Commentary: Visual Cultures, Publication Technologies, and Legitimation in the Life Sciences

This paper comments on five articles in the special issue "Circulating Images in the Life Sciences." It sees the papers as unified by two themes. The first is their attention to the processes of legitimation. The second is the embedding of the images in textual cultures, which changed over time from the mid-nineteenth century to the very recent past, most notably with the recent advent of digital culture.

Cycles and circulation: a theme in the history of biology and medicine

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 centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent 'canonical icons', cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.

Speaking of science Scientific Babel How Science Was Done Before and After Global English Michael D. Gordin University of Chicago Press, 2015. 421 pp

How English became the language of science.

Life after death: the Gorilla Family of the Senckenberg Museum (Frankfurt/Main)

This essay examines the history of the gorilla family placed on display at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 1907. It considers, first, how it came to be; second, what it signified both at the time--the museal domestication of an ape previously considered to be a terrifying foe and a monstrous possible ancestor--and third, what it meant ninety years later, when I sought out its history and found more than I bargained for.

The shape of the history of science profession, 2038: a prospective retrospective

Presented as a retrospective speech by the president of the History of Science Society in 2038, this essay imagines a future for the profession of the history of science in the United States. Acknowledging that self-described historians of science do not fully control the subject, it considers the place of the history of science in a future university landscape in which interdisciplinary "studies" have supplanted disciplines as the fundamental organizing structure. It then situates this academic scene within a broader professional landscape in which nonuniversity institutions play an expanded role in bringing the history of science directly to the public. Here the essay focuses on an imagined Science Heritage Center that blends commitments to innovative scholarly research, public history techniques of experiential learning, and updated technologies of virtual reality. It further suggests an unexpected direction for developing a collaborative "citizen history of science".

Individuals at the center of biology: Rudolf Leuckart's Polymorphismus der Individuen and the ongoing narrative of parts and wholes. With an annotated translation

Rudolf Leuckart's 1851 pamphlet Ueber den Polymorphismus der Individuen (On the polymorphism of individuals) stood at the heart of naturalists' discussions on biological individuals, parts and wholes in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Our analysis, which accompanies the first translation of this pamphlet into English, situates Leuckart's contribution to these discussions in two ways. First, we present it as part of a complex conceptual knot involving not only individuality and the understanding of compound organisms, but also the alternation of generations, the division of labor in nature, and the possibility of finding general laws of the organic world. Leuckart's pamphlet is important as a novel attempt to give order to the strands of this knot. It also solved a set of key biological problems in a way that avoided some of the drawbacks of an earlier teleological tradition. Second, we situate the pamphlet within a longer trajectory of inquiry into part-whole relations in biology from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. We argue that biological individuality, along with the problem-complexes with which it engaged, was as central a problem to naturalists before 1859 as evolution, and that Leuckart's contributions to it left a long legacy that persisted well into the twentieth century. As biologists' interests in part-whole relations are once again on the upswing, the longue durée of this problem merits renewed consideration.

Making German Evolution: Translation and Tragedy

The Tragic Sense of Life . Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought. By Robert J. Richards . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008. 579 pp. $39, £27. ISBN 9780226712147.

H. G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism . A Study in Translation and Transformation. By Sander Gliboff . MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 271 pp. $35, £22.95. ISBN 9780262072939.

Richards and Gliboff offer contrasting perspectives on Ernst Haeckel and evolutionary thought in 19th-century Germany.

Inventing Johannes Müller

Müller's Lab . By Laura Otis . Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. 336 pp. $55, £32.99. ISBN 9780195306972.

The author uses the contradictory accounts of Müller's life and research left by seven of his influential students to explore the personal, social, and political circumstances that shaped the careers of the group.

Learning from history: morphology's challenges in Germany ca. 1900

A century ago, Carl Gegenbaur's program of vertebrate evolutionary morphology faced its greatest challenges. The controversy over the evolutionary origin of the vertebrate paired limbs between 1875 and 1906 illustrates the failure of the traditional methods of comparative anatomy and embryology (supported by Haeckel's biogenetic law) to choose between different phylogenetic hypotheses. The controversy over morphology's status as science intensified at the turn of the twentieth century, when the legitimacy of historical explanation itself as a mode of scientific understanding came under fire. Gegenbaur's intellectual grandson, Hermann Braus, sought to defend the legitimacy of phylogenetic reconstruction while updating it to include experimental and causal-analytical approaches, but was unable to sustain a viable synthetic research program. The article concludes with reflections on approaches to the past used by historians and evolutionary morphologists.