Heredity II, 18th to 19th Century: Heredity Becomes Central

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

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

Report

This workshop was the second 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. While the first workshop concentrated on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the second dealt with a time period demarcated by two classical publications: Immanuel Kant's Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen (1775) and Charles Darwin's The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (1868). One of the major results of the first workshop was corroborated by the contributions to the second, namely that no general concept of heredity was underlying the discourse on life (including medicine, anthropology and the moral sciences) in the eighteenth century and that such a concept was only slowly emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century. This comes to the fore in a decisive linguistic shift, indicating a reification of the concept: while the use of the adjective hereditary can be dated back to antiquity in the context of nosography (hereditary diseases), a transition to a nominal use (heredity) took place only from the 1830s onwards. Alongside this development, one can observe the erosion of a set of very ancient distinctions in regard to observed similarities between parents and offspring: the distinction of specific vs. individual, paternal vs. maternal, normal vs. pathological similarities all gave way gradually to a generalised notion of heredity capturing relations among traits independent of the particular life forms they were part of. This result provides a central, historiographical problem for the cultural history of heredity. How is it that a phenomenon that, from a contemporary perspective, appears to be of central importance, and in its effects appears to be so tangible in everyday life, was subjected to conceptualisation so late? Most of what the contributors to the workshop had to say on this point, leads to a solution of this problem that may come as a surprise. It is not that the concept of heredity emerged from a growing attention to regularities, a sort of fixation of the scientific mind on the laws of nature at the expense of the contingenices and complexities of real life. It seems, rather, that the emergence of heredity occurred within an epistemic space that unfolded while people, objects, and their relationships were set into motion. This means that it was a condition for distinguishing between inherited and environmentally induced traits in organisms, for example, that organisms were actually removed from their natural and (agri-)cultural habitats. Only then could an environmental difference express itself in a difference in traits, and only then could heritable traits manifest their steadiness against environmental changes. Breeding new varieties for specific marketable traits, the exchange of specimens among botanical and zoological gardens, experiments in fertilisation and hybridisation, the dislocation of Europeans and Africans that accompanied colonialism, and the appearance of new social strata in the context of industrialisation and urbanisation, all these processes interlocked in mobilising cultural and natural ties and thus provided the material substrate for the emerging concept of heredity. Some of the contributions to the workshop have been published in a separate of the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science.

Bck to past Heredity Workshops