Historiographical analyses of the development of genetics in the first decade of the 20th century have been to a great extent framed in the context of the Mendelian-Biometrician controversy. Much has been discussed on the nature, origin, development, and legacy of the controversy. However, such a framework is becoming less useful and fruitful. This paper challenges the traditional historiography framed by the Mendelian-Biometrician distinction. It argues that the Mendelian-Biometrician distinction fails to reflect the theoretical and methodological diversity in the controversy. (...) It also argues that that the Mendelian-Biometrician distinction is not helpful to make a full understanding of the development of genetics in the first decade of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This essay introduces an anthropological practice that remains largely unexplored in the historical literature on racial science: biometrics. In the early twentieth century, biometricians analyzed skull measurements using novel statistical methods to demonstrate racial biological differences. Drawing on new archival material, the essay reveals how these biometric data practices challenged racist anthropology. Between 1934 and 1952, Geoffrey Morant, an expert on biometry and race in Karl Pearson’s Biometric Laboratory in London, mobilized biometry to debunk Nazi racial theories. He (...) informed the public about Nazism’s fallacies in The Races of Central Europe (1939) and his UNESCO pamphlet The Significance of Racial Differences (1952). Unlike anti-racism campaigners such as Ashley Montagu, however, Morant did not dismiss the biological reality of race in his fight against Nazi racism. The essay shows that the coexistence of anti-racist and racializing practices was not paradoxical but, rather, an important feature of the anthropological study of human variation in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the ongoing reassessment of the controversy between William Bateson and Karl Pearson by characterising what we call “Batesonian Mendelism” and “Pearsonian biometry” as coherent and competing scientific outlooks. Contrary to the thesis that such a controversy stemmed from diverging theoretical commitments on the nature of heredity and evolution, we argue that Pearson’s and Bateson’s alternative views on those processes ultimately relied on different appraisals of the methodological value of the statistical apparatus developed by Francis Galton. (...) Accordingly, we contend that Bateson’s belief in the primacy of cross-breeding experiments over statistical analysis constituted a minimal methodological unifying condition ensuring the internal coherence of Batesonian Mendelism. Moreover, this same belief implied a view of the study of heredity and evolution as an experimental endeavour and a conception of heredity and evolution as fundamentally discontinuous processes. Similarly, we identify a minimal methodological unifying condition for Pearsonian biometry, which we characterise as the view that experimental methods had to be subordinate to statistical analysis, according to methodological standards set by biometrical research. This other methodological commitment entailed conceiving the study of heredity and evolution as subsumable under biometry and primed Pearson to regard discontinuous hereditary and evolutionary processes as exceptions to a statistical norm. Finally, we conclude that Batesonian Mendelism and Pearsonian biometry represented two potential versions of a single genetics-based evolutionary synthesis since the methodological principles and the phenomena that played a central role in the former were also acknowledged by the latter—albeit as fringe cases—and conversely. (shrink)

The twentieth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of statistics by biologists, including systematists. The modern synthesis and new systematics stimulated this development, particularly after World War II. The rise of "the statistical frame of mind " resulted in a rethinking of the relationship between biological and mathematical points of view, the roles of objectivity and subjectivity in systematic research, the implications of new computing technologies, and the place of systematics among the biological disciplines.

The debate between the Mendelians and the (largely Darwinian) biometricians has been referred to by R. A. Fisher as ‘one of the most needless controversies in the history of science’ and by David Hull as ‘an explicable embarrassment’. The literature on this topic consists mainly of explaining why the controversy occurred and what factors prevented it from being resolved. Regrettably, little or no mention is made of the issues that figured in its resolution. This paper deals with the latter topic (...) and in doing so reorients the focus of the debate as one between Karl Pearson and R. A. Fisher rather than between the biometricians and the Mendelians. One reason for this reorientation is that Pearson's own work in 1904 and 1909 suggested that Mendelism and biometry could, to some extent, be made compatible, yet he remained steadfast in his rejection of Mendelism. The interesting question then is why Fisher, who was also a proponent of biometric methods, was able to synthesise the two traditions in a way that Pearson either could not or would not. My answer to this question involves an analysis of the ways in which different kinds of assumptions were used in modelling Mendelian populations. I argue that it is these assumptions, which lay behind the statistical techniques of Pearson and Fisher, that can be isolated as the source of Pearson's rejection of Mendelism and Fisher's success in the synthesis. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Der folgende Beitrag handelt vom Rückgriff auf den Körper an der Grenze und will einige der besonderen Problematiken skizzieren, die sich durch eine kontrollpolitisch begründete Ontologie des Körpers und seine weitere Verarbeitung als datenbankgestützte Identität im Kontext der europäischen Migrationspolitik ergeben. Er will damit einen Beitrag zur Politisierung der konstitutiven Instabilität einer verkörperten Identität leisten, d. h. einer Identität und vor allem auch eines Körpers, wie sie – gewissermaßen gegen das somatische Identitätskriterium, demgemäß „wir“ unser Körper „sind“ – von (...) Feminist*innen wie etwa Elizabeth Grosz oder Niamh Stephenson und Dimitris Papadopoulos und, für den Bereich der Surveillance Studies, etwa von Kirstie Ball postuliert wurde. Im ersten Teil des Textes greifen wir drei Fälle auf. Sie haben sich infolge der Flüchtlingsbewegungen nach Europa ab 2015 ereignet und sind ihrerseits – wie wir zeigen werden, ganz und gar nicht rational begründet – zu Skandalen beschworen und anschließend als Argumente angeführt worden, um sowohl für die gesellschaftliche und politische Akzeptanz als auch für die Zweckmäßigkeit einer zunehmenden Daten-Interoperabilität und einer Ausweitung der Geltungsbereiche zu werben, wie sie sich anhand der EURODAC-Novellierung erkennen lassen, die sich gegenwärtig vollzieht. Im zweiten Teil fassen wir den EURODAC-Recast zusammen – und skizzieren damit eine neue Entwicklungsphase der soziotechnischen Assemblage, durch die in den europäischen Entwicklungs- und Forschungseinrichtungen der biometrischen Identifikation und der Kontrolle der Mobilität eine verkörperte Identität der Migration produziert wird. (shrink)

There are two motivations commonly ascribed to historical actors for taking up statistics: to reduce complicated data to a mean value (e.g., Quetelet), and to take account of diversity (e.g., Galton). Different motivations will, it is assumed, lead to different methodological decisions in the practice of the statistical sciences. Karl Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon are generally seen as following directly in Galton’s footsteps. I argue for two related theses in light of this standard interpretation, based on a reading (...) of several sources in which Weldon, independently of Pearson, reflects on his own motivations. First, while Pearson does approach statistics from this "Galtonian" perspective, he is, consistent with his positivist philosophy of science, utilizing statistics to simplify the highly variable data of biology. Weldon, on the other hand, is brought to statistics by a rich empiricism and a desire to preserve the diversity of biological data. Secondly, we have here a counterexample to the claim that divergence in motivation will lead to a corresponding separation in methodology. Pearson and Weldon, despite embracing biometry for different reasons, settled on precisely the same set of statistical tools for the investigation of evolution. (shrink)

Purpose – The paper is a conceptual investigation of the metaphysics of personal identity and the ethics of biometric passports. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Philosophical argument, discussing both the metaphysical and the social ethics/computer ethics literature on personal identity and biometry. Findings – The author argues for three central claims in this paper: passport are not simply representations of personal identity, they help constitute personal identity. Personal identity is not a metaphysical fact, but a (...) set of practices, among them identity management practices employed by governments. The use of biometry as part of these identity management practices is not an ethical problem as such, nor is it something fundamentally new and different compared to older ways of establishing personal identity. It is worrisome, however, since in the current political climate, it is systematically used to deny persons access to specific territories, rights, and benefits. Originality/value – The paper ties together strands of philosophical inquiry that do not usually converse with one another, namely the metaphysics of personal identity, and the topic of identity in social philosophy and computer ethics. (shrink)

The so-called "biometric-Mendelian controversy" has received much attention from science studies scholars. This paper focuses on one scientist involved in this debate, Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire, who performed a series of hybridization experiments with mice beginning in 1901. Previous historical work on Darbishire's experiments and his later attempt to reconcile Mendelian and biometric views describe Darbishire as eventually being "converted" to Mendelism. I provide a new analysis of this episode in the context of Darbishire's experimental results, his underlying epistemology, and his (...) influence on the broader debate surrounding the rediscovery and acceptance of Mendelism. I investigate various historiographical issues raised by this episode in order to reflect on the idea of "conversion" to a scientific theory. Darbishire was an influential figure who resisted strong forces compelling him to convert prematurely due to his requirements that the new theory account for particularly important anomalous facts and answer the most pressing questions in the field. (shrink)

Few of Stephen Jay Gould’s accomplishments in evolutionary biology have received more attention than his hierarchical theory of evolution, which postulates a causal discontinuity between micro- and macroevolutionary events. But Gould’s hierarchical theory was his second attempt to supply a theoretical framework for macroevolutionary studies—and one he did not inaugurate until the mid-1970s. In this paper, I examine Gould’s first attempt: a proposed fusion of theoretical morphology, multivariate biometry and the experimental study of adaptation in fossils. This early “macroevolutionary (...) synthesis” was predicated on the notion that parallelism and convergence dominate the history of higher taxa, and moreover, that they can be explained in terms of adaptation leading to mechanical improvement. In this paper, I explore the origins and contents of Gould’s first macroevolutionary synthesis, as well as the reasons for its downfall. In addition, I consider how various developments during the mid-1970s led Gould to identify hierarchy and constraint as the leading themes of macroevolutionary studies—and adaptation as a macroevolutionary red herring. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the development of evolutionary theory in the period from 1918 to 1932. It argues that: (i) Fisher's work in 1918 constituted a not fully satisfactory reduction of biometry to Mendelism; (ii) there was a synthesis in the 1920s but that this synthesis was mainly one of classical genetics with population genetics, with Haldane's The Causes of Evolution being its founding document; (iii) the most important achievement of the models of theoretical population genetics was to show that (...) natural selection sufficed as a mechanism for evolution; and (iv) Haldane formulated a prospective evolutionary theory in the 1920s whereas Fisher and Wright formulated retrospective theories of evolutionary history. (shrink)

Summary Long-standing claims have been made for nearly the entire twentieth century that the biometrician, Karl Pearson, and his colleague, W. F. R. Weldon, rejected Mendelism as a theory of inheritance. It is shown that at the end of the nineteenth century Pearson considered various theories of inheritance (including Francis Galton's law of ancestral heredity for characters underpinned by continuous variation), and by 1904 he ?accepted the fundamental idea of Mendel? as a theory of inheritance for discontinuous variation. Moreover, in (...) 1909, he suggested a synthesis of biometry and Mendelism. Despite the many attempts made by a number of geneticists (including R. A. Fisher in 1936) to use Pearson's chi-square (X 2, P) goodness-of-fit test on Mendel's data, which produced results that were ?too good to be true?, Weldon reached the same conclusion in 1902, but his results were never acknowledged. The geneticist and arch-rival of the biometricians, Williams Bateson, was instead exceptionally critical of this work and interpreted this as Weldon's rejection of Mendelism. Whilst scholarship on Mendel, by historians of science in the last 18 years, has led to a balanced perspective of Mendel, it is suggested that a better balanced and more rounded view of the hereditarian-statistical work of Pearson, Weldon, and the biometricians is long overdue. (shrink)

Avec l’identification biométrique, nous passons imperceptiblement du contrôle à distance des populations pratiqué par les États modernes à des macro-systèmes techniques qui imposent de plus en plus leur propre logique. Du point de vue anthropologique ce déplacement de paradigme met en jeu la définition même de l’identité en renforçant le divorce entre l’identité civile et l’identité personnelle ou sociale. La frontière est désormais inscrite à même le corps biologique des individus au sein de l’espace géré depuis les terminaux du grand (...) réseau mondial de gestion des flux disséminés sur la planète. Elle tend donc à se confondre avec les limites fonctionnelles du Macro-Système technique. Du point de vue du droit, la mise en place par les États de dispositifs d’identification biométriques s’exprime principalement par la restriction de la liberté de circuler accordée aux individus. L’un des constats apporté par la revue des législations nationales montre pourtant que le droit s’adapte globalement à cette nouvelle situation. Cet article interroge en conclusion quelques-unes des raisons permettant d’expliquer ces reculs successifs et propose, parmi elles, la définition implicite de l’individu sur laquelle fait fond le droit moderne.With biometric identification we are imperceptibly moving from the remote control of the population practised by the modern States on to large technical systems which increasingly impose their own logic on people. From an anthropological viewpoint, this paradigm shift calls into question the very definition of « identity » by broadening the divide between civil identity and personal or social identity. The frontier is now inscribed on the biological body of the individual within the space that is managed from the terminals of the global flow management networks scattered the world over. The frontier thus tends increasingly to coincide with the functional limits of the large technical system. From a legal viewpoint, the introduction by States of biometric identification systems results primarily in a restriction of the freedom of circulation granted to individuals. One of the findings which emerge from a review of national legislations is however that law is globally adapting to this new situation. In the conclusion, the article considers some of the reasons behind these successive backward steps, and proposes, amongst them, an implicit definition of the individual on which modern law is founded. (shrink)

This paper describes the historical background and early formation of Wilhelm Johannsen's distinction between genotype and phenotype. It is argued that contrary to a widely accepted interpretation his concepts referred primarily to properties of individual organisms and not to statistical averages. Johannsen's concept of genotype was derived from the idea of species in the tradition of biological systematics from Linnaeus to de Vries: An individual belonged to a group - species, subspecies, elementary species - by representing a certain underlying type. (...) Johannsen sharpened this idea theoretically in the light of recent biological discoveries, not least those of cytology. He tested and confirmed it experimentally combining the methods of biometry, as developed by Francis Galton, with the individual selection method and pedigree analysis, as developed for instance by Louis Vilmorin. The term "genotype" was introduced in W. Johannsen's 1909 treatise, but the idea of a stable underlying biological "type" distinct from observable properties was the core idea of his classical bean selection experiment published 6 years earlier. The individual ontological foundation of population analysis was a self-evident presupposition in Johannsen's studies of heredity in populations from their start in the early 1890s till his death in 1927. The claim that there was a "substantial but cautious modification of Johannsen's phenotype-genotype distinction" from a statistical to an individual ontological perspective derives from a misreading of the 1903 and 1909 texts. The immediate purpose of this paper is to correct this reading of the 1903 monograph by showing how its problems and results grow out of Johannsen's earlier work in heredity and plant breeding. Johannsen presented his famous selection experiment as the culmination of a line of criticism of orthodox Darwinism by William Bateson, Hugo de Vries, and others. They had argued that evolution is based on stepwise rather than continuous change in heredity. Johannsen's paradigmatic experiment showed how stepwise variation in heredity could be operationally distinguished from the observable, continuous morphological variation. To test Galton's law of partial regression, Johannsen deliberately chose pure lines of self-fertilizing plants, a pure line being the descendants in successive generations of one single individual. Such a population could be assumed to be highly homogeneous with respect to hereditary type, and Johannsen found that selection produced no change in this type. Galton, he explained, had experimented with populations composed of a number of stable hereditary types. The partial regression which Galton found was simply an effect of selection between types, increasing the proportion of some types at the expense of others. (shrink)

This paper describes the historical background and early formation of Wilhelm Johannsen's distinction between genotype and phenotype. It is argued that contrary to a widely accepted interpretation his concepts referred primarily to properties of individual organisms and not to statistical averages. Johannsen's concept of genotype was derived from the idea of species in the tradition of biological systematics from Linnaeus to de Vries: An individual belonged to a group - species, subspecies, elementary species - by representing a certain underlying type. (...) Johannsen sharpened this idea theoretically in the light of recent biological discoveries, not least those of cytology. He tested and confirmed it experimentally combining the methods of biometry, as developed by Francis Galton, with the individual selection method and pedigree analysis, as developed for instance by Louis Vilmorin. The term "genotype" was introduced in W. Johannsen's 1909 treatise, but the idea of a stable underlying biological "type" distinct from observable properties was the core idea of his classical bean selection experiment published 6 years earlier. The individual ontological foundation of population analysis was a self-evident presupposition in Johannsen's studies of heredity in populations from their start in the early 1890s till his death in 1927. The claim that there was a "substantial but cautious modification of Johannsen's phenotype-genotype distinction" from a statistical to an individual ontological perspective derives from a misreading of the 1903 and 1909 texts. The immediate purpose of this paper is to correct this reading of the 1903 monograph by showing how its problems and results grow out of Johannsen's earlier work in heredity and plant breeding. Johannsen presented his famous selection experiment as the culmination of a line of criticism of orthodox Darwinism by William Bateson, Hugo de Vries, and others. They had argued that evolution is based on stepwise rather than continuous change in heredity. Johannsen's paradigmatic experiment showed how stepwise variation in heredity could be operationally distinguished from the observable, continuous morphological variation. To test Galton's law of partial regression, Johannsen deliberately chose pure lines of self-fertilizing plants, a pure line being the descendants in successive generations of one single individual. Such a population could be assumed to be highly homogeneous with respect to hereditary type, and Johannsen found that selection produced no change in this type. Galton, he explained, had experimented with populations composed of a number of stable hereditary types. The partial regression which Galton found was simply an effect of selection between types, increasing the proportion of some types at the expense of others. (shrink)

This essay examines the origin of genotype-environment interaction, or G×E. "Origin" and not "the origin" because the thesis is that there were actually two distinct concepts of G×E at this beginning: a biometric concept, or \[G \times E_B\], and a developmental concept, or \[G \times E_D \]. R. A. Fisher, one of the founders of population genetics and the creator of the statistical analysis of variance, introduced the biometric concept as he attempted to resolve one of the main problems in (...) the biometric tradition of biology - partitioning the relative contributions of nature and nurture responsible for variation in a population. Lancelot Hogben, an experimental embryologist and also a statistician, introduced the developmental concept as he attempted to resolve one of the main problems in the developmental tradition of biology - determining the role that developmental relationships between genotype and environment played in the generation of variation. To argue for this thesis, I outline Fisher and Hogben's separate routes to their respective concepts of G × E; then these separate interpretations of G × E are drawn on to explicate a debate between Fisher and Hogben over the importance of G × E, the first installment of a persistent controversy. Finally, Fisher's \[G \times E_B\] and Hogben's \[G \times E_D \] are traced beyond their own work into mid-2Oth century population and developmental genetics, and then into the infamous IQ Controversy of the 1970s. (shrink)

Avec le salariat et le rassemblement des ouvriers sur les mêmes lieux, dans le même temps et pour une tâche commune, la surveillance est apparue comme plus « nécessaire ». Les techniques se sont naturellement installées dans l'univers de la surveillance au travail, marquant plusieurs étapes. Autrefois, vigiles, contremaîtres et cadres assuraient la surveillance. Une seconde étape a été matérialisée par l'installation des automatismes de première génération, avec les badges notamment. La troisième étape a enrichi les dispositifs du recours à (...) la vidéo, avec la capture des images et des sons. Plus récemment, la cyber-surveillance a pris place, avant que les techniques biométriques n'apparaissent. Le caractère de plus en plus intrusif des moyens de la surveillance apparaît avec leur possible mise en oeuvre à l'insu des « surveillés ». Dans cet univers, la Cnil doit s'assurer du respect de l'esprit et des termes de la loi Informatique et Libertés. Mais chacun doit être appelé à la vigilance et veiller personnellement au bon usage des traces qu'il laisse et qui peuvent aller sommeiller dans un fichier jusqu'au jour où...!With salaried employment and the presence of an entire workforce in the same premises and at the same time, supervision is considered as increasingly "necessary". Technology has naturally become established in the world of workplace supervision, developing through different stages. In the past, the task was entrusted to security guards, foremen and supervisors. Next came first-generation automation, particularly with the introduction of badges. The third phase brought in video recordings, with image and sound capture. More recently, cyber-supervision was frequently used before being superseded by biométrie techniques. With today's possibilities for installing work supervision systems without the knowledge of those being supervised, they have become increasingly prevalent. The French data protection authority is responsible for enforcing observance of the terms and the spirit of the French data protection act . However, it is up to each one of us to be vigilant and to make sure, individually, that the digital traces we leave behind us are properly used and are not waiting patiently in some obscure archive for the day when .. (shrink)

Huxley coined the phrase, the “evolutionary synthesis” to refer to the acceptance by a vast majority of biologists in the mid-20th Century of a “synthetic” view of evolution. According to this view, natural selection acting on minor hereditary variation was the primary cause of both adaptive change within populations and major changes, such as speciation and the evolution of higher taxa, such as families and genera. This was, roughly, a synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory; it was a (...) demonstration that prior barriers to understanding between various subdisciplines in the life sciences could be removed. The relevance of different domains in biology to one another was established under a common research program. The evolutionary synthesis may be broken down into two periods, the “early” synthesis from 1918 through 1932, and what is more often called the “modern synthesis” from 1936-1947. The authors most commonly associated with the early synthesis are J.B.S. Haldane, R.A. Fisher, and S. Wright. These three figures authored a number of important synthetic advances; first, they demonstrated the compatibility of a Mendelian, particulate theory of inheritance with the results of Biometry, a study of the correlations of measures of traits between relatives. Second, they developed the theoretical framework for evolutionary biology, classical population genetics. This is a family of mathematical models representing evolution as change in genotype frequencies, from one generation to the next, as a product of selection, mutation, migration, and drift, or chance. Third, there was a broader synthesis of population genetics with cytology, genetics, and biochemistry, as well as both empirical and mathematical demonstrations to the effect that very small selective forces acting over a relatively long time were able to generate substantial evolutionary change, a novel and surprising result to many skeptics of Darwinian gradualist views. The later “modern” synthesis is most often identified with the work of Mayr, Dobzhansky and Simpson. There was a major institutional change in biology at this stage, insofar as different subdisciplines formerly housed in different departments, and with different methodologies were united under the same institutional umbrella of “evolutionary biology.” Mayr played an important role as a community architect, in founding the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the journal Evolution, which drew together work in systematics, biogeography, paleontology, and theoretical population genetics. (shrink)

Sewall Wright first encountered the complex systems characteristic of gene combinations while a graduate student at Harvard's Bussey Institute from 1912 to 1915. In Mendelian breeding experiments, Wright observed a hierarchical dependence of the organism's phenotype on dynamic networks of genetic interaction and organization. An animal's physical traits, and thus its autonomy from surrounding environmental constraints, depended greatly on how genes behaved in certain combinations. Wright recognized that while genes are the material determinants of the animal phenotype, operating with great (...) regularity, the special nature of genetic systems contributes to the animal phenotype a degree of spontaneity and novelty, creating unpredictable trait variations by virtue of gene interactions. As a result of his experimentation, as well as his keen interest in the philosophical literature of his day, Wright was inspired to see genetic systems as conscious, living organisms in their own right. Moreover, he decided that since genetic systems maintain ordered stability and cause unpredictable novelty in their organic wholes (the animal phenotype), it would be necessary for biologists to integrate techniques for studying causally ordered phenomena (experimental method) and chance phenomena (correlation method). From 1914 to 1921 Wright developed his "method of path coefficient" (or "path analysis"), a new procedure drawing from both laboratory experimentation and statistical correlation in order to analyze the relative influence of specific genetic interactions on phenotype variation. In this paper I aim to show how Wright's philosophy for understanding complex genetic systems (panpsychic organicism) logically motivated his 1914-1921 design of path analysis. (shrink)

‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,’ Winston Churchill is famously said to have quipped. That he never seems to have actually made this comment is beside the point, since the message is important: past events never speak for themselves. Facts do not settle like rocks in a dry river, but are moved, displaced, and replaced by waters that continue to gush. The currents and their temperates are sensetative to mores, signs of their times. And (...) the keepers of the waters, more often than not, are historians. This special issue is devoted to new directions in the historiography of genetics, a field that has seen particularly lively drift, swirl, and surge in recent decades. (shrink)

Francis Galton coined the word eugenics in the late nineteenth century in England to characterize the “noble heritage” and the “well-born.” Its statistical approach leads to biometry as the quantitative study of populations. As an organized movement, its main purpose was to apply the available knowledge on inheritance in order to shape the characters of the future generations. Since then, eugenistic studies mingled science with the social values of the ruling classes, distorting scientific practice. The early twentieth century gave (...) rise to human genetics with strong eugenistic roots, assuming the role to prevent the “social degeneration” in modern industrial societies. This negative eugenistic movement developed into mandatory sterilization laws in several European countries and in the United States, and has its most dramatic achievement in the racial cleaning program of National Socialist Germany. (shrink)

Wynn examines the confluence of science, mathematics, and rhetoric in the development of theories of evolution and heredity in the 19th century. He shows how mathematical warrants become accepted sources for argument in the biological sciences and explores the importance of rhetorical strategies in persuading biologists to accept mathematical arguments.

One claim found in the received historiography of the biometrical school (comprised primarily of Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and W. F. R. Weldon) is that one of the biometricians' great flaws was their inability to look past their population-focused, statistical, gradualist understanding of evolutionary change – which led, in part, to their ignoring developments in cellular biology around 1900. I will argue, on the contrary, that the work of the biometricians was, from its earliest days, fundamentally concerned with connections between (...) statistical patterns of inheritance and the underlying cellular features that gave rise to them. Such work remained current with contemporary knowledge of chromosomes, cytology, and development; in this article, I explore the first case. The biometricians were thus well positioned to understand the relationship between the patterns of Mendelian inheritance and the statistical distributions with which they primarily occupied themselves. Ignorance of this connection, then, is not the reason why they rejected Mendelism. Further, both Galton and Weldon – though each in their own unique way – decided to turn to biological detail as a way to better justify the generality of their statistical approaches to heredity. Perhaps paradoxically, then, for these biometricians, detail offered an approach to theoretical generality. (shrink)

This book considers all aspects of privacy and security relating to an individual's DNA, with a concentration on fundamental human rights as well as specific cases and examples, in addressing greater security and privacy in the modern world.

Ontology engineering is mainly done by domain experts who are specialists in their domain but have, if at all, limited knowledge in logics, computer science, or analytic philosophy. The literature on formal ontologies and biomedical ontologies is neither suited nor intended to serve as an educational resource that would help domain experts to become good ontologists. Existing educational resources focus rather on ontology tools and languages than on good practice. The purpose of the GoodOD guideline is to pave the road (...) for domain experts who want (or need) to become ontology engineers. It pursues the openly pragmatic approach that ontology engineers only need to know ontology theory to the extent which supports the (measurable) outcome of their work. The GoodOD Guideline builds upon given philosophical and methodological principles as well as preexisting tools and resources. In particular (pragmatic) scientific realism, first order logics and its subset OWL-DL (description logics), set theory, an upper-level ontology with high-level categories and a canonic set of relations, constraints which limit the freedom of choice when building coordinate expressions, the ontology editor Protégé 4, a complete DL reasoner, such as HermIT, ontology design patterns, and naming conventions. -/- Given these precepts the guideline contains all the knowledge to be acquired by a user to be able to solve ontology engineering problems in a foreseeable and non-arbitrary way. The didactic concept is to convey the skills not only by theory but also by practical examples. (shrink)