pointed out that the sciences for which he, in 1837, had coined the term “palætiological” have much in common and that they may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. This recommendation is here put into practice in a specific way, to wit, not by comparing the palaetiological sciences that Whewell distinguished himself but by comparing the general historical development of the scientific study of the four broad palætiological domains that he (...)
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  • Boas and holism: A textual analysis.Michel Verdon - 2006 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (3):276-302.
    Some anthropologists advocate going back to Boas’s anthropology to retrieve his sense of the individual and agency, among other things. Such a "psycho-logical Boas" could only exist in his holistic works. Elsewhere, I argued in a very synthetic way that Boas’s ethnography was not holistic. Here, I move a step further; perusing the very texts that famous commentators have singled out to prove Boas’s holism, I discover no holism; I find history as mere movement in space, and no individual agents; (...)
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  • Charles Darwin's theory of evolution: A review of our present understanding. [REVIEW]David R. Oldroyd - 1986 - Biology and Philosophy 1 (2):133-168.
    The paper characterizes Darwin's theory, providing a synthesis of recent historical investigations in this area. Darwin's reading of Malthus led him to appreciate the importance of population pressures, and subsequently of natural selection, with the help of the wedge metaphor. But, in itself, natural selection did not furnish an adequate account of the origin of species, for which a principle of divergence was needed. Initially, Darwin attributed this to geographical isolation, but later, following his work on barnacles which underscored the (...)
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  • Wallace’s Other Line: Human Biogeography and Field Practice in the Eastern Colonial Tropics.Jeremy Vetter - 2006 - Journal of the History of Biology 39 (1):89-123.
    This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace's "human biogeography" paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive "mental and moral" features (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Significance of Temminck’s Work on Biogeography: Early Nineteenth Century Natural History in Leiden, The Netherlands.M. Eulàlia Gassó Miracle - 2008 - Journal of the History of Biology 41 (4):677-716.
    C. J. Temminck, director of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie and a renowned ornithologist, gained his contemporary's respect thanks to the description of many new species and to his detailed monographs on birds. He also published a small number of works on biogeography describing the fauna of the Dutch colonies in South East Asia and Japan. These works are remarkable for two reasons. First, in them Temminck accurately described the species composition of poorly explored regions, like the Sunda Islands and (...)
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  • Towards “A Natural History of Data”: Evolving Practices and Epistemologies of Data in Paleontology, 1800–2000. [REVIEW]David Sepkoski - 2013 - Journal of the History of Biology 46 (3):401-444.
    The fossil record is paleontology’s great resource, telling us virtually everything we know about the past history of life. This record, which has been accumulating since the beginning of paleontology as a professional discipline in the early nineteenth century, is a collection of objects. The fossil record exists literally, in the specimen drawers where fossils are kept, and figuratively, in the illustrations and records of fossils compiled in paleontological atlases and compendia. However, as has become increasingly clear since the later (...)
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  • The Darwinian Revolution Revisited.Sandra Herbert - 2005 - Journal of the History of Biology 38 (1):51 - 66.
    The "Darwinian revolution" remains an acceptable phrase to describe the change in thought brought about by the theory of evolution, provided that the revolution is seen as occurring over an extended period of time. The decades from the 1790s through the 1850s are at the focus of this article. Emphasis is placed on the issue of species extinction and on generational shifts in opinion.
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  • Joseph Hooker Takes a “Fixed Post”: Transmutation and the “Present Unsatisfactory State of Systematic Botany”, 1844–1860.Richard Bellon - 2006 - Journal of the History of Biology 39 (1):1-39.
    Joseph Hooker first learned that Charles Darwin believed in the transmutation of species in 1844. For the next 14 years, Hooker remained a "nonconsenter" to Darwin's views, resolving to keep the question of species origin "subservient to Botany instead of Botany to it, as must be the true relation." Hooker placed particular emphasis on the need for any theory of species origin to support the broad taxonomic delimitation of species, a highly contentious issue. His always provisional support for special creation (...)
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  • Historiographical approaches to biogeography: a critical review. [REVIEW]Fabiola Juárez-Barrera, David Espinosa, Juan J. Morrone, Ana Barahona & Alfredo Bueno-Hernández - 2023 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 45 (3):1-23.
    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 (...)
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  • Paleontology and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: The Subversive Role of Statistics at the End of the 19th Century.Marco Tamborini - 2015 - Journal of the History of Biology 48 (4):575-612.
    This paper examines the subversive role of statistics paleontology at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In particular, I will focus on German paleontology and its relationship with statistics. I argue that in paleontology, the quantitative method was questioned and strongly limited by the first decade of the 20th century because, as its opponents noted, when the fossil record is treated statistically, it was found to generate results openly in conflict with the Darwinian theory (...)
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  • Natural History Spiritualized: Civilizing Islanders, Cultivating Breadfruit, and Collecting Souls.Sujit Sivasundaram - 2001 - History of Science 39 (4):417-443.
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  • How Did Darwin Arrive at His Theory? The Secondary Literature to 1982.David R. Oldroyd - 1984 - History of Science 22 (4):325-374.
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  • Charles Darwin’s Beagle Voyage, Fossil Vertebrate Succession, and “The Gradual Birth & Death of Species”.Paul D. Brinkman - 2010 - Journal of the History of Biology 43 (2):363-399.
    The prevailing view among historians of science holds that Charles Darwin became a convinced transmutationist only in the early spring of 1837, after his Beagle collections had been examined by expert British naturalists. With respect to the fossil vertebrate evidence, some historians believe that Darwin was incapable of seeing or understanding the transmutationist implications of his specimens without the help of Richard Owen. There is ample evidence, however, that he clearly recognized the similarities between several of the fossil vertebrates he (...)
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  • Darwin, Concepción, and the Geological Sublime.Paul White - 2012 - Science in Context 25 (1):49-71.
    ArgumentDarwin's narrative of the earthquake at Concepción, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwin'sBeaglediary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the (...)
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  • Escaping Darwin's Shadow.Jim Endersby - 2003 - Journal of the History of Biology 36 (2):385-403.
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  • Science and islands in Indo-Pacific worlds.Sebestian Kroupa, Stephanie J. Mawson & Dorit Brixius - 2018 - British Journal for the History of Science 51 (4):541-558.
    This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency (...)
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  • Mr. Blakeslee Builds His Dream House: Agricultural Institutions, Genetics, and Careers 1900–1915. [REVIEW]Barbara A. Kimmelman - 2006 - Journal of the History of Biology 39 (2):241 - 280.
    Between 1907 and 1915 Albert Francis Blakeslee transformed both himself and the Connecticut Agricultural College at Storrs into things neither had been at the beginning of the century. Using the varied commitments of the agricultural college and experiment station at which he worked as resources with which to build his career, Blakeslee began as a botanist and instructor in botany and ended as a geneticist and teacher of genetics. Moreover, he left behind at Storrs a legacy of genetic research and (...)
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  • “My Reputation is at Stake.” Humboldt's Mountain Plant Geography in the Making (1803–1825).Susanne S. Renner, Ulrich Päßler & Pierre Moret - 2023 - Journal of the History of Biology 56 (1):97-124.
    Alexander von Humboldt’s depictions of mountain vegetation are among the most iconic nineteenth century illustrations in the biological sciences. Here we analyse the contemporary context and empirical data for all these depictions, namely the _Tableau physique des Andes_ (1803, 1807), the _Geographiae plantarum lineamenta_ (1815), the _Tableau physique des Îles Canaries_ (1817), and the _Esquisse de la Géographie des plantes dans les Andes de Quito_ (1824/1825). We show that the Tableau physique des Andes does not reflect Humboldt and Bonpland’s field (...)
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  • The “Cycle of Life” in Ecology: Sergei Vinogradskii’s Soil Microbiology, 1885–1940. [REVIEW]Lloyd T. Ackert - 2006 - Journal of the History of Biology 40 (1):109-145.
    Historians of science have attributed the emergence of ecology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century to the synthesis of Humboldtian botanical geography and Darwinian evolution. In this essay, I begin to explore another, largely neglected but very important dimension of this history. Using Sergei Vinogradskii’s career and scientific research trajectory as a point of entry, I illustrate the manner in which microbiologists, chemists, botanists, and plant physiologists inscribed the concept of a “cycle of life” into their investigations. Their (...)
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  • H. G. Bronn and the History of Nature.Sander Gliboff - 2007 - Journal of the History of Biology 40 (2):259 - 294.
    The German paleontologist H. G. Bronn is best remembered for his 1860 translation and critique of Darwin's Origin of Species, and for supposedly twisting Darwinian evolution into conformity with German idealistic morphology. This analysis of Bronn's writings shows, however, that far from being mired in an outmoded idealism that confined organic change to predetermined developmental pathways, Bronn had worked throughout the 1840s and 1850s on a new, historical approach to life. He had been moving from the study of plant and (...)
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  • A Delicate Adjustment: Wallace and Bates on the Amazon and “The Problem of the Origin of Species”.John van Wyhe - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (4):627-659.
    For over a century it has been believed that Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates set out for the Amazon in 1848 with the aim of “solving the problem of the origin of species”. Yet this enticing story is based on only one sentence. Bates claimed in the preface to his 1863 book that Wallace stated this was the aim of their expedition in an 1847 letter. Bates gave a quotation from the letter. But Wallace himself never endorsed or (...)
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