Oren Harman

Bar Ilan University | BIU · Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society

During the 1960s and 1970s population geneticists pushed beyond models of single genes to grapple with the effect on evolution of multiple genes associated by linkage. The resulting models of multiple interacting loci suggested that blocks of genes, maybe even entire chromosomes or the genome itself, should be treated as a unit. In this context, Ri...

This handbook offers original, critical perspectives on different approaches to the history of biology. This collection is intended to start a new conversation among historians of biology regarding their work, its history, and its future. Historical scholarship does not take place in isolation: As historians create their narratives describing the p...

In 1869, Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered a new substance in the nucleus of living cells. The substance, which he called nuclein, is now known as DNA, yet both Miescher’s name and his theoretical ideas about nuclein are all but forgotten. This paper traces the trajectory of Miescher’s reception in the historiography of genetics. To his critics,...

The story of genetics typically omits the original discovery of the molecular nature of DNA: Friedrich Miescher's 1869 discovery of the substance he christened “nuclein”. The article explains how he came... In 1869, the young Swiss biochemist Friedrich Miescher discovered the molecule we now refer to as DNA, developing techniques for its extraction...

The Price equation was a piece of abstract mathematics. What kind of a connection could it possibly have had to George Price's personal life and biography? Here, I will argue that the initial impetus for Price's foray into mathematical population genetics stemmed from a preoccupation with the origins of family, one that was born following a divorce...

This handbook offers original, critical perspectives on different approaches to the history of biology. This collection is intended to start a new conversation among historians of biology regarding their work, its history, and its future. Historical scholarship does not take place in isolation: As historians create their narratives describing the p...

An original review of Scientific Biography for the Handbook of the Historiography of Biology

Classical genetics has its origin in the 1850s and 1860s, when the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel attempted to formalise the rules of inheritance governing plant hybridisation. In 1909, the Danish biologist Wilhelm Johannsen proposed that there are two sources of variation: one arising from the action of the environment and the other due to variations...

Many different histories of the altruism–morality debate in biology are possible. Here, I offer one such history, based on the juxtaposition of four pairs of historical figures who have played a central role in the debate. Arranged in chronological order, the four dyads — Huxley and Kropotkin, Fisher and Emerson, Wynne-Edwards and Williams, and Ham...

“A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history,” Mahatma Ghandi is often quoted as saying, and, one might add cheekily, but with unquestionable truth, so too a small group of determined historians. Burke may have counseled that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to...

With the yearly exodus from labs and lecture theatres imminent, Nature's regular reviewers and editors share some tempting holiday reads.

Recently, a number of prominent evolutionary biologists have contested the theory of kin selection and have in turn been strongly challenged by the majority of their colleagues. The heated nature of the argument over the role of kin and group selection in the evolution of altruism is a testament to the ways in which vested interests and intellectua...

Recently, the question of adolescent culpability has been brought before the Supreme Court of the United States for reconsideration. Neuroscience, adolescent advocates claim, is teaching us that young people cannot be found fully responsible for their actions. The reason: their brains are not fully formed. Here I consider the history of the use of...

Oren Harman assesses the first biography of biologist W. D. Hamilton, the 'greatest Darwinian since Darwin'.

Much of modern moral philosophy argued that there are is's in this world, and there are oughts, but that the two are entirely independent of one another. What this meant was that morality had nothing to do with man's biological nature, and could not be derived from it. Any such attempt was considered to be a categorical mistake, and plain foolish....

Before Darwin, the devout believed that morality was infused from above on the Sixth Day, religious skeptics that it had been born with philosophy. But could the moral order have other origins? Could the design of virtue come from another place? “He who understands baboon,” the sage of evolution scribbled in a notebook at the London Zoo in 1836, “w...

The life of George Price (1922-1975), the eccentric polymath genius and father of the Price equation, is used as a prism and counterpoint through which to consider an age-old evolutionary conundrum: the origins of altruism. This biographical project, and biography and history more generally, are considered in terms of the possibility of using form...

The following discussion considers three aspects of the Sciences-versus-Humanities divide: (1) the historical evolution of disciplines in the modern period through the beginning of the twenty-first century; (2) the epistemology of the sciences versus that of the Humanities as defined and practiced in that same period; and (3) the ways in which the...

Both the British naturalist Charles Darwin and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz attempted explanations of the origin of variation: the former of the biological kind, the latter of the cultural kind. In so doing, both made claims that outstripped the evidence they possessed. But, in retrospect, in light of the history of the Nature versus...

This article considers the reception of British cytogeneticist C.D. Darlington’s controversial 1932 book, Recent Advances in Cytology. Darlington’s cytogenetic work, and the manner in which he made it relevant to evolutionary biology, marked an abrupt shift in the status and role of cytology in the life sciences. By focusing on Darlington’s scienti...

Classical genetics has its origin in the 1850s and 1860s, when the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel attempted to formalize the rules of inheritance governing plant hybridization. When Mendel's laws were rediscovered in 1900, breeding experiments were wedded to cytological observation of chromosomes in the nucleus of organisms – most notably in the fruit...

Cyril Darlington (1903-1981) was the most famous cytologist in the world in the decades preceding the molecular revolution of the 1950s. He crossed disciplinary boundaries to create a synthesis of cytology, genetics and evolution by revealing the mechanics of chromosomal recombination and the importance of its evolution. Always controversial during...

Cyril Dean Darlington (1903-1981) has been forgotten by historians, but was in his day, the leading cytologist of the premolecular era. Of humble and inconspicuous beginnings, Darlington started his career as an unpaid volunteer worker under the aging William Bateson. Working in almost total isolation and with no scientific guidance, he boldly dedu...

The Anglo-American reaction to the Lysenko affair has been treated primarily either from the point of view of the political Right or Left, or as a consequence of post-WWII international relations. None of the accounts have been considered the central role of the British cytogeneticist and evolutionist C.D. Darlington. This article considers Darling...

The subject of this contribution will be approached by means of answering two major questions. These are the following: what is the role for accrual accounting and budgeting in the Dutch central government system and what is the content of recent government proposals to renew the budget and report structure? The answering will be done by means of e...

Standard software found on all HP 1000 A-Series Computer Systems is described. This includes the operating system and a large number of utility programs and libraries. It also includes an optinal package that extends the software's capabilities to include virtual code, spooling, and multiple users.