In their modern context questions of heredity have come to be
closely aligned with theories of evolution because all such theories
require the presence of heritable variation. Thus the need for an
understanding of a source of variation and a mechanism for its inheritance
became very apparent with the general...
The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, truly a synthesized work of natural history, coincided with the emergence of specialized disciplines in the 19th century. This thesis aims to explore the relationship between the specialization of knowledge, in the form of disciplinization, and the reception of new...
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Paul Lawrence Farber Mina Carson
The publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin
By 1900 domestication was a promising, if somewhat vexed, subject in biology. Volumes had been written about domestication, but little serious scientific inquiry was directed toward the phenomenon. Expertise lay with practical men, primarily breeders and fanciers. The bulk of scientific commentary on domestication came from anthropologists who derived theories...
Mimicry, obscure colors, and secondary sexual colors were
important classes of observations that were analyzed by nineteenth
century biologists from several vantage points. Adherents of the
doctrine of special creation of fixed species believed animal colors
to be evidence of design; Darwin and Wallace and their successors
suggested that a...
There were two viable theories of generation, preformation
and epigenesis, existing in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries. Due to their irreconcilable nature,
they were often at loggerheads during this time interval.
The status of these generation theories can be effectively
understood in terms of Thomas Kuhn's conception of preparadigm
science....
At the beginning of the nineteenth century most theorizing British naturalists supported a Biblical account of the distribution of life which was based upon the notion that life had been dispersed from the resting place of the ark. This implied a relatively even dispersion of life about the Earth, but...
This investigation attempts to demonstrate that the development
of the early 20th century biological enterprise involved a striving for a
unifying theoretical perspective. A skeletal substantiation of this is
given by an overview of early 20th century biology in which some
biologists began recognizing a multiplicity of different orders of...
An examination of the technical and historical literature
concerning the discovery and development of antibiotics suggests the
possible existence of an era of discovery. This era appears to have
a well-defined beginning (about 1940) and a well-defined close (about
1960). It is the purpose of this dissertation to examine the...
Determination of the Vertebrate pedigree was a
particularly enigmatic problem for evolutionary morphologists
of the early post-Darwinian period. At that time,
practically no characteristics were known by which the
Vertebrates could be linked to any of the other animal
groups. Up to the 1850's, most research in embryology
and anatomy...
Modern science was produced by a Christian society,
and although science has had an effect on Christianity, it
could not itself remain unaffected. In the second half of
the nineteenth century, the subject of evolution was as
much a religious as a scientific issue. The battle line
was drawn and...