220079 Conception and Heredity: Societal Change and Gender in 19th Century Biological Thought. (S) (SoSe 2021)

Scientific concepts are part of the societies they “live” in. Natural science texts thus also speak about cultural history. We take history of science in the German lands as an example to discuss the interaction of changes in society and in scientific concepts. The German lands are representative and at the same time politically salient for our enterprise: During the course of the 19th century French and British scientists and those writing in German dominated the world of the natural sciences. At the same time pressures to prevent revolutions similar to the one in France resulted in repeated turmoil and in concealed ways to express political positions. This holds for the revolutionary times leading to the “Vormärz” in the first half of the 19th century, for the reaction as well as for the industrialization and nation building in the last decades of the 19th century.
Those scientific disciplines which we can put under the umbrella term of biology were, together with physics, leading sciences then. What do the cell-concepts of biologists have to do with contemporary political challenges and why were some of these biologists chased out of the country? While in the second half of the century reaction restored classes and genders, the last decades witnessed worker’s and feminist’s call for emancipation in the monarchy – this again interlaced with concepts of genders in the moment of conception and in models of inheritance.
We use most salient history of science texts about these episodes and accompany them by theories about how to analyze such science-society-interactions and co-productions.