“What is Dead May Not Die”: Locating Marginalized Concepts Among Ordinary Biologists

Historians and biologists identify the debate between mechanists and vitalists over the nature of life itself with the arguments of Driesch, Loeb, and other prominent voices. But what if the conversation was broader and the consequences deeper for the field? Following the suspicions of Joseph Needha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the history of biology 2022-08, Vol.55 (2), p.219-251
Main Authors: Peterson, Erik L., Hall, Crystal
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Biochemistry
Biologists
Biology
Debates
Digital humanities
Embryology
Exceptionalism
Historians
History
History of Science
Laboratories
Life sciences
Original Research
Philosophy of Biology
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Summary:Historians and biologists identify the debate between mechanists and vitalists over the nature of life itself with the arguments of Driesch, Loeb, and other prominent voices. But what if the conversation was broader and the consequences deeper for the field? Following the suspicions of Joseph Needham in the 1930s and Francis Crick in the 1960s, we deployed tools of the digital humanities to an old problem in the history of biology. We analyzed over 31,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and learned that bioexceptionalism participated in a robust discursive landscape throughout subfields of the life sciences, occupied even by otherwise unknown biologists.
ISSN:0022-5010
1573-0387
DOI:10.1007/s10739-020-09618-1