Heredity I, 17th to 18th Century: Heredity in Separate Domains

organized by Peter McLaughlin, Staffan Müller-Wille, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

Report

This workshop was the first in a series of workshops forming the backbone of a long term research project on the cultural history of heredity. This project aims to uncover the technical, juridical, medical, and scientific practices in which the knowledge of inheritance was historically anchored in a respective epoch and to understand the genesis of today’s naturalistic concept of heredity. The first workshop concentrated on the late seventeenth and eighteenth century and assembled historians of science, medicine, politics and literature from the United States, Mexiko, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Discussion turned around two questions: 1), if a concept of heredity existed at all in this period; and 2), in how far 18th century theories of generation were guided by empirical experience. In regard to the first question, several contributions could show that there was no general concept of heredity underlying the discourse of the life sciences. However, there did exist some isolated, well-defined and sometimes, especially in breeding and medicine, highly localised fields structured by the recognition of hereditary transmission of differential characters in the 18th century – the defintion of specific difference in natural history, the explanation of hereditary diseases in pathology, the political organisation of colonial societies according to racial characteristics, and the application of hybridisation in plant breeding. In regard to the second question, the workshop disclosed a rich spectrum of theoretical approaches to generation in the 18th century and made clear that this discovery is only insufficiently captured by the conventional dichtomy of preformation vs. epigenesis. This spectrum, however, was rather determined by different positions in regard to the politics and poetics of production, both experimental and social, than by a secured and well-defined domain of empirical data. Some of the contributions to the workshop have been published in a separate of the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science.

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