Staffan Müller-Wille

ABSTRACT In the summer of 1732, a young medical student named Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) journeyed through Sápmi. Just under two decades later, Lars Montin (1723–1778), a student of the now famous Uppsala professor Linnaeus, followed his teacher’s footsteps. We will focus on the accounts that both naturalists gave of the parasitic reindeer warble fly Hypoderma tarandi. While Linnaeus integrated the life history of this fly with his image of Sámi pastoralism as representing a ‘silver age’ of humanity in tune with the balance of nature, Montin mused about ways in which the fly’s damaging effects on reindeer could be weaponized to force the Sámi into ‘productive’ labour. As a consequence, Linnaeus’s timeless conception of an economy of nature was infused by Montin with notions of historical development and an open future. We will suggest that the differing attitudes of Linneaus and Montin can be explained by changes in the political context – most notably an emerging effort to enforce national borders and fiscal regimes in Northern Scandinavia in the 1740s and 1750s. But the different attitudes they developed towards the reindeer warble fly also point to deeper connections between natural history practices and the writing of human histories.

The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry, and descent among humans are diagrams. For this reason, and at the same time to avoid a reduction to biology as transported by terms such as kinship, ancestry, and descent, we introduce the expression diagrammatics of relatedness. We seek to understand the enormous influence that especially tree diagrams have had as a way to express and engage with human relatedness, but hold that this success can only be adequately understood by attending to what in fact are broader diagrammatic practices. These practices bring to light that diagrams of relatedness do not simply make visible natural connections, but create or deny relations in particular ways and for particular reasons. In this special section, contributors investigate diagrams of relatedness in genealogy, heredity, as well as biological and social anthropology. Conceiving of diagrams as techniques that transcend such binaries as ‘thought and action’ and ‘image and text’, we aim at an understanding of how they were constructed and how they functioned in particular epistemic, cultural, and political contexts.

In botany, garden and herbarium specimens have been used for purposes of systematic research since the mid-sixteenth century. The associated practices of collecting, exchanging and collating specimens were most influentially synthesized by Carl Linnaeus in the mid-eighteenth, although it should take roughly a century after Linnaeus’s death until they were formally canonized in international rules of nomenclature. The role of specimens and type-specimens in the history of natural history – a “metaphysics in action”, as Lorraine Daston calls it – has been discussed in a number of historical and philosophical studies in recent years. What has largely been overlooked, however, is the fact, that alongside the rise of the type specimen method, plants began to acquire another role in botanical research. In hybridization experiments, plants were increasingly used as tools to manipulate other plants, and the offspring resulting from these interventions as a kind of recording device to score the effects of hybridization. In my presentation I will look at select hybridisation experiments of the period to unravel the intricate relationship between natural historical and physiological concerns which governed this experimental practice.

Understanding how scientific activities use naming stories to achieve disciplinary status is important not only for insight into the past, but for evaluating current claims that new disciplines are emerging. In order to gain a historical understanding of how new disciplines develop in relation to these baptismal narratives, we compare two recently formed disciplines, systems biology and genomics, with two earlier related life sciences, genetics and molecular biology. These four disciplines span the twentieth century, a period in which the processes of disciplinary demarcation fundamentally changed from those characteristic of the nineteenth century. We outline how the establishment of each discipline relies upon an interplay of factors that include paradigmatic achievements, technological innovation, and social formations. Our focus, however, is the baptism stories that give the new discipline a founding narrative and articulate core problems, general approaches and constitutive methods. The highly plastic process of achieving disciplinary identity is further marked by the openness of disciplinary definition, tension between technological possibilities and the ways in which scientific issues are conceived and approached, synthesis of reductive and integrative strategies, and complex social interactions. The importance – albeit highly variable – of naming stories in these four cases indicates the scope for future studies that focus on failed disciplines or competing names. Further attention to disciplinary histories could, we suggest, give us richer insight into scientific development.

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.

The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae and the demise of racial typologies after World War II in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. “Race” is placed outside of rational discourse as a residue of outdated essentialist and hierarchical thinking. I will throw doubt on this underlying assumption, not in order to re-legitimate race but in order to understand better why race has been, and continues to be, such a politically powerful and explosive concept.

What is it to make an error in the identification of a named taxonomic group? In this article we argue that the conditions for being in error about the identity of taxonomic groups through their names have a history, and that the possibility of committing such errors is contingent on the regime of institutions and conventions governing taxonomy and nomenclature at any given point in time. More specifically, we claim that taxonomists today can be in error about the identity of taxonomic groups in a way that Carl Linnaeus, who is routinely cited as the “founder” of modern taxonomy and nomenclature, simply could not be. Starting from a remarkable recent study into Linnaeus’s naming of Elephasmaximus that led to the discovery of a nomenclatural error by him, we reconsider what it could mean to discover that Linnaeus misidentified a biological taxon in applying his taxon names. Through a further case study in Linnaean botany, we show that his practices of applying names in taxonomic revisions reveal a take on determining “which taxon is which” that is strikingly different from that of contemporary taxonomists. Linnaeus, we argue, adopted a practice-based, hands-on concept of taxa as “nominal spaces” that could continue to represent the same taxon even if all its former members had been reallocated to other taxa.

We provide a detailed description of an interleaved and heavily annotated copy of Florae Berolinensis Prodromus, a flora of Berlin published by the German apothecary and botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow in 1787, which today is preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. We demonstrate that this is the copy that the author himself used and carried with him during his botanical excursions in and around Berlin to prepare a second edition of the work. By analyzing this document as paper technology, we reveal that even seemingly trifling aspects of its material organization enabled far-reaching biological research agendas that were not originally intended. The hybrid form of manuscript and printed book, used in field excursions, enabled a kind of natural-historical observation that was at once detailed and bound by strict convention, a combination that inadvertently opened new research questions and suggested new objects of research. We thereby contribute to an understanding of the history of natural history that goes beyond the history of ideas and the intended uses of techniques, giving an example of how routine work on paper within a scientific tradition could generate innovation.

This paper presents and discusses a series of hybridization experiments carried out by Nils Herman Nilsson-Ehle between 1900 and 1907 at a plant breeding station in Svalöf, Sweden. Since the late 1880s, the Svalöf station had been renowned for its ‘scientific’ breeding methods, which basically consisted of an elaborate system of record-keeping through which the offspring of individual plants were traced over generations while being meticulously described. This record system corresponded to a certain breeding technique and certain theoretical convictions . Inspired by Tschermack’s translation of Mendel’s Pisum-paper, Nilsson-Ehle began his experiments in 1900 and published a first, major synthesis of his findings in 1908. If one compares these experiments as documented in the breeding records, with their representations in print, one encounters discrepancies in terms of procedure and presentation of data. This can be explained by the fact that Nilsson-Ehle was obliged to follow the recording and breeding procedures institutionalised at Svalöf, and these procedures, grounded in a taxonomic discourse, left little room for Mendelian hybridisation experiments. The twists and turns that this story takes are analysed in terms of Bachelardian philosophy of science, where the ‘epistemological obstacle’ functions as a central, analytic category. In contrast to Bachelard, however, I will characterise these obstacles as being of an institutional, rather than mental, nature. Thus characterized, moreover, they turn out to have been prerequisites as much as barriers to scientific progress

Although the cell is commonly addressed as the unit of life, historians and philosophers have devoted relatively little attention to this concept in comparison to other fundamental concepts of biology such as the gene or species. As a partial remedy to this neglect, we introduce the cell as a major point of connection between various disciplinary approaches, epistemic strategies, technological vectors and overarching biological processes such as metabolism, growth, reproduction and evolution. We suggest that the role of the cell as a nexus forms the basis for a new philosophical and historical appreciation of cell biology. This perspective focuses less on the cell as a well-defined, stable object and places more emphasis on its role as a mediator of fundamental biological processes

The prevalent reading of Darwin's achievements today is adaptationist. Darwin, so the usual story goes, succeeded in providing a naturalistic explanation of the fact that organisms are adapted to their environments, a fact that served and continues to serve, as a chief argument for creationism. This stands in a curious tension with Darwin's own fascination with phenomena whose adaptive value was problematic, like vicariance, ornaments, atavisms, and rudiments, as well as the various "contraptions" and "contrivances" by which organisms take advantage of each other. I will explore this "dark side" of Darwin's evolutionism with respect to three themes that run through his work: heredity, which provided one of the corner stones of Darwin's theory and yet was defined as an essentially capricious, not necessarily adaptive force; mimicry, which for Darwin exemplified a general tendency of nature to produce deceiving semblances that turn actual relations on their head; and extinction, a phenomenon that pointed towards the redundancy of life, which for Darwin, in the double sense of that word, was both a fundamental condition and necessary consequence of evolution by natural selection

This paper provides a translation of the introduction, titled ‘Account of the work’ Ratio operis, to the first edition of Genera plantarum, published in 1737 by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. The text derives its significance from the fact that it is the only published text in which Linnaeus engaged in an explicit discussion of his taxonomic method. Most importantly, it shows that Linnaeus was clearly aware that a classification of what he called ‘natural genera’ could not be achieved by a top-down approach of logical division, but had to rely on inductive, bottom-up procedures. The translation is supplemented by explanatory notes.