“Morganisms—Local Choice in Late 19th century Biology, The Case of Thomas Hunt Morgan”

Sean Cohmer (Arizona State University)

Thomas Hunt Morgan is best known for his experiments in genetics with fruit flies of the species Drosophila melanogaster in the early 20th century. Too early to speak of organisms in terms of their status as a ‘model’, an important question to answer is how biologists experimenting during the period from 1886 to 1908 made choices about what to study in the laboratory. Less well analyzed in Morgan’s research is the variety of organisms that he experimented with at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in his early career. To understand what motivated biologists to do certain kinds of experimental work in the late 19th century, it is also important to understand why they chose certain organisms for laboratory work. Experimental organism choices matter, and these choices had a different character in late 19th century biology than in the later 20th century. Morgan’s case is an excellent illustrative example of how geographically situated—or ‘local’—organisms are a crucial way to understand how organism choices were made in experimental biology during this time. Before Morgan experimented with Drosophila beginning around 1908, he had published over 120 scientific articles, studying over 30 different organisms. His example is an extreme one, as he was an inexhaustible experimenter compared to many of his contemporaries. On the other hand, his example is representative of a broader trend in experimental organism choices through this period, from prolific and diverse in the late 19th century to homogenous and standardized into the 1910s.

“Organism Choice and Epistemic Culture in Ecological Genetics”

Erick Peirson (Arizona State University)

During the 1960s many ecologists dramatically reconceptualized the temporal and spatial scales on which adaptive evolution could occur. New evidence and new ideas suggested that natural selection could shape local populations on time scales commensurate with those of ecological processes. That realization laid the foundation for a wide range of contemporary research that explicitly integrates population genetics with both theoretical and field-based ecological research, and facilitated the rise of so-called adaptationism in evolutionary ecology. Much of the crucial evidence and theoretical impetus for that transformation came from the work of a handful of plant genecologists in Britain, part of a larger group later known as the Ecological Genetics Group (EGG). Previous research into the investigative pathways of individual participants in the EGG suggest that biological characteristics of the organisms that genecologists studied impacted their views about the relative merits of several competing models of intraspecific evolution, generating conditions for theory change. As part of a systematic investigation of the EGG, we have analyzed the relative influence of several social and epistemic factors on organism choice at the level of the individual researcher using a probabilistic empirical model. We fit that model to heterogeneous data generated through large-scale text mining and collaborative semantic annotation. In this paper, we discuss the development and application of our model of organism choice, the implications of our results for understanding the development of ecological genetics in Britain, and the broader historiographical ramifications of our approach for research into organism choice in the life sciences.

“Are Fingerprint Patterns Genetically Inherited? The History of a Transnational Research Problem”

Daniel Asen (Rutgers University-Newark)

This paper examines the history of "dermatoglyphics," a term coined by American anatomists Harold Cummins and Charles Midlo in 1926 to describe the scientific study of fingerprints and other ridged skin. Throughout the 20th century, dermatoglyphics researchers have attempted to use fingerprint patterning (which is partially genetically determined) to study mechanisms of human heredity, investigate "racial" populations, and diagnose congenital disorders.

This paper examines the history of post-WWII research into one of the most elusive problems in dermatoglyphics: how fingerprint patterns and their component parts are genetically inherited. It focuses on the development of two roughly contemporary approaches to this question: a theory of fingerprint-pattern (arch, loop, whorl) inheritance developed by Japanese medico-legal researcher Matsukura Toyoji during the 1950s, and an approach focusing on the quantitative count of fingerprint ridges as the object of inheritance, elaborated by British geneticist Sarah B. Holt.

By examining the development and impact of these research programs, this paper tells a story about the building of genetic knowledge in a scientific field long defined by high ambitions and epistemic ambiguities. While the projects of Matsukura and Holt did exemplify mid-century researchers' very real interest in using fingerprints as a source of genetic evidence in clinical and medico-legal applications, in the end they also revealed the limitations of this line of inquiry and its ambivalent value for subsequent iterations of dermatoglyphics research. The latter point, I argue, is important for understanding the discipline's long-term trajectory – and, ultimately, its decline – within the modern life sciences.

“Mendel’s Two Hybridist Theories and their Intertheoretical Relationships”

Pablo Lorenzano (National University of Quilmes/National Scientific and Technical Research Council)

It can hardly be said that Mendel had been a proponent, even less the first proponent, of Genetics. He was actually an excellent “hybridist”. His hybridism consists of two theories: a first theory that moves on a level more “empirical” or “phenomenological” (according to Schleiden 1849: 141-146), which can be called “Mendel’s theory of the development/evolution of hybrids” (DEH), and a second theory that moves on a level more “theoretical” (according to Schleiden 1849: 146-148), which can be called “Mendel’s theory on the cellular foundation of the development/evolution of hybrids” (CFH).

The aim of this communication is to present an analysis of these two theories and of their intertheoretical relationships, carried out within the framework of the so-called Metatheoretical Structuralism.