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Article ID: CBB001510244

Seeking the Constant in What Is Transient: Karl Ernst von Baer's Vision of Organic Formation (2015)

Vienne, Florence (Author)

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Volume: 37, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 34-49

DOI: 10.1007/s40656-014-0057-3

Publication Date: 2015
Edition Details: Part of a Series: Temporalities of Reproduction
Language: English

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Biology Natural history Mammalogy Embryology Reproduction Developmental biology 19th century Baer, Karl Ernst von Dumas, Jean Baptiste André Prévost, Jean Louis Schwann, Theodor

A well-established narrative in the history of science has it that the years around 1800 saw the end of a purely descriptive, classificatory and static natural history. The emergence of a temporal understanding of nature and the new developmental-history approach, it is thought, permitted the formation of modern biology. This paper questions that historical narrative by closely analysing the concepts of development, history and time set out in Karl Ernst von Baer's study of the mammalian egg (1827). I show that Baer's research on embryogenesis aimed not simply to explain temporal changes, but to inscribe the formation of new individual organisms into a continuous, unending organic process. I confront Baer's views with other explanations of embryogenesis arising in the 1820s and 1830s, especially those of Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Jean-Louis Prévost and of Theodor Schwann. By highlighting divergences between these scientists, especially as to their view of the role of gender differences in reproduction, I argue that biology evolved not from a homogeneous concept of developmental history but out of various, even opposing, views and research programmes. Thus, the birth of biology did not imply the end of all natural history's thought models.

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Article Bock von Wülfingen, Bettina; Brandt, Christina; Lettow, Susanne; Vienne, Florence (2015) Temporalities of Reproduction: Practices and Concepts from the Eighteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (pp. 1-16). unapi

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