Staffan Müller-Wille

• Lecturer at University of Cambridge

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the...

In the ‘Fifth Gene Technology Report’, renowned experts provide an overview of current developments and their applications in the dynamically evolving research field of gene and biotechnologies. They examine, among other topics, genetic diagnostics, somatic gene therapy, the development of vaccines, stem cell and organoid research, green gene techn...

The rapid reception of Gregor Mendel's paper ‘Experiments on plant hybrids’ (1866) in the early decades of the twentieth century remains poorly understood. We will suggest that this reception should not exclusively be investigated as the spread of a theory, but also as the spread of an experimental and computational protocol. Early geneticists used...

What is it to make an error in the identification of a named taxonomic group? In this article we argue that the conditions for being in error about the identity of taxonomic groups through their names have a history, and that the possibility of committing such errors is contingent on the regime of institutions and conventions governing taxonomy and...

From contraception to cloning and pregnancy to populations, reproduction presents urgent challenges today. This field-defining history synthesizes a vast amount of scholarship to take the long view. Spanning from antiquity to the present day, the book focuses on the Mediterranean, western Europe, North America and their empires. It combines history...

Statistics derives its power from classifying data and comparing the resulting distributions. In this paper, I will use two historical examples to highlight the importance of such data practices for statistical reasoning. The two examples I will explore are Franz Boas’s anthropometric studies of native American populations in the early 1890s, which...

August Weismann was a 19th-century German biologist, who is today mainly remembered for his strict distinction between what he called the “soma” and the “germ plasm” in higher, multicellular, and sexually reproducing organisms. The soma includes all cells that develop through processes of cellular division and differentiation from germ cells and th...

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the transition from natural history to the history of nature. This essay analyzes institutional, social, and technological changes in natural history associated with this epochal change. Focusing on the many posthumous reeditions of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae that began to appear throughou...

In der Historiographie der globalen Welt ist im englischsprachigen Raum häufig von der »großen Trennung « (The Great Divide) die Rede, mit der »der Westen « im Verlauf der Frühen Neuzeit nicht nur seine eigene »vormoderne« Vergangenheit, sondern auch den »Rest« der Welt hinter sich ließ, und zwar zugunsten einer Kultur, die einerseits durch die Ver...

Die Wissenschaftsgeschichte ist eine akademische Disziplin, deren eigene Geschichte untrennbar mit der Geschichte der europäischen Moderne verbunden ist. Zwar war es auch in vormodernen Schriftkulturen, sowohl in der griechisch-lateinischen Antike als auch in anderen Hochkulturen, durchaus üblich, zuvor Behauptetes enzyklopädisch zu sammeln und rüc...

Wie sind die Wissenschaften entstanden? Wie haben sie sich entwickelt? Wissenschaftsgeschichte hat als Disziplin eine ebenso lange und bewegte Geschichte wie die wissenschaftliche Arbeit selbst. Das Handbuch gibt einen umfassenden Überblick über die historische und aktuelle Wissenschaftsgeschichte in ihrer Anwendung auf alle Wissenschaftszweige, st...

1852 Studium der Medizin in Göttingen; 1856 Assistenzarzt an der Städtischen Klinik Rostock; 1859 Feldarzt in Italien; 1860 Studienaufenthalte in Paris und Gießen; 1861 Leibarzt des österreichischen Erzherzogs Stephan; 1863 Habilitation an der Universität Freiburg i. Br.; 1869–1871 Aufenthalt in Italien; 1873 Ordinarius für Zoologie an der Universi...

(auch: Carolus Linnaeus; d. i. Carl Nilsson Linnaeus) – 1727 Medizinstudium in Lund und Uppsala; 1735 Promotion an der Universität von Harderwijk (Niederlande); 1739 Arzt in Uppsala, 1741 dort Professor für Medizin; 1762 Verleihung des Adelstitels und Änderung des Namens in Carl von Linné; erlitt 1774 einen schweren Schlaganfall, von dessen Folgen...

The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: The invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus's Systema naturae (1735); and the demise of racial typologies after WWII in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation mark...

Many accounts of the history of the race concept place the naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), and his Systema Naturae (1735), at the beginning of modern concepts of race, in contrast to older notions that did not yet reduce race to physical traits, but presented it as the outcome of an inextricable entanglement of blood, soil, and customs.1 In the...

A famous debate between John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus at the end of the seventeenth century has often been referred to as signalling the beginning of a rift between classificatory methods relying on logical division and classificatory methods relying on empirical grouping. Interestingly, a couple of decades lat...

The eighteenth-century German naturalist Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter was the first to carry out a systematic study of plant sexuality in a series of experiments he carried out from 1759 to 1766 in the botanical garden in St. Petersburg. The conclusions he reached seem contradictory from today's vantage point. On the one hand, he believed to have sho...

August Weismann was a nineteenth-century German biologist, who is today mainly remembered for his strict distinction between what he called the 'soma' and the 'germ plasm' in higher, multicellular, and sexually reproducing organisms. The soma includes all cells that develop through processes of cellular division and differentiation from germ cells...

We provide a detailed description of an interleaved and heavily annotated copy of Florae Berolinensis Prodromus, a flora of Berlin published by the German apothecary and botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow in 1787, which today is preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. We demonstrate that this is the copy that the author...

Anthropologists, linguists, cultural historians, and literary scholars have long emphasized the value of examining writing as a material practice and have often invoked the list as a paradigmatic example thereof. This Focus section explores how lists can open up fresh possibilities for research in the history of science. Drawing on examples from th...

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is famous for having turned botany into a systematic discipline, through his classification systems--most notably the sexual system--and his nomenclature. Throughout his life, Linnaeus experimented with various paper technologies designed to display information synoptically. The list took pride of pl...

ABSTRACT Anthropologists, linguists, cultural historians, and literary scholars have long emphasized the value of examining writing as a material practice and have often invoked the list as a paradigmatic example thereof. This Focus section explores how lists can open up fresh possibilities for research in the history of science. Drawing on example...

Natural History can be seen as a discipline paradigmatically engaged in 'data-driven research.' Historians of early modern science have begun to emphasize its crucial role in the Scientific Revolution, and some observers of present day genomics see it as engaged in a return to natural history practices. A key concept that was developed to understan...

This paper summarizes the results from the first European Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences, which was held at the Brocher Foundation in Hermance (Switzerland) 6-10 September 2011. The Advanced Seminar brought together philosophers of the life sciences to discuss the topic of "Causation and Disease." The search for causes of d...

In 1952, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss published a small booklet titled Race and History. It formed part of a series of pamphlets on the so-called ‘race-question’ by leading anthropologists and geneticists, which UNESCO published as part of its campaign against racism. Roughly 20 years later, in 1971, UNESCO invited Lévi-Strauss's t...

Although the cell is commonly addressed as the unit of life, historians and philosophers have devoted relatively little attention to this concept in comparison to other fundamental concepts of biology such as the gene or species. As a partial remedy to this neglect, we introduce the cell as a major point of connection between various disciplinary a...

The cell is not only the structural, physiological, and developmental unit of life, but also the reproductive one. So far, however, this aspect of the cell has received little attention from historians and philosophers of biology. I will argue that cell theory had far-reaching consequences for how biologists conceptualized the reproductive relation...

Vor allem im englischen Sprachraum hat es sich eingebürgert, von einer Darwinschen Revolution (Darwinian Revolution) zu sprechen, deren weltanschauliche Wirkung durchaus mit der wissenschaftlichen Revolution des 17. Jahrhunderts vergleichbar sei. Demnach befreite Darwin die Lebenswissenschaften aus einer jahrtausendealten, religiös und metaphysisch...

Der Begriff bezeichnet allgemein die Herkunft von Vorfahren und in der Biologie insbesondere die Annahme, dass die gesamte organismische Mannigfaltigkeit der Erde das Ergebnis einer stammesgeschichtlichen Entwicklung (Phylogenie) ist (Lexikon der Biologie 1999). Der Begriff ist gleichbedeutend mit dem bis ins 20. Jahrhundert häufiger gebrauchten Te...

Wissenschaftliche Sammlungen können als ein gezieltes, systematisches Zusammentragen von Erkenntnissen zu einem bestimmten Thema verstanden werden. Das Sammeln wird aber auch als ein ungerichteter Prozess beschrieben, der immer dann einsetzt, wenn ein interessantes Bearbeitungsfeld erst erkannt und noch nicht übersehen wird. Schließlich hält eine b...

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In botany, garden and herbarium specimens have been used for purposes of systematic research since the mid-sixteenth century. The associated practices of collecting, exchanging and collating specimens were most influentially synthesized by Carl Linnaeus in the mid-eighteenth, although it should take roughly a century after Linnaeus’s death until th...

The prevalent reading of Darwin's achievements today is adaptationist. Darwin, so the usual story goes, succeeded in providing a naturalistic explanation of the fact that organisms are adapted to their environments, a fact that served and continues to serve, as a chief argument for creationism. This stands in a curious tension with Darwin's own fas...

Th e topic was not only chosen because of its timeliness. It so happened that the ISHPSSB meeting also coincided with the tercentenary of both Georges Buff on and Carl Linnaeus. Both are arguably the founding fathers of modern biology, with the emphasis they put on the reproduction rather than the generation of living beings (Muller-Wille/Rheinberg...

Prompted by recent recognitions of the omnipresence of horizontal gene transfer among microbial species and the associated emphasis on exchange, rather than isolation, as the driving force of evolution, this essay will reflect on hybridization as one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century biology. I will argue that an emphasis on horizontal...

Historians and philosophers of science have interpreted the taxonomic theory of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) as an 'essentialist', 'Aristotelian', or even 'scholastic' one. This interpretation is flatly contradicted by what Linnaeus himself had to say about taxonomy in Systema naturae (1735), Fundamenta botanica (1736) and Genera plantarum (1737). Thi...

This paper provides a translation of the introduction, titled 'Account of the work' Ratio operis, to the first edition of Genera plantarum, published in 1737 by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). The text derives its significance from the fact that it is the only published text in which Linnaeus engaged in an explicit discussion of his...

In 1979, Robert C. Olby published an article titled ‘Mendel no Mendelian?’, in which he questioned commonly held views that Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) laid the foundations for modern genetics. According to Olby, and other historians of science who have since followed him, Mendel worked within the tradition of so-called hybridists, who were intereste...

Carl Linnaeus's use of erotic language to describe plants ultimately helped him to recruit a global network of specimen collectors.

The cultural history of heredity: scholars from a range of disciplines discuss the evolution of the concept of heredity, from the Early Modern understanding of the act of "generation" to its later nineteenth-century definition as the transmission of characteristics across generations. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the biological makeu...

Understanding how scientific activities use naming stories to achieve disciplinary status is important not only for insight into the past, but for evaluating current claims that new disciplines are emerging. In order to gain a historical understanding of how new disciplines develop in relation to these baptismal narratives, we compare two recently...

Innovations in agricultural technology have had the most immediate consequences for modern societies. And yet the history of the agricultural sciences, if compared with the history of eugenics and medical genetics, is under-researched. The only exception is a small number of studies on the close relationship between the rise of Mendelism and its ap...

The Swedish 18th-century naturalist Carolus (Carl) Linnaeus is habitually credited with laying the foundations of modern taxonomy through the invention of binominal nomenclature. However, another innovation of Linnaeus' has largely gone unnoticed. He seems to have been one of the first botanists to leave his herbarium unbound, keeping the sheets of...

This paper presents and discusses a series of hybridization experiments carried out by Nils Herman Nilsson-Ehle between 1900 and 1907 at a plant breeding station in Svalöf, Sweden. Since the late 1880s, the Svalöf station had been renowned for its 'scientific' breeding methods, which basically consisted of an elaborate system of record-keeping thro...

History of Political Economy Annual Supplement to Volume 35 (2003) 154-172 Carl Linnaeus is well known to disciplinary historians as the "father of systematics," and yet it is only recently, in Lisbet Koerner's Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (1999), that he was considered in the context of his own time and place. Koerner argues convincingly for a rela...

During the early modern period, European naturalists were confronted With a rapidly growing body of new objects due to the recent geographic discoveries. According to Bruno Latour's model of "action at a distance" naturalists managed this situation by mobilizing and stabilizing specimens and inscriptions at the periphery of the known world, as well...