Early natural philosophers seeking to mathematicize nature almost certainly thought of themselves as seeing into the real foundations of the world, not as setting up models that might correspond to the observed phenomena. The language of “models” or “analogies” emerged first among late nineteenth-century physicists, and it is an interesting question (beyond the topic of this chapter) whether the explicit recognition of the modeling function marked a significant step toward the modern view of how science operates. In biology, where many at first believed the phenomena to be outside the scope of mathematical representation, the approach via models seemed to offer a way forward to those who felt that a bridge had to be built to the world of law and causality.

Mathematical modeling did not emerge as an important research strategy in the life sciences until the second decade of the twentieth century, but its origins properly lie in mid-nineteenth-century efforts to make the life sciences more like physics and in the growth of probability theory and mathematical statistics. At that time, European biologists were beginning to reject the idealist, vitalist biology of the German Naturphilosophie tradition, and several were turning toward the other physical sciences for inspiration. In particular, several young German physiologists and microbiologists advocated a reductionist biology that invoked only physico-chemical explanations, sometimes expressed as Newtonian force laws. Reductionism did not flourish everywhere immediately, but even investigators who thought that some aspects of biology were not reducible to physics or chemistry agreed that one should start by trying to make such a reduction.

Biologists today answer many questions with the theory of evolution. How do new species arise? By evolution: by descent with modification from older species. Why do bird species all have two legs and two wings? Because they have all descended, evolved, from a single common ancestral species with these features. How has life progressed from the first few simple organisms billions of years ago? By evolution: by multiplication, diversification, and complexification of their descendants.

The study of evolution today forms a distinct discipline: evolutionary biology. This discipline more than most invokes its own ancestors. A recent contributor such as John Maynard Smith looks back to J. B. S. Haldane in the 1920s and to August Weismann in the 1880s. They in turn looked back to Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species (1859), who saw himself following paths first taken by his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, both writing around 1800.

All these conscious followings of earlier precedents constitute a genuine historical continuity of succession. However, when today’s biologists look back to Charles Darwin or Lamarck, they usually add two further judgments. First, they assume a sameness of enterprise, with everyone contributing to evolutionary biology as found in a current textbook. However, a historian of science cannot make this assumption, being trained and paid, indeed, to ask: How might the enterprises and thus the agendas have changed and why?

“If … we say that each human individual develops from an egg, the only answer, even of most so-called educated men, will be an incredulous smile; if we show them the series of embryonic forms developed from this human egg, their doubt will, as a rule, change into disgust. Few … have any suspicion,” wrote evangelist of evolution Ernst Haeckel in the 1870s, “that these human embryos conceal a greater wealth of important truths, and form a more abundant source of knowledge than is afforded by the whole mass of most other sciences and of all so-called ‘revelations.’” Between this extravagant claim and the incredulity and disgust that it invokes lies a contradictory history. In nineteenth-century universities and medical schools embryology was a key science of life; around 1900 modern biology was forged within it; and as developmental biology it buzzes with excitement today. Embryology fired wide publics with Darwinist fervor, sexual knowledge, and the prospect of reproductive control; but it also bored generations of medical students, was molecular biologists’ favorite example of scientific decline, and has attracted both feminist and antiabortionist critiques. There are, then, rich histories to be told, and as scholars in various disciplines begin to tell them, existing surveys have come to seem thin. Largely confined to concepts and theories, they tell us little about the daily life of embryology. Written within particular traditions, they do scant justice to the diversity of embryo science and the variety of perspectives on it.

It is as though, when we look at the living body, we look at its reflection in an ever-running stream of water. The material substratum of the reflection, the water, is continually changing, but the reflection remains apparently static. If this analogy contains an element of truth, if, that is to say, we are justified in regarding the living body as a sort of reflection in a stream of material substance which continually passes through it, we are faced with the profound question – what is it that actually determines the ‘reflection’? Here we approach one of the most fundamental riddles of biology – the ‘riddle of form’ as it has been called, the solution of which is still entirely obscure. Wilfred E. Le Gros Clark, The Tissues of the Human Body, 6th edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 9

Anatomy, histology, and cytology are sciences of form that have largely depended on the study of the dead: dead bodies, dead tissues, and dead cells. Each science began with observers isolating, identifying, and naming the external and internal structures of living things, first with the naked eye and then with microscopes. For some investigators, the primary goal has been classification, arranging the bewildering array of plants, insects, fish, birds, and animals into groups and subgroups based on the shapes and arrangements of their parts.

In traditional Christian thought, the soul and the bodywere distinct from one another: If behavior was affected by animal impulses, this merely indicated that the soul did not have sufficient control over its fleshly garment. Descartes’ insistence that the mind existed on a separate plane from that of the body – the latter being conceived of essentially as a machine – continued the dualistic interpretation. In such a model, psychology and the social sciences would constitute a body of knowledge with no link to biology. The workings of the mind could be investigated by introspection without reference to the body. The dualistic perspective came under fire in the eighteenth century, as materialist philosophers such as Julien Offray de la Mettrie argued that the mind was affected by the body. They implied that the mind should be treated as nothing more than a by-product of the physical processes going on in the brain. For the materialists, human nature was essentially biological. The conflict between dualism and materialism was renewed in the nineteenth century as developments in biology began to offer a range of techniques for investigating human behavior. There was not, however, a complete triumph of the materialistic approach. Efforts to preserve the mind as a distinct level of activity have continued, partly in defense of the concept of the soul but increasingly as a means of creating a professional niche for psychology and the social sciences.

The increasing visibility and sense of intellectual opportunity associated with neuroscience in recent years have in turn stimulated a growing interest in its past. For the first time, a general reference book on the history of science has seen fit to include a review of the history of the brain and behavioral sciences as a thread to be reckoned with within the broader narrative tapestry. On the one hand, this looks like a welcome sign that a new historical subfield has “come of age.” On the other hand, when one settles down to the task of composing a “state of the art” narrative, one realizes just how much these are still early days. The bulk of available secondary literature still swims in a space between nostalgic narratives of great men and moments, big “march of ideas” overviews, and an unsystematic patchwork of more theorized forays by professional historians into specific themes (e.g., phrenology, brain localization, reflex theory).

The challenge of imagining a comprehensive narrative is made all the more formidable by the fact that we are dealing here with a history that resists any easy or clean containment within disciplinary confines. The paper trail of ideas, experiments, clinical innovations, institutional networks, and high-stakes social debates not only moves across obvious sites of activity such as neurology, neurosurgery, and neurophysiology but also traverses fields as (only apparently) distinct as medicine, evolution, social theory, psychology, asylum management, genetics, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and theology.

In this chapter, we describe traditional historical accounts of the gene and gene concepts and raise some issues from recent revisionist historiography dealing with this topic. Histories of the gene and genetics are still in their infancy. Until the mid-1970s, most histories were written by scientists and reflected the viewpoints of the victors in scientific controversies. Only recently have professional historians contested traditional accounts and probed deeply into lost aspects of the history of the gene. Recent biological work has raised doubt whether there is such an entity as “the” gene. Historians now disagree about whether the gene should count as an invention or a discovery, whether the history involved is fundamentally continuous or discontinuous, and how technical and theoretical developments in genetics are connected to larger social issues, including eugenics, genome projects, genetic medicine, and biotechnological “interference” with nature.

BEFORE MENDEL

From prehistoric times, people have recognized that like begets like and have believed in some form of inheritance of acquired characters, which was used to help explain familial inheritance of character traits and physique. Later, it was used to explain susceptibility to particular diseases, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, and the adaptation of imported plants and domesticated animals to their new environments. The Hippocratics had already developed explicit theories in support of such inheritance, but sustained efforts to develop particulate theories of heredity began with the introduction of the idea of evolution in the writings of such figures as Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), and, above all, Charles Darwin (1809–1882).

Preparation of this volume has been a daunting task for both editors and authors. We have had to create a workable framework through which to present an overview of the development of a diverse range of sciences through a period of major conceptual, methodological, and institutional changes. Equally problematic has been the need to ensure that the presentation takes note of both the enduring traditions within the history of science and the major historiographical initiatives of the last few decades. We have tried to ensure adequate treatment of both the sciences themselves and historians’ concerns about how they should be studied. Some sacrifices have had to be made to create a viable list of topics. The result is, we hope, representative, but it is by no means encyclopedic. Topics that might have been expected were dropped either because there was not enough space to cover them adequately or, in a few cases, because the editors could not find authors willing to synthesize vast ranges of information and insights in the space that could be allowed. We are particularly conscious that agriculture and related sciences are barely present and that some areas of the environmental sciences could not be covered, including oceanography and meteorology. Delays have been inevitable in the production of so complex a text, and although some efforts have been made to update the references in the chapters, we and the authors are conscious of the fact that what we are presenting will not always reflect the very latest developments and publications.

The subject headings list of the U.S. Library of Congress is the most comprehensive such list ever assembled. A bibliographic Michelin’s Guide would give it five stars – this world-class menu showing how Washington’s chefs de livres serve up the field of knowledge. For a century, it has shaped the taxonomic tastes of librarians everywhere, and it still guides the providers of classified information in many fields. Some items on the menu are indeed irresistible, not least “Religion and Science.” This is the library’s preferred rubric for a vast number of publications, outstripping entries under “Science and Religion,” “Theology and Science,” and “Religion and Sciences” by a thousandfold or more. And how is “Religion and Science” carved up? The library divides it into over one hundred categories: by period and by place; through books and serials; in poetry, drama, and fiction; for readers from medics to children. The chronological breakdown is most detailed for the last two centuries, where “Religion and Science” titles are classified from 1800 to 1859, 1860 to 1899, 1900 to 1925, 1926 to 1945, and 1946 to date.

Useful as this scheme may be, like all taxonomies it assumes more than it can prove. For instance, why cut time’s seamless web into segments ending in 1859 and 1925? Centuries are convenient – 1800, 1900 – and 1945 marks the end of a world war, but why pick out the years that saw publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the “monkey trial” of the Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes? To regard these events as having peculiar significance for organizing a subject as extensive as “Religion and Science” would be controversial, and in fact librarians of Congress have not always done so. A small number of older subheadings draw the line at 1857, 1858, 1879, and 1889; one range of dates ignores 1925 altogether. This suggests that with a little thought and ingenuity it would be possible to devise an entirely different periodization that takes account of the physical sciences, worldwide developments, or merely events in Europe.

Whereas the general public experiences a natural history museum as a series of educational displays, particularly of fossils and stuffed animals, the scientific importance of these institutions lies in the much larger collections of specimens behind the scenes that make possible an inventory and analysis of the world’s diversity. The history of natural history museums is more often studied as part of the history of culture rather than as belonging to the history of science, but the role of well-documented collections as an instrument that makes systematic comparison possible deserves investigation. It has been argued that museums were the focus for a new type of science that came to the fore around 1800 based on the analysis of large bodies of information by professional scientists. Although steps in this direction had been taken earlier, the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, founded by the revolutionary government in Paris in 1793, became the model for this new science. The subsequent transformation and proliferation of natural history museums was responsible for a substantial increase in the kinds of science that depended on collections.

Plentiful raw material awaits historians in museums’ records, in the scientific literature, and even in the physical evidence of collections and buildings. A comprehensive survey ought to pay attention to the related subjects of herbaria, botanical and zoological gardens, medical museums, ethnographic collections, and the international trade that gave specimens monetary value, as well as comparisons with art museums and other exhibitions, but here the focus will be on the zoological activity of major natural history museums.

IMMUNOLOGY

“Immunity,” taken broadly, refers to a cluster of natural phenomena observed first in the field, then in the clinic, and finally in the laboratory. It had been known since antiquity that injections of small doses of poison could prevent unexpected larger doses from causing harm (preventive immunity), that there were some diseases that never afflicted a person more than once (acquired immunity), and that certain individuals were more disposed than others to stay free from infectious diseases (natural immunity). Although it is customary to credit the British physician Edward Jenner with the invention of the first effective preventive procedure against smallpox (later known as vaccination), inhalation or inoculation of powdered scabs from smallpox lesions seems to have been part of ethnomedical practice long before then and was even practiced by the European gentry throughout most of the eighteenth century. Jenner’s technique – inoculating cowpox matter to prevent smallpox – was first published in 1798 and won rapid acceptance, probably because his methodical investigation suited an age permeated by Enlightenment optimism toward science. Even so, the next advance in understanding immunity came nearly a century later within the context of the new germ theory of disease.

Geology is the name arrived at in the 1820s for a specific approach to the scientific study of the earth’s outer layers. This new science aimed to discover and date the natural history of this three-dimensional ensemble of layered rock, to learn the origins, variety, and provenance of the rock-forming minerals that composed these layers, and to uncover and understand the natural processes and laws that shaped them. The name “geology” came into general use when the new approach it denoted had already been under way for more than a century (as is almost always the case in science). Thus, while it was still an activity without a fixed name, “geology” had already encountered several robust and preexisting competing approaches to studying the earth, each with its own proprietary interest in the phenomenon. Much of the history of geology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a story of conflict and accommodation with these antecedent approaches to the study of the surface of the planet. As a result, most writing on the history of geology – and especially that produced since about 1980 – has embraced the idea that geology emerged and grew as a science through a series of great controversies.