Reading Response QuestionsWeek 8, Precepts March 31 - April 2, 1998
Email: creager@phoenix.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: The Warming reading is frankly rather dense; I've suggested some passages you can cut.
Week 8
Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life 1° source
p. 3 What is the objective of Loeb's research and of this book?
pp. 4-13 How does Loeb reconstruct the history of "scientific biology"? What is the basis of all life for Loeb? What does Loeb mean by the "riddle of life"? With what field of biology does Loeb illustrate his point? (Recall Entswicklungsmechanik.) What was Loeb's contribution to experimental embryology?
pp. 14-15 What does Loeb's review of the recent experiments in embryology lead him to claim at the end of section IV.? How does Loeb define heredity? Notice the distinction he draws between heredity and transmission of characters (only the latter of which is explicable according to Mendel's laws).
pp. 17-23 What is Loeb's key example for the determination of traits by chromosomes?
pp. 25-26 Why is adaptation a problem for Loeb's reductionistic program?
pp. 26-31 Like Darwin's interest in exploring the biological basis for human emotions, Loeb's aim to explain "wishes and hopes, efforts and struggles, disappointments and suffering" mitigates against the notion of human consciousness as separate from animal impulse. What does Loeb propose as a model in this endeavor? How does Loeb aim to subsume ethics under experimental biology?Kruif, "Jacques Loeb, the Mechanist" 1° source
pp. 182-83 How does De Kruif present Loeb and the 'scientist' generally? Since you've read an excerpt of Loeb's book, why do you think De Kruif says that the "truths that Loeb has unveiled are hard ones. They bite and hurt."? What is novel about Loeb's mechanistic approach to biology? Who are Loeb's opponents?
p. 184 Why does Loeb reject the term "environment"? Consider that this article is published only a year before the piece you read last week by Herbert Spencer Jenning, "Heredity and Environment." What sort of person does Loeb seem to be from de Kruif's description? (I.e., read between the lines.)
pp. 186-87 What sort of model organisms does Loeb advocate for experimental biology? Why? How does De Kruif depict vitalists and teleologists (i.e. those who explain nature in terms of purpose)?
p. 189 Does Loeb's experimental biology entail metaphysical assumptions?Warming, Oecology of Plants 1° source
p. 414 Who coined the term "ecology"? What was it to mean? How does Warming define his field (pardon the pun)?
pp. 415-419 SKIP
pp. 12-13 What is the subject and approach of "oecological botany and plant-geography"?
pp. 14-15 SKIP
pp. 348-49 How do changes of the plants in a landscape occur? Candolle's writings had also influenced Darwin. The French quote roughly translates 'All the plants of a land, all those of a given place, are in a state of war of one against the other.' To what does the "peopling" of a new soil refer?
pp. 350-55 SKIM: Note the kinds of processes Warming lists as giving rise to new soil (the headings).
p. 356 What stages of different kinds of vegetation does 'new soil' go through?
pp. 357-365 SKIP
p. 366 What does Warming mean by the "weapons of species"?
p. 368 What is a 'relic' species?
pp. 369-73 How is Darwinian evolution important to Warming's idea of developmental succession? What mechanisms does Warming include as possibly responsible for the origin of new species? What are the problems with each mechanism? Which mechanism does Warming seem to favor? What is direct adaptation? Why is self-regulation important to organisms in a plant community?Borell, "Biologists and the Promotion of Birth Control Research, 1918-1938" 2° source
p. 51 When did self-proclaimed biologists first investigating birth control? Why then?
pp. 54-57 How did the way Margaret Sanger's rhetoric about the benefits of birth control change over the 1920s? How was eugenics involved in the appeals to the public to accept birth control? What happened to the feminist concerns that had initiated interest in birth control? Why did birth control come to be seen as a 'scientific' solution to war and poverty? (Borell does not fully answer this question.)
pp. 61-62 What was the de-politicization of the World Population Conference in Geneva in 1927 supposed to achieve (especially in Sanger's view)? Did it succeed? How did Sanger and others accomplish their goal?
p. 64 How and why was the Bureau of Social Hygiene, Inc. founded? What sorts of projects did they undertake? Who financed it?
p. 70 How did F. A. E. Crew and his research provide a bridge between birth control promotion and contemporary eugenic concerns?
pp. 72-73 Why did Cecil I. B. Voge's work on contraceptives lose Crew's support in 1932?
p. 77 Why (ultimately) was the Rockefeller Foundation so interested in birth control research? Why did it receive scientific support? What was the role of American physicians in defining or supporting birth control research?
pp. 84-85 Were research scientists supporting the eugenic arguments for birth control in the 1930s? When and why did the arguments for birth control as a means for breeding fitter humans lose their wider appeal?Worster, Nature's Economy 2° source
"Words on a Map"p. 192 When was the word 'ecology' first coined? What did it mean? What older phrase did biologists continue using instead? (We have used the similar term 'the animal economy.') Who were most of the scientists (by discipline) who laid claim to ecology as a new science?
pp. 194-95 How did these early ecologists, often disciples of Humboldt, view plants?
p. 196 What were C. Hart Merriam's "life zones"?
p. 199 What distinguished Warming's depiction of "the manifold and complex relations subsisting between the plants and animals that form one community" from earlier articulations of the economy of nature, such as Linnaeus's?
p. 201 What was Warming's most influential set of ideas? How was this, also, a departure from Linnaeus's animal economy?"Clements and the Climax Community"
pp. 206-07 What was the contribution of Clements and Cowles' Anglo-American school of ecology? Where and how did Cowles apply Warming's notion of plant succession?
pp. 208-09 What was Frederic Clements' important contribution to ecological thinking? How did his early life and education in Nebraska contribute towards his scientific insight?
pp. 210-11 What is a "sere"? How does Clements' succession relate to embryology?
pp. 212-13 From whom did Clements adopt his organismal philosophy of nature?
p. 214 What did Clements mean by "biotic community" or "biome"? What was Clements' most important actual model (for biome and for his ecological theory more generally).
pp. 217-220 What organism is not a part of Clements' biome? What were the effects of this exclusion?Allen, Chapter IV, "Mechanistic Materialism and Its Metamorphosis: General Physiology, 1900-1930," Life Science in the Twentieth Century 2° source
p. 73 Upon what traditions in 19th century biology did Loeb's mechanistic pronouncements draw?
pp. 74-77 How did Loeb come to his mechanistic views? What did Loeb mean by 'mechanistic approach'? What were its social implications?
pp. 80-81 What aspects of Loeb's mechanistic generalizations did biologists oppose? Who (i.e. out of what traditions) supported Loeb?
pp. 82-88 Optional (but if you've ever wanted to know more about Pavlov's dogs, here's the chance.)
pp. 95-97 How did Henderson use physical chemical methods for a holistic rather than reductionistic view of the organism? Where does he depart from Loeb?
p. 101 What did Walter Cannon's "homeostasis" mean? What does this school of self-regulating organismal biology share with contemporary ecological science?
pp. 103-06 What are the differences between mechanistic and holistic materialism? Is the second a kind of vitalism?
pp. 106-11 Why did materialism become so prevalent in late 19th and early 20th century biology? Why the oscillation between its mechanistic and holistic exemplifications?
