Article ID: CBB000931145

Heredity and Its Entities around 1900 (2008)

unapi

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (Author)


Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Volume: 39
Pages: 370--374


Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Part of a special issue: “Science and the Changing Senses of Reality circa 1900”.
Language: English

This paper aims to give an impression of how biologists, at the turn of the twentieth century, came to conceptualize and define the hidden entities presumed to govern the process of hereditary transmission. With that, the stage was set for the emergence of genetics as a biological discipline that came to dominate the life sciences of the twentieth century. The annus mirabilis of 1900, with its triple re-appreciation of Gregor Mendel's work by the botanists Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak, can be seen as the watershed after which theorizing about heredity and experimentation---selecting pure lines and Mendelian crossing---became tightly connected. As to concepts before this, this paper will analyze Carl von Nägeli's `idioplasm', Hugo de Vries's `pangenes', and August Weismann's `germ plasm'. Carl Correns's Anlagen and Wilhelm Johannsen's `genes' would replace them in the decade after 1900.

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Article Sibum, H. Otto (2008) Science and the Changing Senses of Reality circa 1900. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (p. 295). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000931145/

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Authors & Contributors
Stamhuis, Ida H.
Simunek, Michal
Sheldon, Myrna Perez
Teicher, Amir
Pereira Martins, Lilian Al-Chueyr
Zevenhuizen, Erik J. A.
Concepts
Genetics
Heredity
Mendelism
Biology
Science and culture
Collected correspondence
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century
Places
United States
Germany
Europe
Great Britain
Moscow (Russia)
Japan
Institutions
Cambridge University
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