Reading Response QuestionsWeek 6, 7, Precepts March 24-26, 1998
Email: creager@princeton.edu, or manfredl@princeton.edu Reminder: You may use these content-based questions as a springboard for your e-mail reading response, which should, however, focus on more general issues than the specific items detailed here. The response you send in to your preceptor each week should address all of the required readings (especially the primary source readings, which will be the focus for precept discussion); the text may include questions as well as analysis.
Note: This material is not covered on the mid-term. Since we are not holding precepts during week 6, I have made a few suggestions below of pages to skip in the excerpts of Bernard and Comte so that we can cover the important aspects of all four primary source readings when precepts meet during week 7. Also, you may prefer to read the last section of Chapter 5 of the Allen book during week 10, when I will discuss these developments briefly in lecture.Week 6
Coleman, "The Experimental Ideal" 2° source
p. 154: What does Coleman identify as the problem of both reductionist (i.e. mechanist) and vitalist approaches to biology. What emerged as an alternative?
p. 155: What is positivism?
p. 157: Why is cell theory important to positivistic physiology? Bernard's notion of an internal environment, or milieu interieur, is often invoked as a forerunner of 20th century ideas of homeostasis. Looking backwards rather than forwards, how is his milieu interieur is a reconfiguration of the animal economy? Liebig's Animal Chemistry is known to have strongly influenced Bernard.
p. 157: Why was vivisection important to Bernard's vision of physiology?Bernard, excerpts from "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine" 1° source
pp. 5-9: How, according to Bernard, have experiment and observation been conventionally differentiated? Why is such a division problematical?
pp. 10-13: What are the defining features of experimental method for Bernard?
p. 14: Why are new techniques important to Bernard's view of medical research?
pp. 16-23: Skip or skim
pp. 24-26: What are the salient features of Bernard's experimental medicine?
p. 87: How is biology/medicine different in its research outlook from physics and chemistry, in Bernard's view?
p. 89: How does Bernard account for (and undermine) "vitalism"?
p. 91: How does Bernard differentiate naturalists from physicians in their methods? (Do you think he is being fair?)
p. 93: In the same line Bernard says "life is creation" and "a created organism is a machine." Is this a contradiction? How does he attempt to resolve the mechanist-vitalist debate?
pp. 96-99: How does Bernard use the term "environment"? What purpose does his notion of an "inner environment" serve? Why is vivisection (dissection of life organisms) so important to Bernard?
pp. 99-105. Skip-or skim just to get a sense of Bernard's defense of vivisection.Comte, excerpt from The First System: Cours de Philosophie Positive 1° source
pp. 71-73: What phases does Comte claim that all human knowledge passes through? Darwin was highly influenced by Comte, and understood the continuing influence of religion as an indication that most of his contemporaries had not progressed to the third stage. (The church could be seen as a social fossil of Comte's first stage.)
p. 75: What characteristics do positive science display?
pp. 96, 100-101: What is Comte's hierarchy of disciplines? What separates the "highest" from the "lowest" disciplines? (Comte's succession is like an academic "great chain of being"-supported by his placing mathematics at the "head" on p. 101.) Do we still think in terms of this hierarchy?
pp. 163-167: How does Comte differentiate biology from traditional studies of organisms, especially physiology? How does Comte's depiction of biology differ from Bernard's picture of experimental medicine? Comte's book was published between 1830-42, and Bernard's book on experimental medicine (the previous selection) was published in 1865; you can consider Bernard to be contending with Comte over experimentation in biology versus medicine and about experiment versus observation.
pp. 168-171 Skip or skimWeek 7
Galton, "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims" 1° source
pp. 35-37 How does Galton handle the moral question inherent in good-genics? Does his zoo parable solve the problem?
pp. 38-39 What objectives does Galton set for a Eugenic Society? Do racist or "Eurocentric" assumptions inform his plan for historical inquiry? How does he want to use a notion of class to assess biological fitness? Is this problematic? Note his correlation between degree of civilization and decreased fertility.
p. 40 How does Galton define a "large family"?
pp. 42-43 How does Eugenics fit in to nationalist aspirations for Galton? To what does Galton compare the introduction of Eugenics into society? (Recall Comte's attempts to establish secular humanist religion as also affirming the social importance of religion.) In what respect does Galton consider eugenics to be natural? ethically incumbent?Jennings, "Heredity and Environment" 1° source
p. 225 What analogies does Jennings use to argue for the importance of environment to organisms?
p. 226 How does Jennings describe the physical mechanisms underlying heredity? What kind of research is essential for understanding heredity, according to Jennings?
p. 228 What is the Mendelian 'doctrine,' in Jennings' view? What is the source of the common misunderstanding? How does heredity actually operate?
pp. 230-233 What biological examples does Jennings offer for the importance of environment to the expression of trait in organisms?
p. 234 What is the "moral" of Jennings' salamander story? If this episode had been recounted by Darwin or Chambers, would its lesson have been different? Notice the footnote at the bottom of the page in which Jennings makes clear that he is not talking about Lamarckianism. Does his distinction make sense to you? Where does Jennings say that most of his contemporaries draw the line between "inherited" and "acquired"?
pp. 236-37 What are the ramifications of Jennings' account of heredity for concerns about immigration and race?Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century 2° source
Chapter 2 "Revolt from Morphology I: The Origins of Experimental Embryology"
p. 21 How was the study of embryology affected by the evolution? (We're back to Ernst Haeckel's doctrine that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.) Another way to ask the question is this: Why did scientists expect embryology to answer questions about evolution?
pp. 25-27 In contrast to the evolutionists, what did Wilhelm Roux seek to investigate through embryology? Why? How had Haeckel influenced Roux and where did Roux depart from Haeckel's approach? (Don't worry about all of the technical details in this section, but pay attention to the shift from materialist/evolutionary research on embryos to a new kind of mechanist experimentation.)
p. 29 What was Roux's 'mosaic' theory of heredity and development? (Note the lack of distinction between heredity and development here, and the absence of a genetic orientation to understanding heredity.) How did Roux's experiments support this idea? How did the experiments of Hans Driesch differ?
pp. 33-34 What was Entwicklungsmechanik? What did it mean to Roux to find the cause of development? What connections do you see between this research program and early manifestations of mechanism in biology? How was this program taken up by American biologists (many of whom came to espouse genetic approaches to heredity a few decades later)? What kinds of experiments did these researchers conduct on embryos?Chapter 3, "Revolt from Morphology II: Heredity and Evolution"
p. 41 What kinds of theories did late-19th century scientists use to account for heredity?
p. 43 What did the problem of 'continuous' versus 'discontinuous' heredity mean to turn-of-the-century biologists? How did it grow out of Darwin's work? How did Galton approach this problem? You should be able to explain his "Law of Filial Regression.")
pp. 46-47 How did the 'resolution' of the continuous vs. discontinuous problem of heredity in the 1880s and 1890s threaten Darwin's theory of natural selection? By the turn of the century, Darwin's natural selection was viewed with skepticism by many biologists. How did Bateson give a different answer to the problem of continuous versus discontinuous variation? How had Mendel explained the inheritance of traits in peas?
p. 48 Given that Mendel's work was ignored during the 19th century, how was it resuscitated and by whom?
pp. 50-55 Who rejected Mendelianism after it was re-introduced into biology? Who supported it-even outside of the domain of 'science' proper? What were Morgan's objections to it before 1910? Why did Mendelism seem to bring the spectre of preformationism to embryologists? How did Johannsen's distinction between 'phenotype' and 'genotype,' still used today, help resolve this issue?
pp. 56-61 How did Morgan's group's experiments on the eye color of fruit flies help to put Mendelian genetic factors on more solid footing? What did sex have to do with it? Why were flies so useful for genetics?
p. 62 Morgan's conception of a physical genetic map of the chromosome is still very much in use today. How did crossing different flies show where different traits "mapped" on chromosomes?
p. 65 Why was Morgan's Mendelianism so attractive to adherents of Entswicklungsmechanik?
p. 66 Why did Goldschmidt and some other continue to dissent from Mendelian genetics? What did experimental biology mean to Morgan?
pp. 68-71 How did the new Mendelian genetics soften biologists' resistance to Darwinian natural selection? (Once again, a critical source is lectures delivered at Princeton…)Excerpt from Chapter 5, "The Embryological Synthesis"
pp. 114-15 What questions about development seemed most pressing to Entwicklungsmechanik biologists at the turn of the century? What was the organizer? (I'll explain this in my lectures; Allen is rather cryptic here.)
pp. 120-21 How did Spemann's organizer concept move embryology away from the mechanism of Roux?
Skip or skim 121-124 to 382, paragraph beginning "To return to our initial point…"
p. 125 Allen speaks of the imminent convergence of genetics and embryology, but I will emphasize that the birth of genetics set genetics and embryology in competition for explaining heredity. Historically, Morgan is now viewed as having de-privileged embryology, which was relatively low status until the 1980s, to bolster the increasingly prestigious genetics.
p. 129 Do you see why the idea that an unwanted characteristic was recessive made eugenics seem quite hopeless?Note: You may want to refer to pages 129-145 in three weeks, when I cover this material in lecture.
pp. 130-31 Why were Russian biologists particularly open to Mendelian genetics as practiced in studies of Drosophila?
pp. 136-139 How did the work of Haldane, Fisher, and Wright help to redeem natural selection and also to settle the long-standing disputes between Mendelians and biometricians?
