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This book builds on recent scholarship highlighted in the edited collections, Philosophie, histoire, biologie: mélanges offerts à Jean Gayon (Merlin & Huneman, 2018) and Knowledge of Life Today (Gayon & Petit 2018/2019). While honoring the career and the thought of Jean Gayon (1949-2018), this book showcases the continued relevance of Gayon’s interdisciplinary work and illustrates his central place in the community of historians and philosophers of the life sciences. Chapters in this book address Jean Gayon’s intellectual trajectory from historical epistemology to the philosophy of biology, the nature and scope of his philosophical approach to the history of science, and his unique contributions to the history and epistemology of biological concepts and theories. Drawing on published and unpublished sources, the book explores some of Gayon’s most significant contributions to the philosophy, history, and social studies of biology.
Knowledge of Life Today presents the thoughts of Jean Gayon, a major philosopher of science in France who is recognized across the Atlantic, especially for his work in philosophy and the history of life sciences. The book is structured around Gayon's personal answers to questions put forward by Victor Petit. This approach combines scientific rigor and risk-taking in answers that go back to the fundamentals of the subject. As well as the relationship between philosophy and the history of science, Gayon discusses the main questions of the history and philosophy of biology that marked his intellectual journey: Darwin, evolutionary biology, genetics and molecular biology, human evolution, and various aspects of the relationship between biology and society in contemporary times (racism, eugenics, biotechnology, biomedicine, etc.).
In 1945, the United States was not only the strongest economic and military power in the world; it was also the world's leader in science and technology. In American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, John Krige describes the efforts of influential figures in the United States to model postwar scientific practices and institutions in Western Europe on those in America. They mobilized political and financial support to promote not just America's scientific and technological agendas in Western Europe but its Cold War political and ideological agendas as well. Drawing on the work of diplomatic and cultural historians, Krige argues that this attempt at scientific domin...
A rich and wide-ranging philosophical interpretation of the history of theoretical Darwinism.
This collection of essays focuses on the connection between biology and questions in ethics.
“Thought-provoking…any scientist interested in genetics will find this an enlightening look at the history of this field.”—Quarterly Review of Biology It was only around 1800 that heredity began to enter debates among physicians, breeders, and naturalists. Soon thereafter, it evolved into one of the most fundamental concepts of biology. Here, Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger offer a succinct cultural history of the scientific concept of heredity. They outline the dramatic changes the idea has undergone since the early modern period and describe the political and technological developments that brought about these changes. They begin with an account of premodern theories...
This volume explores problems in the history of science at the intersection of life sciences and agriculture, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Taking a comparative national perspective, the book examines agricultural practices in a broad sense, including the practices and disciplines devoted to land management, forestry, soil science, and the improvement and management of crops and livestock. The life sciences considered include genetics, microbiology, ecology, entomology, forestry, and deal with US, European, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese contexts. The book shows that the investigation of the border zone of life sciences and agriculture raises many interesting ...
In this masterful account, a historian of science surveys the molecular biology revolution, its origin and continuing impact. Since the 1930s, a molecular vision has been transforming biology. Michel Morange provides an incisive and overarching history of this transformation, from the early attempts to explain organisms by the structure of their chemical components, to the birth and consolidation of genetics, to the latest technologies and discoveries enabled by the new science of life. Morange revisits A History of Molecular Biology and offers new insights from the past twenty years into his analysis. The Black Box of Biology shows that what led to the incredible transformation of biology w...
This book aims to perform a critical and broad assessment of the historiography of science produced from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It presents its main authors, concepts, ideas, conceptions, and schools. It also analyzes the historical circumstances of the rise of the discipline history of science and the relations of the historiography of science with related areas. These chapters do not understand the historiography of science as a mere description or record of the history of science. Instead, they understand the historiography of science from the epistemological criteria and choices that guided the writing of the history of science in its different con...
This book examines the wide range of scientific and social arenas in which the concept of inheritance gained relevance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although genetics emerged as a scientific discipline during this period, the idea of inheritance also played a role in a variety of medical, agricultural, industrial, and political contexts. The book, which follows an earlier collection, Heredity Produced (covering the period 1500 to 1870), addresses heredity in national debates over identity, kinship, and reproduction; biopolitical conceptions of heredity, degeneration, and gender; agro-industrial contexts for newly emerging genetic rationality; heredity and medical research; and the genealogical constructs and experimental systems of genetics that turned heredity into a representable and manipulable object. Taken together, the essays in Heredity Explored show that a history of heredity includes much more than the history of genetics, and that knowledge of heredity was always more than the knowledge formulated as Mendelism. It was the broader public discourse of heredity in all its contexts that made modern genetics possible.