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Seeking the constant in what is transient: Karl Ernst von Baer’s vision of organic formation

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In the late eighteenth century, a new configuration was to appear that would definitively blur the old space of natural history for modern eyes.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 162

Abstract

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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Notes

  1. Baer was born in Estonia. Between 1817 and 1834 he lived in Königsberg, teaching and researching in zoology, anatomy and anthropology. It was during this period that he carried out his renowned embryological studies. In 1834, he moved to the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, where he remained until his retirement. On Baer’s life and work see, for example, von Baer (1866), Raikov (1968), Breidbach in Baer (1999, pp. vii–ix), Breidbach and Ghiselin in Baer (2006, pp. v–xxvii), Schmuck (2009, pp. 115–188) and Riha and Schmuck (2011). Here and throughout, all translations are my own unless otherwise attributed.

  2. François Jacob also contributed to this picture, although in his account the transformation begins earlier, in the eighteenth century (Jacob 1993, pp. 130–152).

  3. Lepenies borrows Foucault’s time frame, which locates the transition from natural history to biology in the period between 1775 and 1825 (Foucault 1974, p. 221).

  4. In his memoirs, Baer claimed only to have “fully studied” Oken’s “natural philosophy,” having had neither the time nor the interest for exhaustive consideration of the works of Schelling and other natural philosophers (von Baer 1866, pp. 289–290, also 170–171). There are various interpretations of Baer’s relationship with Naturphilosophie. See, among others, Riha and Schmuck (2011, pp. 230–233); Lenoir (1982, pp. 85–86).

  5. The only published form of this lecture is the summary by Boris Raikov (Raikov 1968), which is the source of the following quotations.

  6. For detail on the context of Pander’s work and on his concept of the germ layer, see Wellmann (2010), pp. 315–343; Schmitt (2005); Balan (1979), pp. 237–254.

  7. He wrote this text in Latin as an open letter to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which had just appointed him a corresponding member. The following quotations are based on the 1956 English translation by Charles Donald O’Malley, “On the Genesis of the Ovum of Mammals and of Man” (von Baer 1827/1956), or the 1927 German translation by Benno Ottow, Über die Bildung des Eies der Säugetiere und des Menschen (von Baer 1827/1927).

  8. In his memoirs, he also referred to the “primordial ovum” (von Baer 1866, p. 328).

  9. On Purkynĕs’s influence on Baer, see Knorre (1971) and Kruta (1971–1972).

  10. Baer was particularly critical of the recapitulation hypothesis as formulated by Étienne Serres (1786–1868). See Schmuck (2009, pp. 200–213) and Meyer (1935).

  11. “The peripheral or radial type, the jointed or extended type, the massy or mollusc type, and the type of the vertebrates” (von Baer 1828/1999, 209). On Baer’s typology and the teleological thinking associated with it, see Lenoir (1982, p. 86), Lenoir (1985), Oppenheimer (1963) and Riha and Schmuck (2011).

  12. Later, in the 1860s, Baer turned against Darwin’s theory of common descent. On Baer’s view of evolution, see Brauckmann (2012), Riha and Schmuck (2011, pp. 180–212), Holmes (1947) and Breidbach and Ghiselin in Baer 1999.

  13. While little is known about Prévost, Dumas entered the history books chiefly as one of the founders of organic chemistry, alongside Justus Liebig (1803–1873). After the 1848 revolution in France, Dumas also began a political career. He held high offices, including those of the Minister of Trade and Agriculture and the master of the French mint. On Dumas’s life and work, see Chaigneau (1984) and Klosterman (1985).

  14. Exceptions are Gasking (1967, pp. 137–147) and Farley (1982, pp. 37–42). Ilse Jahn counts Prévost and Dumas among the founders of animal physiology, but does not mention their research on generation (Jahn 1998, p. 350).

  15. The literature on Baer makes virtually no mention of his natural-history approach to sperm and its significance for his embryological research. An exception is Riha and Schmuck (2011, pp. 179–188).

  16. With his principle of cell autonomy, Schwann also opposed the teleological assumptions so central to Baer’s work. There were thus also significant differences between Baer’s and Schwann’s understanding of organic processes, which cannot be detailed here. It was Schwann’s notion of the autonomous action of cells that Baer particularly criticized after the formulation of cell theory (von Baer 1866, pp. 380–386).

  17. Matthias Jacob Schleiden (1804–1881), commonly regarded as the co-founder of the late 1830s cell-theory, held a similar view, see Farley (1982, pp. 48–51).

  18. Leading German researchers in the physiology of generation in the 1830s were Rudolf Wagner (1805–1864) and Carl Theodor von Siebold (1804–1885). They regarded sperms as the fertilizing factor in semen, but nevertheless still as animals. See, for example, Wagner (1837), Siebold (1837). Among the naturalists who described sperm as parasites were Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) (see Carus 1839) and Gabriel Gustav Valentin (1810–1883) (see Valentin 1839).

  19. Dumas and Prévost’s studies of semen were preceded by research on the blood’s “globules,” and were inspired by this to the extent that in both cases they were seeking the “active principle” of these organic substances (Prévost and Dumas 1821, p. 196). In the historiography of biology, Dumas and Prévost have featured as French representatives of “globule theory,” often considered a precursor to cell theory (Klein 1936; Pickstone 1973).

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    Florence Vienne

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Vienne, F. Seeking the constant in what is transient: Karl Ernst von Baer’s vision of organic formation. HPLS 37, 34–49 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-014-0057-3

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