Abstract
Heredity has been dismissed as an insignificant object in Claude Bernard’s physiology, and the topic is usually ignored by historians. Yet, thirty years ago, Jean Gayon demonstrated that Bernard did elaborate on the subject. The present paper aims at reassessing the issue of heredity in Claude Bernard’s project of a “general physiology”. My first claim is that Bernard’s interest in heredity was linked to his ambitious goal of redefining general physiology in relation to morphology. In 1867, not only was morphology included within experimental physiology, but it also theoretically grounded physiological investigations. By 1878, morphology and physiology were considered as completely independent sciences, and only the latter was perceived as suitable to experimentation. My second claim is that this reversal reflected the existence of two opposite attitudes towards heredity. In the late 1860s, Bernard was convinced that heredity would soon be accessible to experimental manipulation and that new species would be produced in the laboratory exactly like organic chemistry succeeded to do for raw bodies. Ten years later, he ascertained that this was impossible. My third claim is that Bernard was epistemologically ill-equipped to address the issue of heredity. Bernard was strongly committed to a general reasoning scheme that acknowledged only three categories: determining conditions, constant laws and phenomena. This scheme was a key factor in his successes as a physiologist who was able to capture new mechanisms in living bodies. Nonetheless, it also prevented him from understanding how time and history could be endowed with a causal action that cannot be reduced to timeless parameters.
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25 April 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00577-4
Notes
This text was later reworked in an updated version that contained only minor changes (Gayon, 2013). In the following I will refer mostly to the 1991 text.
I am unable to read Spanish, which means I only have indirect access to Caponi’s book, mostly through discussions with colleagues — particularly Ghyslain Bolduc, whom I thank very much for his help.
Some of these texts were published after his death. See for example Bernard, 1879, pp. XIV-XV.
An exhaustive list of publications is provided in Grmek, 1967.
In France, at the time, general physiology was often synonymous with biology (Grmek, 1979, pp. 14–15).
This aspect, i.e. Bernard-the-discipline-builder, is especially apparent in the manuscript notes and comments that preceded the Report. These notes were published in 1979 by Grmek (Bernard, 1979).
For a general treatment, see Grmek, 1979 and Tirard, 2009. The very peculiar form of this text, very focused on Claude Bernard and rather poor in bibliography, certainly owes much to the fact that it was written during a long convalescent stay in Saint-Julien during the winter of 1866–1867, where Bernard had only very limited access to possible documentary resources (Olmsted & Olmsted, 1952, pp. 154–155).
The 1872 text is almost the same as the 1867 version, except for pagination. At first Bernard aimed to produce a reworked version, but he gave up because of health issues.
In this text, Bernard used two terms “organogenic” (sometimes “organogenetic”) [organogénique] and “organotrophic” [organotrophique], which he related to “law(s)”, “phenomena” and even “force(s)”. It is not certain that these two terms express a genuine conceptual distinction, in any case Bernard did not explain himself clearly anywhere. It might be the case that “organogenic” referred to a more fundamental and abstract law, which regulates morphology, and that “organotrophic” designated the protoplasmic processes which make possible the actualization of this law, but this interpretation is not certain. For the sake of simplicity, I do not make any distinction in the article.
All translations from French are mine.
“Evolution” is a very common word in Bernard’s writings, but he almost always used it in its traditional and old-fashioned meaning, i.e. as a synonymous of development, and only very rarely in reference to species transformation. Being unaware of this is conducive to major misinterpretations (see for example Poupa, 1967 and Schiller, 1967). On the “non-reception” of Darwinism and contemporary evolutionary theories by Bernard, see Bolduc’s and Angleraux’s joint contribution in the present special issue. See also Roll-Hansen, 1976.
The word itself is repeatedly and purposively used by Bernard: p. 2, p. 132, pp. 138–139, p. 142.
The concept of “creative idea” is especially complex in Bernard’s work and would deserve a paper of its own (for a stimulating treatment, see Caponi, 2018). The concept first appears in the Introduction, but he does not expand on it then. He alternatively used the phrases “creative idea” or “guiding idea” [idée directrice] to designate an entity somewhere in between physics and metaphysics, that “is manifested by the organization” but cannot be seen as an active material cause producing the organization Bernard 1865b, p. 143).
For a recent synthesis on Entwicklungsmechanik, see Bolduc, 2021.
For a general treatment, see Fischer, 1973.
On the basis of his extensive experimental work, Dareste published a 600-page synthesis in 1877 entitled Research on the Production of Monstrosities or Eexperimental Teratogenics.
For instance by William Bateson himself (Bateson, 1902, p. 30).
Apart from Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Dareste and Naudin, Bernard also made a brief mention of a recent work on the development of aphids: Balbiani & Signoret, 1867. Note that all these authors cited each other’s work.
See Bolduc & Angleraux in the present special issue.
Here, I owe special thanks to Annie Petit, who suggested with great insight that organic chemistry and especially Berthelot’s work might have stimulated Bernard.
This Bernardian dichotomy was already illuminatingly evidenced by Nils Roll-Hansen in 1976 (Roll-Hansen, 1976, pp. 81–83).
Strangely enough, whereas Gayon did not see any difference between 1867 and 1878, he explained that in 1867 Bernard developed a nutritive concept of heredity and that in 1878 he thought of heredity as a “metaphysical conception” (Gayon, 1991, p. 180).
Nevertheless, in the last years of his life, we find at least one written trace where Bernard showed a form of nostalgia towards his former project. Thus, in a letter to his close friend, “Mme” Raffalovich, he wrote in August 1876: “Could nature be taught a new lesson and would its memory reproduce it in a series of new beings? I think so. It is still my old idea, to remake beings not by spontaneous generation, as one dreamed, but by the repetition of organic phenomena of which nature would keep the secret” (Bernard, 1950, pp. 108–109).
During the second half of the nineteenth century, many important foreign books and authors were translated into French. Thus, even if French biologists were not fluent in English or German, they had at that time a direct knowledge of some key works thanks to this huge translation effort.
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Acknowledgements
This article is one of the results of the research project “Claude Bernard, History and Philosophy of a Physiological Theory” (2109 − 2022), of which I was the principal investigator. I would like to thank all the institutions that supported this project, and in particular the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. The content of this text has obviously greatly benefited from the exchanges that took place during the three years of the project, and I thank all the colleagues for their investment. Last but not least, I thank Jean-Yves Bart who edited the final version of this article.
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Loison, L. Heredity as a problem. On Claude Bernard’s failed attempts at resolution. HPLS 45, 10 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00564-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00564-9