Abstract
WHILE DARWIN, Durkheim and others struggled to define a collectivity made up of individual organisms, a group of nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars, inspired by Darwin’s work, explored collectivity at a smaller scale, sowing the seeds for a full-fledged hierarchical evolutionary theory. This work was primarily done in Germany, by Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Roux, and August Weismann, and was inspired by their studies of embryology.
I can feel pieces of my brain falling away like a wet cake.
Bernard Black
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Notes
- 1.
…which has still not been published in English translation (Heams 2012).
- 2.
The German edition first appeared in 1902. An English translation was published in 1903 by Edward Arnold (London), and this is the edition cited by Gould in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. The 1904 copy in my own collection appears to be a reissue of the 1903 translation.
- 3.
It is interesting to note that elsewhere Roux makes the explicit comparison between competing cells forming a stable entity and social structures. Addressing those who might doubt that an entity can exist when its parts are at variance, Roux asked whether it is “impossible for the State to exist when citizens compete with each other” (quoted by Heams 2012). Elsewhere, he wrote that “[w]hen parts struggle against each other to acquire an ever greater efficiency, the overall performance should also increase, in the same way that the efficiency of an army increases when officers compete and when the best among them are selected to train the novice soldiers” (quoted by Heams 2012). Heams notes that Roux’s professor, Rudolf Virchow , wrote also of “cellular democracies” and “republics of cells” when describing multicellular organisms (Heams, p. 27). Heams calls this is a “restrictive” reading of Darwinism, and that “equating darwinism and violent fight is misleading”. However, Roux is making a more complex point. In both these quotations, he is pointing out how conflict at one level leads to stability at the next higher level. The metaphor of human society – as we have seen from the discussion of crowd theory in Chap. 1 – simply provides an example of how conflict at level n can lead to stability at level n + 1.
- 4.
Note that an alternate explanation, based on the possible selective benefit of the reallocation of resources, also fails at this point due to the minimal benefit that could result from reallocation away from such tiny appendages.
- 5.
Boveri’s insights as well as his experiments were, in many ways, ahead of his time. In a passage quoted by Madspacher (2008), Boveri wrote in 1904 about the possibility of symbiosis between cells and subcellular components, in terms that echo the ideas about evolution, symbiosis and cell organelles proposed by Lynn Margulis. Boveri wrote that “[i]f we follow these structures [chromosomes] in their ‘expressions of life’ – how they branch out like rhizopodia during formation of the resting nucleus and contract again as it dissolves, how they propagate by division and from time to time copulate as pairs – then this indicates a level of ‘expressions of life’, [as] is ascribed to entire cells. The way the chromosomes form a unity with the protoplasm can be best described as an extremely close symbiosis. I think it is worth discussing the question of whether this might not be more than a metaphor. It might be possible that what we call a cell, and for which our mind demands simpler preliminary stages, originated from a symbiosis of two kinds of simpler plasmatic structures, such that a number of smaller ones, the chromosomes, settled within a larger one, which we now call a cell body.”
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Bahar, S. (2018). The Battle of the Parts. In: The Essential Tension. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1054-9_4
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