2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
laboratory at the Biologische Versuchsanstalt [Institute for Experimental Biology]
in Vienna. In his prolific technical and popular writings and especially in the
“big show-lectures” he gave all over Europe and the U. S., Kammerer argued
that his careful manipulation of the animals‚ environment had caused them to
change, and that the changes were hereditary. Further, he claimed that his insights
into the evolutionary process could be put to use to ensure human progress, both
physical and cultural. Kammerer’s conclusions were irreconcilable with what
later became a central tenet of Darwinian evolutionism: the non-inheritance of
acquired characteristics. As a result, he has come to be seen as an opponent of
Darwinism. His suicide in 1926, amid suspicion that he had faked one of his
transformed specimens—the infamous midwife toad—has made it easy for
modern Darwinians to dismiss him as a crank and a fraud. This paper therefore
re-tells Kammerer’s story with special attention to three aspects of his context:
the intellectual faction within the Darwinian fold, with which he identified himself
the material and institutional culture of his laboratory and his popularizing mission
and presentation techniques. It shows Kammerer’s battles to have been not against
Darwinism, but for the inheritance of acquired characteristics within Darwinism,
for the use of experimental methods in support of Darwinism, and for the
popularization of a Darwinian world-view in the spirit of Ernst Haeckel. Finally,
it offers a new explanation of the midwife-toad scandal and what it reveals
about Kammerer’s methods and the credibility of his work.
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Anne Godlewska Queen’s University—Kingston
When is Description Mere Description? The Nature of 18th Century
Geography
In a recent book focused on the transition period from Enlightenment science
to modern empirical science I described geography’s difficulties in
reformulating itself as an intellectually respectable modern science. My
preferred way of describing the transition the field was undergoing has been
as a movement away from description and towards theory-based explanation.
I initially chose the word ‘description’ because it was the word French
geographers used in the title of their monumental Description de l’Egypte and
which, incidentally, was not used in a similar work on Algeria thirty or so
years later. It also seemed an excellent characterization of the kind of geography
practiced by map makers and universal geography writers of the 18th century.
In fact, those early nineteenth century geographers who saw themselves as
working in a defined tradition of research also engaged in work that tied to a
descriptive approach: mapping, universal geography writing; and data
collection for the exercise of state power. On the margins of the group of
people who described themselves as geographers were a few individuals who
in the first half of the 19th century were beginning to problematize description
and to structure their work around the explanation of social phenomena, the
explanation of natural phenomena and the developing critical approaches to