Visualizing Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer's Organic Forces: Goethe's Morphology on the Threshhold of Evolution

Bersier, Gabrielle

doi:10.3368/m.xcvii.1.18

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Goethe's concept of the Urpflanze was an emergent Proteus, a generalized system of which all plants are built (Pfau, 2010). By contrast, the plant archetype was an original, ideal form, an abstract entity that was collectively ''represented'' in the material world by the whole range of iterated parts -leaf, stalk, sepals, petals, and so on (Pratt and Brook, 1996;Richards, 2002;Bersier, 2005;von Mu¨cke, 2006;Pfau, 2010). 3 A plant is composed of these parts, which for Goethe shared a morphological equivalence and were repeated stages of development.…”

Section: The Problem Of Individualitymentioning

confidence: 95%

“…In 1793 Kielmeyer had argued that three different fundamental life-forces -reproduction, motility, and sensibility -produced this balance by playing off against one another (Kielmeyer, 1993;Richards, 2002;Bersier, 2005). Goethe reverted to a single force, emphasizing the variety of directions it might take.…”

Section: The Problem Of Individualitymentioning

confidence: 97%

“…After 1790, Goethe began applying his ideas of the archetype and increasing differentiation to the comparative anatomy of vertebrates. 5 Influenced by the zoologist Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, he embraced the importance of physiology and function, to stress the integration of organismal parts and wholes (Bersier, 2005). He sought to characterize this integration, both internally and with respect to the external world:…”

Section: The Problem Of Individualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Individuals at the Center of Biology: Rudolf Leuckart’s Polymorphismus der Individuen and the Ongoing Narrative of Parts and Wholes. With an Annotated Translation

Nyhart

Lidgard

2011

J Hist Biol

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Rudolf Leuckart's 1851 pamphlet Ueber den Polymorphismus der Individuen (On the polymorphism of individuals) stood at the heart of naturalists' discussions on biological individuals, parts and wholes in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Our analysis, which accompanies the first translation of this pamphlet into English, situates Leuckart's contribution to these discussions in two ways. First, we present it as part of a complex conceptual knot involving not only individuality and the understanding of compound organisms, but also the alternation of generations, the division of labor in nature, and the possibility of finding general laws of the organic world. Leuckart's pamphlet is important as a novel attempt to give order to the strands of this knot. It also solved a set of key biological problems in a way that avoided some of the drawbacks of an earlier teleological tradition. Second, we situate the pamphlet within a longer trajectory of inquiry into part-whole relations in biology from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. We argue that biological individuality, along with the problem-complexes with which it engaged, was as central a problem to naturalists before 1859 as evolution, and that Leuckart's contributions to it left a long legacy that persisted well into the twentieth century. As biologists' interests in part-whole relations are once again on the upswing, the longue durée of this problem merits renewed consideration.

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Section: The Problem Of Individualitymentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: The Problem Of Individualitymentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: The Problem Of Individualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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