יום ב' ,19.04.2004, 18:00 - 20:00
חדר 496 בנין גילמן

פרופ' שטפן מולר-ווילה, מכון מקס פלאנק, ברלין

A Cultural History of Heredity,
Early Sixteenth to Mid Nineteenth Centuries

The talk will present results of a long term research project carried out at the Max-Planck-institute for the History of Science. This project explores, from a longue durée perspective, the various practices, standards, and architectures of hereditary knowledge and the "spaces" which they formed by their respective historical conjunctions in given epochs. "Heredity", under this perspective, is more than the scientific discipline "genetics". The project is less about the history of a science than about the history of a broader knowledge regime, in which a naturalistic conception of heredity developed that today affects all domains of society. One of the main results of the project so far is, that no general concept of heredity was underlying the discourse of the life sciences (including medicine, anthropology and the moral sciences) in the Early Modern period and that such a concept was only slowly emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century. This emergence of heredity, moreover, did not result from concerns with the constancy of species form, but from concerns with the patterns of variety that structure life at a sub-specific level. As long as such patterns coincided with the distribution of life over locally circumscribed environments, such patterns were readily explainable by the permanence of ties between organisms and their "natural places". In these cases, it seemd to be the place, which, in a sense, "inherited" its inhabitants and impressed its character upon them. It was only when such ties were dissolved to open up a variety of relationships between forms, places, and modes of transmission, that a need arose for a complex metaphor as heredity (in its complex legal sense) to be inserted in order to account for the proliferating phenomena. The emergence of heredity occurred within an epistemic space that was spanned by setting people, objects, and their relationships into motion, and not by a fixation of the scientific mind with the laws of nature at the expense of the contingenices and complexities of real life.