Idealistic morphology as perhaps the most important historical manifestation of typology is very suitable for a historical analysis of Ernst Mayr's “Essentialism Story”, which postulates an antagonism between “typological thinking” and “population thinking”. We show that Germanlanguage idealistic-morphological theories consisted of two clearly distinguishable parts. The cornerstone of these theories was the concept of the type as an abstract pattern representing a certain class of phenomena and embodying the norm of this class. The primary objective of pure typology was to (...) create a non-phylogenetic classification system for living organisms based on structurally explicable characters. Thus, typology, as a non-phylogenetic foundation of idealistic morphology, was conceptually neutral with respect to hypotheses of evolutionary mechanisms. Typology was often accompanied by concepts such as Lamarckism, orthogenesis, creationism, essentialism, etc. These peripheral concepts were autonomous constructions and did not represent a direct logical consequence of typology. In our view “population thinking”, as part of the Darwinian theory of evolutionary mechanism, could not be directly opposed to “typological thinking”. Rather, it was peripheral concepts such as essentialism or creationism that led to conflicts between the Modern Synthesis and idealistic morphology. (shrink)

The prescription of growth hormone therapy for children who are not growth hormone deficient is one of the controversies in contemporary paediatric endocrinology. Is it morally appropriate to enhance the growth, by means of medical treatment, of a child wish idiopathic short stature? The medical, moral, and philosophical questions in this area are many. Data on the effects of human growth hormone (hGH) treatment will not on their own provide us with answers, as these effects have to be evaluated from (...) a normative perspective. In this article we consider hGH treatment for children of idiopathic short stature from three normative perspectives: the goals of medicine, the good of the patient, and the public good. We argue that the prevention of psychological and social problems due to short stature (and not merely the enhancement of growth) should be the ultimate goal of medical treatment and research. (shrink)

The relationship between biological and social scientists as regards the study of human traits and behavior has often been perceived in terms of mutual distrust, even antipathy. In the interwar period, population study seemed an area that might allow for closer relations between them—united as they were by a concern to improve the eugenic quality of populations. Yet these relations were in tension: by the early post-war era, social demographers were denigrating the contributions of biologists to the study of population (...) problems as embodying the elitist ideology of eugenics. In response to this loss of credibility, the eugenics movement pursued a simultaneous program of withdrawal and expansion: its leaders helped focus concern with biological quality onto the developing field of medical genetics, while at the same moment, extended their scope to improving the social quality of populations through birth control policies, guided by demography. While this approach maintained boundaries between the social and the biological, in the 1960s, a revitalized American Eugenics Society helped reunite leading demographers and geneticists. This paper will assess the reasons for this period of influence for eugenics, and explore its implications for the social and biological study of human populations. (shrink)

The classical/balance controversy continued along these lines throughout the first half of the sixties. Then, at about the same time that the classical position lost its leading advocate, the balance position received striking new support from Harry Harris, and independently from Dobzhansky's former student Lewontin, and Lewontin's research partner, Jack Hubby.80 These developments served more to reorient the controversy than to end it — and the resulting “neoclassical”/balance controversy is different enough to be grist for another mill.Social policy considerations no (...) longer play a role in keeping the dispute alive. This particular respect in which the issues have changed is, as Diane Paul suggests in her contribution to this volume, as striking as any other.82 There is, however, little danger of our forgetting that this was once much more than just a narrowly technical controversy — the additional social policy issues were far too blatant.However, although blatant, they were by no means the only, or even the most important, issues. In choosing to concentrate on the social policy considerations, I do not mean to suggest that the empirical issues were irrelevant, or simple and straightforward, or otherwise uninteresting. That is by no means the case. What I have tried to show is that there was much more to the classical/balance stalemate than just the empirical underdetermination of the theoretical issues, and that the empirical issues cannot be treated adequately without taking into account the social policy considerations that were involved. Dobzhansky and Muller both appealed to the dangers of misguided social policy that might have resulted from prematurely resolving their controversy in the other's favor. They called for high empirical standards on those grounds, more than once seeking to forestall the resolution of their dispute in this way. (shrink)