Abstract
To speak of the “transfer of metaphors between biology and the social sciences” implies a sense of movement from one space into another. Implicit is an understanding of dichotomy, of boundaries to be transgressed. Framing the problem in this way legitimates the disciplinary boundaries central to the professional identity of the biological and social sciences and to their professional authority within the public sphere. For example, one might detail the preponderance of anthropomorphic terms such as “spite” and “slavery” in sociobiology, citing how such transgressions erode the disciplinary authority of the social sciences and breach the nature/nurture divide. Instead of reifying these boundaries, can we bring them into question? Can we alter these disciplinary topographies, shattering the linear movement of words from one space to another, and situate the metaphors within a general field of meaning? Once we begin to explore science as culture, the dichotomy erected between the biological and the social begins to break down. In the subject matter of this essay, biology is a human science.1
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Notes
The treatment of biology as human science in the twentieth century has been most systematically explored by Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Natural in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989); Stephen J.Cross and William R. Albury, “Walter B. Canon. L. J. Henderson, and the Organic Analogy,” Osiris, 2d. ser., 3 (1987), 165 – 192; and Robert M. Young, “The Naturalization of Value Systems in the Human Sciences,” in Science and Belief: Darwin to Einstein, Block VI, Problem in the Bioloical and Human Sciences(Milton Keynes: Opem University Press, 1981), pp. 63-110.
Sam B. Girgus, The Law of the Heart: Individualism and the Modern Self in American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 12.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Michael Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and Its Critics (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 17.
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William Corlett, Community Without Unity: A Politics of Derridian Extravagance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 23.
Leo W. Buss, The Evolution of Individuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 13.
On this inversion of liberal in American social science, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The development of an interdependent market economy and its impact on the rise of professional American social science is treated at length in Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
For a historical analysis of the “common good” in American political rhetoric, see Rodgers, Contested Truths.
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 37. See, also, T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (eds.), The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 1–38. For a somewhat different perspective on the reconstruction of self in relation to an emerging consumer culture in America, see Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, p. 237.
Quoted in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 44.
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John Dewey, “Evolution and Ethics,” in The Early Works of John Dewey 5 (1898), 53.
Westbrook, John Dewey, p. 43.
Norton Wise provides a fascinating analysis of the emergence of ideas on statistical causality in the context of individualism and its relationship to Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in central European culture from 1870 to 1920. His approach strikes a resonant chord with some of the themes raised in this essay. See M. Norton Wise, “How Do Sums Count? On the Cultural Origins of Statistical Causality,” in Lorenz Krüger, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Mary S. Morgan (eds.), The Probabilistic Revolution. Vol. 1: Ideas in History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
Charles Otis Whitman, “Specialization and Organization, Companion Principles of All Progress — The Most Important Needs of American Biology,” Biological lectures Delivered at the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole (1891), pp. 1–2. On Whitman, see Edward S. Morse, “Charles Otis Whitman,” National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs 7 (1912), 269–288; Frank R. Lillie, “Charles Otis Whitman,” Journal of Morphology 22 (1911), xv–lxxvii; Jane Maienschein, introduction to Defining Biology. Lectures from the 1890s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); idem., “Whitman at Chicago: Establishing a Chicago Style of Biology?” in Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson, and Jane Maienschein (eds.), The American Development of Biology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 151–182.
Whitman, “Specialization and Organization,” pp. 6–7.
Whitman, “Specialization and Organization,”, p. 23.
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J. Ronald Engel, Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).
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Whitman, “Specialization and Organization,” pp. 23, 9.
Whitman, “Specialization and Organization,”, pp. 22, 25. Both Maienschein, “Whitman at Chicago,” and Philip J. Pauly, “Summer Resort and Scientific Discipline: Woods Hole and the Structure of American Biology, 1882–1925,” in The American Development of Biology, pp. 121–150 emphasize this organizational ideal in Whitman’s work. Pauly has also emphasized the MBL as a place of community for a nascent tradition of American biology.
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See, e.g., Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). For a historical account of regeneration studies in biology during this period, see Jane Maienschein, “T. H. Morgan’s Regeneration, Epigenesis and (W)holism,” in Charles Dinsmore (ed.), History of Regeneration Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Gregg Mitman and Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Whatever Happened to Planaria? C. M. Child and the Physiology of Inheritance,” in Adele Clarke and Joan Fujimura (eds.), The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 172–197.
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For a slightly different contextual analysis of Child’s theory of individuality in relation to liberalism and Chicago pragmatism, see Sharon Kingsland, “Toward a Natural History of the Human Psyche: Charles Manning Child, Charles Judson Herrick, and the Dynamic View of the Individual at the University of Chicago,” in Keith R. Benson, Ronald Rainger, and Jane Maienschein (eds.), The Expansion of American Biology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 195-230.
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Child, Individuality in Organisms, pp. 21, 27.
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Gregg Mitman, “Evolution as Gospel: William Patten, the Language of Democracy, and the Great War,” Isis 81 (1990), 446–463; idem., The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
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Quoted in Rodgers, Contested Truths, p. 204. On community as a cultural ideal in the 1930s, see Blake, Beloved Community, Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (1973. reprint, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).
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Edwin Grant Conklin, Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915), p. 176. On Conklin’s belief in the importance of cytoplasm in heredity, see Maienschein, Transforming Traditions; Jan Sapp, Beyond the Gene: Cytoplasmic Inheritance and the Struggle for Authority in Genetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
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E. G. Conklin, “Biology and Democracy,” Scribner’s Magazine 65 (April, 1919), 410.
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Conklin, Heredity and Environment, p. 484.
Conklin, “Biology and Democracy,” p. 408.
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Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution: The Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Haraway, Primate Visions, pp. 197–203.
E. G. Conklin, The Direction of Human Evolution, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), pp. 145–146.
E. G. Conklin, The Direction of Human Evolution, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), p. 149.
Conklin, “Biology and Democracy,” p. 407.
Michael Kammen, Spheres of Liberty: Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 151.
Herman Belz, “Changing Conceptions of Constitutionalism in the Era of World War II and the Cold War,” Journal of American History 59 (1972), 657.
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David Riesman, Reuel Denney, and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study in Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). On the revival of individualism in 1950s American culture, see Booth, Believing Skeptics.
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Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977). For a more detailed analysis of ecology’s debt to a nonhereditarian view of the organism, see Mitman, The State of Nature.
Henry Allen Gleason, “The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 53 (1926), 16. On the revival of Gleason’s views in postwar American ecology, see T. F. H. Allen, Gregg Mitman, and T. W. Hoekstra, “Synthesis Mid-Century: J. T. Curtis and the Community Concept,” Journal of the Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences (forthcoming).
Robert P. McIntosh, “H. A. Gleason — Individualistic Ecologist’ 1882–1975: His Contributions to Ecological Theory,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 102 (1975), 253–73.
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Dorian Sagan and Lynn Margulis, “Epilogue: The Uncut Self,” in Alfred I. Tauber (ed.), Organism and the Origins of Self (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 365.
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Mitman, G. (1995). Defining the Organism in the Welfare State: The Politics of Individuality in American Culture, 1890–1950. In: Maasen, S., Mendelsohn, E., Weingart, P. (eds) Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0673-3_11
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