Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 384-396, September 2022.

Against the common historiographic narratives of evolutionary biology, the first decades of the 20th century were theoretically far richer than usually assumed. This especially refers to the hitherto neglected role that early theoretical biologists played in introducing visionary research perspectives and concepts before the institutionalization of the Modern Synthesis. Here, we present one of these scholars, the German theoretical biologist and ecomorphologist Hans Böker, by reviewing his 1935 paper “Artumwandlung durch Umkonstruktion, Umkonstruktion durch aktives Reagieren der Organismen”, published in the (...) inaugural volume of the journal Acta Biotheoretica. While largely forgotten today, this work represents a melting pot of ideas that adumbrate some of today’s most lively debated empirical and conceptual topics in evolutionary biology: the active role of organisms as actors of their own evolution, environmental induction and phenotypic plasticity, genetic assimilation, as well as developmental bias. We discuss Böker’s views on how species change through "Umkonstruktion," and how such reconstruction is exerted through active reactions of organisms to environmental perturbations. In addition, we outline the aims and wider context of his "biological comparative anatomy," including Boker’s reprehensible political affiliation with the Nazi Party. Finally, we highlight some of the historical reasons for why Böker’s views did not have a larger impact in evolutionary biology, but we also recount some of the direct and indirect legacies of his approach in research areas such as ecomorphology and EvoDevo. Böker’s paper is available as supplementary material in the online version of this article, as part of the journal's "Classics in Biological Theory" collection; the first translation of the paper into English, by Alexander Böhm and Jan Baedke, is also being published in this volume. (shrink)

ArgumentD’Arcy Thompson has often been portrayed as a loner. His science of form has frequently been labeled anachronistic, idiosyncratic, and unconnected to his contemporary biology. This article aims to challenge this interpretation. Thompson's representation as a loner did not lie in the idiosyncrasies of his science, but in our own historiography. Through the use of unedited archival sources, this study shows that Thompson's biology was well-connected to an international research program – a program mainly shared by developmental biologists, physiologists, and (...) morphologists. In addition, this article also aims to propose a new interpretation of Thompson'sOn Growth and Form. Drawing on his private correspondence and published sources, the paper re-contextualizes the contents and conclusions of Thompson's seminal work. We will see that Thompson defended a particular kind of organismal biology. The bio-science he supported stemmed not only from Aristotle's zoology or Pythagorean mathematics, but had many allies among twentieth-century naturalists. (shrink)

Using newly uncovered archival sources, this essay traces the meteoric rise and fall of the peculiar interdisciplinary German scientific journal Physis, founded by the physicist Pascual Jordan and the biologist Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1941. Launched when victory for Nazi Germany seemed certain, Physis was intended by Jordan and Meyer-Abich to be a premier international journal for all sciences suitable for the new “German-led Europe” forged by conquest. Yet the journal was simultaneously a vehicle for institutionalizing Jordan’s remarkably prescient vision of (...) the future of the scientific enterprise in Hitler’s state—a vision nearly identical to what is now termed “big science,” yet suitably “Nazified” for wartime Germany. Behind the scenes, Physis was accompanied by a campaign of intrigue, through which Jordan and Meyer-Abich hoped to find a patron for the journal and big science among the various power centers of the Nazi state. These efforts failed, yet they nevertheless demonstrate that big science is not inherently democratic. (shrink)

This paper addresses theoretical challenges, still relevant today, that arose in the first decades of the twentieth century related to the concept of the organism. During this period, new insights into the plasticity and robustness of organisms as well as their complex interactions fueled calls, especially in the UK and in the German-speaking world, for grounding biological theory on the concept of the organism. This new organism-centered biology understood organisms as the most important explanatory and methodological unit in biological investigations. (...) At least three theoretical strands can be distinguished in this movement: Organicism, dialectical materialism, and holistic biology. This paper shows that a major challenge of OCB was to describe the individual organism as a causally autonomous and discrete unit with consistent boundaries and, at the same time, as inextricably interwoven with its environment. In other words, OCB had to conciliate individualistic with anti-individualistic perspectives. This challenge was addressed by developing a concept of life that included functionalist and metabolic elements, as well as biochemical and physical ones. It allowed for specifying organisms as life forms that actively delimit themselves from the environment. Finally, this paper shows that the recent return to the concept of the organism, especially in the so-called “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” is challenged by similar anti-individualistic tendencies. However, in contrast to its early-twentieth-century forerunner, today’s organism-centered approaches have not yet offered a solution to this problem. (shrink)