This paper examines the development of British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s. In a 1951 report for the World Health Organization Bowlby contended that the mother is the child's psychic organizer, as observational studies of children worldwide showed that absence of mother love had disastrous consequences for children's emotional health. By the end of the decade Bowlby had moved from observational studies of children in hospitals to animal research in order to support his thesis that mother love is a biological need. I examine the development of Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s, a central period in the evolution of his views and in debates about the social implications of his work. I argue that Bowlby's view that mother love was a biological need for children influenced discussions about the desirability of mothers working outside the home during the early Cold War. By claiming that the future of a child's mind is determined by her mother's heart, Bowlby's argument exerted an unusually strong emotional demand on mothers and had powerful implications for the moral valuation of maternal care and love.

Science is the subject matter of the philosophy of science. Like evolution, science refers to both a process and a product It is both an activity of production and the set of products resulting from this activity. Philosophers, though, have mainly focused on scientific results, i.e. the products of science, whether current or past. The question I want to raise here is: should philosophers also be concerned with the process of science?

Cytogenetics was born of the confluence of two so-far independent fields: cytological studies and breeding studies, which merged through the identification of genes with chromosomes. In this paper I argue that genes were introduced as functional entities. Functional explanations are presented here as a subclass of inferences to the best explanation and I argue that abductive arguments do not offer conclusive proof for the existence of the entities postulated through them. However, functional explanations usually follow a scheme laid out by Fodor (1968): there is a first phase where hypothetical entities are postulated and individuated through their effects; there is a second phase where the physical structures responsible for these effects are sought. I analyze the development of both phases in the construction of the chromosome theory of Mendelian inheritance. I will argue that first-phase theories are important to set conditions of identification for the functions played by a certain structure in a given containing system.