In this paper I begin by arguing that there are significant intellectual and normative continuities between pre-Victorian hereditarianism and later Victorian eugenical ideologies. Notions of mental heredity and of the dangers of transmitting hereditary ‘taints’ were already serious concerns among medical practitioners and laymen in the early nineteenth century. I then show how the Victorian period witnessed an increasing tendency for these traditional concerns about hereditary transmission and the integrity of bloodlines to be projected onto the level of national health. (...) Tracing the gradual emergence of eugenical thought, I also highlight some of the more fundamental social, political and intellectual factors that promoted this predilection for extrapolating from the individual lineage to the nation and race. In doing so I argue that fully fledged eugenical thought was always unlikely to emerge prior to the early Victorian period. However, I am also able to show that Francis Galton's 1865 eugenical proposals were far from innovative and that identifying him as the ‘father’ of the eugenics movement is highly misleading. (shrink)

The term ‘human nature’ can refer to different things in the world and fulfil different epistemic roles. Human nature can refer to a classificatory nature (classificatory criteria that determine the boundaries of, and membership in, a biological or social group called ‘human’), a descriptive nature (a bundle of properties describing the respective group’s life form), or an explanatory nature (a set of factors explaining that life form). This chapter will first introduce these three kinds of ‘human nature’, together with seven (...) reasons why we disagree about human nature. In the main, this chapter focuses on the explanatory concept of human nature, which is related to one of the seven reasons for disagreement, namely, the scientific authority inherent in the term ‘nature’. I will examine why, in a number of historical contexts, it was attractive to refer to ‘nature’ as an explanatory category, and why this usage has led to the continual contestation of the term within the sciences. The claim is that even if the contents of talk about ‘nature’ varied historically, the term’s pragmatic function of demarcation stayed the same. The term ‘nature’ conveys scientific authority over a territory; ‘human nature’ is a concept used to divide causes, as well as experts, and thereby conquer others who threaten to invade one’s epistemic territory. Analysing this demarcation, which has social as well as epistemic aspects, will help us to understand why the explanatory role has been important and why it is unlikely that people will ever agree on either the meaning or the importance of ‘human nature’ as an explanatory category. (shrink)

In 1894, William Bateson objected to the terms “heredity” and “inheritance” in biology, on grounds of contamination with misleading notions from the everyday world. Yet after the rediscovery of Mendel's work in the spring of 1900, Bateson promoted that work as disclosing the “principles of heredity.” For historians of science, Bateson's change of mind provides a new angle on these terms at a crucial moment in their history. For philosophers of science, the case can serve as a reminder of the (...) potential of Putnam's hypothesis of a division of linguistic labor for analyzing the semantic lives of scientific kind terms. (shrink)

TheConstitution of Manby George Combe (1828) was probably the most influential phrenological work of the nineteenth century. It not only offered an exposition of the phrenological theory of the mind, but also presented Combe's vision of universal human progress through the inheritance of acquired mental attributes. In the decades before the publication of Darwin'sOrigin of Species, theConstitutionwas probably the single most important vehicle for the dissemination of naturalistic progressivism in the English-speaking world. Although there is a significant literature on the (...) social and cultural context of phrenology, the role of heredity in Combe's thought has been less thoroughly explored, although both John van Wyhe and Victor L. Hilts have linked Combe's views on heredity with the transformist theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. In this paper I examine the origin, nature and significance of his ideas and argue that Combe's hereditarianism was not directly related to Lamarckian transformism but formed part of a wider discourse on heredity in the early nineteenth century. (shrink)

When Australia was circumnavigated by Europeans in 1801–02, French and British natural historians were unsure how to describe the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land they charted and catalogued. Ideas of race and of savagery were freely deployed by both British and French, but a discursive shift was underway. While the concept of savagery had long been understood to apply to categories of human populations deemed to be in want of more historically advanced ‘civilisation’, the application of this term in (...) the late 18th and early 19th centuries was increasingly being correlated with the emerging terminology of racial characteristics. The terminology of race was still remarkably fluid, and did not always imply fixed physical or mental endowments or racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, by means of this concept, natural historians began to conceptualise humanity as subject not only to historical gradations, but also to the environmental and climatic variations thought to determine race. This in turn meant that the degree of savagery or civilisation of different peoples could be understood through new criteria that enabled physical classification, in particular by reference to skin colour, hair, facial characteristics, skull morphology, or physical stature: the archetypal criteria of race. While race did not replace the language of savagery, in the early years of the 19th century savagery was re-inscribed by race. (shrink)

This paper’s main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but connected by (...) long term transdisciplinary representational and inferential structures and constraints. The paper intends to show a given set of knowledge claims based on organizing statistically empirical data can be seen to have been underpinned by a previous, more familiar, and probably more natural, narrative handling of similar evidence. To achieve that this paper moves from medicine in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century in England among gentleman naturalists, following its subject: the shift from narrative depiction of hereditary transmission of physical peculiarities to posterior statistical articulations of the same phenomena. Some early defenders of heredity as an important causal presence in the understanding of life adopted singular narratives, in the form of case stories from medical and natural history traditions, to flesh out a special kind of causality peculiar to heredity. This work tries to reconstruct historically the rationale that drove the use of such narratives. It then shows that when this rationale was methodologically challenged, its basic narrative and probabilistic underpinings were transferred to the statistical quantificational tools that took their place. (shrink)

The concept of biological inheritance has recently been extended so as to integrate, among other elements, parts of organisms’ environments. The literature refers to the trans-generational reconstruction of these parts in terms of environmental or ecological inheritance. This article’s main objective is to clarify the different meanings of "environmental inheritance," to underline so far unnoticed theoretical difficulties associated to this polysemous notion and to consequently argue that inheritance, even when extended, should be theoretically distinguished from trans-generational environmental stability. After disentangling (...) the different meanings of environmental inheritance, I underline that studies dealing with this concept place themselves in the wake of earlier contributions about biological environment and elaborate on the role of organisms in the determination of their relevant developmental and selective surroundings. This leads me to question the legitimacy of the category shift operated by niche inheritance proponents—from environment to inheritance—and to explain why the very concept of inherited environment shows important and so far unnoticed theoretical limitations. In this context, I assert the necessity to distinguish two related but different research programs: the construction of a finer-grained theory of environment and the elaboration of an extended theory of inheritance. (shrink)

Staffan Müller-Wille & Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Eds): Heredity Produced. At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870 Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 327-331 DOI 10.1007/s10441-011-9130-4 Authors Robert Olby, Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15236, USA Journal Acta Biotheoretica Online ISSN 1572-8358 Print ISSN 0001-5342 Journal Volume Volume 59 Journal Issue Volume 59, Numbers 3-4.