The Emergence of Population. In: Hopwood N, Flemming R, Kassell L, editors. Reproduction. Cambridge University Press; 2018. pp. 253-66. [DOI: 10.1017/9781107705647.024]

John Graunt F.R.S. (1620-74): The founding father of human demography, epidemiology and vital statistics

John Graunt, a largely self-educated London draper, can plausibly be regarded as the founding father of demography, epidemiology and vital statistics. In his only publication, based on a pioneering analysis of the London Bills of Mortality, he replaced guesswork with reasoned estimates of population sizes and the first accurate information on male:female ratios. He quantified the extent of immigration from countryside to city and his demonstration of the 'dying out' of a cohort paved the way for life table analysis. His comparison of London data with rural data provided the first recognition of the 'urban penalty'. His use of the first known tabular aggregates of health data clarified distinctions between acute diseases, which were often epidemic, and chronic illnesses which were often endemic. He quantified the high infant mortality and attempted the calculation of a case fatality rate during an epidemic of fever. He was the first to document the phenomenon of 'excess deaths' during epidemics. He provided a template for numerical analysis of demographic and health data and initiated the concepts of statistical association, statistical inference and population sampling. By making a novel concept intelligible to a broad audience he influenced the thinking of doctors, demographers and mathematicians.

Ateleological propagation in Goethe's Metamorphosis of plants

It was commonly accepted in Goethe's time that plants were equipped both to propagate themselves and to play a certain role in the natural economy as a result of God's beneficent and providential design. Goethe's identification of sexual propagation as the "summit of nature" in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) might suggest that he, too, drew strongly from this theological-metaphysical tradition that had given rise to Christian Wolff's science of teleology. Goethe, however, portrayed nature as inherently active and propagative, itself improvising into the future by multiple means, with no extrinsically pre-ordained goal or fixed end-point. Rooted in the nature philosophy of his friend and mentor Herder, Goethe's plants exhibit their own historically and environmentally conditioned drives and directionality in The Metamorphosis of Plants. In this paper I argue that conceiving of nature as active productivity-not merely a passive product-freed Goethe of the need to tie plants' forms and functions to a divine system of ends, and allowed him to consider possibilities for plants, and for nature, beyond the walls of teleology.