Scientific animal breeding in Moravia before and after the rediscovery of Mendel's theory

How Political Repression Stifled the Nascent Foundations of Heredity Research before Mendel in Central European Sheep Breeding Societies

The nineteenth century was a time of great economic, social, and political change. The population of a modernizing Europe began demanding more freedom, which in turn propelled the ongoing discussion on the philosophy of nature. This spurred on Central European sheep breeders to debate the deepest secrets of nature: the transmission of traits from one generation to another. Scholarly questions of heredity were profoundly entwined with philosophy and politics when particular awareness of “the genetic laws of nature” claimed natural equality. The realization that the same rules of inheritance may apply to all living beings frightened both the absolutist political power and the divided society of the day. Many were not prepared to separate religious questions from novel natural phenomena. Open-minded breeders put their knowledge into practice right away to create sheep with better wool traits through inbreeding and artificial selection. This was viewed, however, as the artificial modification of nature operating against the cultural and religious norms of the day. Liberal attempts caught the attention of the secret police and, consequently, the aspirations of scholars were suppressed by political will during approximately 1820–1850.

Mendel and modern genetics: the legacy for today

The legacy of Mendel's pioneering studies of hybridization in the pea continues to influence the way we understand modern genetics. But what sort of picture did Mendel himself have of his work and its ultimate uses, and how does that picture compare with the collection of ideas and methodologies that was put forward in his name and later became known as 'Mendelism'? With genetics standing at the center of our present biomedical and biotechnological research, an examination of the history of our concepts in the field can help us better understand what we should and should not expect from current genetic claims. For that enterprise there is no better starting place than Mendel himself.

When scientific knowledge becomes scientific discovery: the disappearance of classical conditioning before Pavlov

In the nineteenth century, scientific materials in experimental physiology changed dramatically. In this context, phenomena that had been widely accepted were lost, sometimes to be reintroduced later as "discoveries." I describe the loss of the phenomenon of classical conditioning, later rediscovered by Ivan Pavlov. In 1896, Austrian physiologist Alois Kreidl demonstrated experimentally that animals anticipate the occurrence of food that is cued by a variety of stimuli. Kreidl stated, moreover, that the fact that animals can be called to food had been widely known to science since the 1830s. I describe Kreidl's work and discuss several factors that may have led to the disappearance of conditioning prior to its rediscovery by Pavlov.