The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics by William B. ProvineReview by: Frederick B. ChurchillIsis, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Dec., 1972), pp. 572-574Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/229788 .

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572 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 219 (1972)

science departments where they could teach some basic science as well as the history of science. At a time when science is under attack for its nonhumanity, an historian of science in the guise of resident humanist might be a very saleable item in the academic market.

For all its uneven quality of content and style, this book provides evidence of both need and opportunity for the teaching of the history of science among the scientists. The natives are friendly; we should attempt communication with them.

ROBERT SIEGFRIED Department of History of Science

University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin 53706

Herbert W. Meyer. A History of Electricity and Magnetism. ix + 325 pp., plts., index. Cambridge, Mass.:M.I.T. Press, 1971. $10.

Herbert W. Meyer, whoever he is, deserves our admiration for having found a reputable publisher. The patsy is the M.I.T. Press, which has traded shamefully on its reputa- tion by giving out as a History of Electricity and Magnetism a rank collection of pap, error, and fabrication. Item: a nineteenth- century picture of an eighteenth-century electrostatic generator captioned "Von Guericke's Electrical Machine," a seven- teenth-century device totally different in design and purpose. Item: Sir Isaac Newton's electrical machine, dated 1675, a pure fiction. Item: Hawksbee, Boze, Wheeler, P. C. Lemonnier for Hauksbee, Bose, Wheler, G. L. Lemonnier. Item: Stephen Gray, born 1695, the year before his first paper was published by the Royal Society. Item: Watson's book on electricity, published 1746, the source of Franklin's first interest in electricity, a gratuitous and erroneous fabrication. Item: "There had been little interest in magnetism since the time of Gilbert"; the author is talking about the middle of the eighteenth century, one hun- dred years after Descartes had transformed the subject!

This harvest of ignorance has been reaped, at no effort, from the first twenty- one pages of Meyer's "history." If we skip along to the back, we learn that Moseley's work preceded Bohr's and that Heisenberg's

followed Schrodinger's, egregious errors that make nonsense of the history of modern physics. As for the middle of the book, I have not been able to bring myself to read it.

J. L. HEILBRON Department of History

University of California Berkeley, California 94720

I BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

William B. Provine. The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. (The Chicago History of Science and Medicine.) xi + 201 pp., bibl., index. Chicago :University of Chicago Press, 1971. $7.75.

William Provine, currently an assistant professor of the history of science at Cornell University, presents, as the title implies, a history of the rise of population genetics. He starts out with Darwin's Origin and Galton's works on heredity and carries his story down to the 1 930s, by which time the mathe- matical studies of R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright, and J. S. B. Haldane had forged a synthesis of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. These seventy-odd years are intricate ones for the history of what is now considered classical genetics. They span not only the reactions and accommodations to Darwin directly but complex develop- ments in cytology, experimental embryology, enzyme studies, biogeography, animal and plant hybridization, and biometrics. By focusing on just the latter two areas of specialization and by singling out certain key controversies, the author gives quantita- tively less but intellectually much more than the standard histories of genetics.

There are five chapters to his book. The first presents a sketch of Darwin's efforts to devise a scheme of inheritance which would be compatible with his own theory of natural selection of common variations and his conviction in a continuous, nonsaltative evolutionary process. Disturbed by this apparent contradiction, Huxley and Galton, each in his own way, emphasized inherited discontinuities. The second and third chap- ters deal almost exclusively with the much celebrated controversies between the bio-

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 219 (1972) 573

metricians Wheldon and Pearson and the Mendelian William Bateson. According to Provine, the biometricians were bene- ficiaries of Galton's statistical approach and used it to support the belief in continuous evolution by natural selection. Bateson, the front-ranking English champion of Mendel's post-1900 rise to ascendency, emphasized the discontinuous and latent characteristics of Galton's and Mendel's models of inheritance. The clash between the two groups was ideological, institutional, and often personal. Provine maintains that it "drove a wedge between Mendel's theory of heredity and Darwin's theory of continuous evolution and consequently delayed the synthesis of these theories into population genetics" (p. 56).

The fourth chapter, more an intermezzo, describes the pure line studies of Johannsen, Jennings, and Pearl-all of which seemed to support the idea of discontinuities or salta- tions in evolution. The chapter concludes with an examination of a medley of studies by Castle, Morgan, East, and Nilsson-Ehle, which by contrast gave experimental evi- dence in one form or another of the efficacy of natural selection of small variations. The fifth and climax chapter presents the mathe- matical resolutions by Fisher, Wright, and Haldane. Each differed in its own right, but all gave computations of the consequence of Mendelian inheritance and thus fashioned the synthesis the author has foreshadowed from the outset. In this short volume, then, Provine offers us a challenging, carefully constructed interpretative essay about a relatively unchartered field. He has organ- ized in a provocative and manageable fashion a wealth of material, and this reviewer for one feels that any future historian of science who treads these grounds must first take this interpretation into account.

Where then does the historian go from here? Despite the boldness and imaginative thesis of this work, there are serious de- ficiencies. I intend it as a sincere form of praise to respond by saying that other his- torians may begin at these points-to begin in fact, with the three conclusions with which Provine closes his text (p. 177).

First, the author points out the importance of the personal equation in the development of science. With Wheldon, Pearson, and Bateson some of this is above the surface and already in the public domain. We must, however, go further. Provine has relied

almost exclusively on the printed record. He cites Coleman's study of the Bateson papers, but he hardly resorts to them himself. He uses no other manuscript material, although such archival studies will be the only way we can find out how fully the personal equation enters the scientific debate. For this period manuscripts abound; the historian to the contrary is faced with the danger of drown- ing in them-witness the entries in the Mendel Newsletter.

Secondly, Provine rightly points out that a priori assumptions are as important as "scientific proof," yet this is not a consistent theme in his text, and there remain many important assumptions which must be added to the history of population genetics. For example, the implications of the continuity of the germplasm, the significance of the chromosome theory, and the meaning of the gene comprise three obvious assumptions, all of which have deep philosophical roots. In working these out, we also must move beyond the Anglo-American tradition upon which Provine relies almost exclusively.

Finally, the author tells us that population genetics contained "a theoretical structure which was far from consistent." Despite the agreement between Fisher, Wright, and Haldane about the efficacy of natural selection, Provine convincingly argues that their approaches were different. Yet this leaves us with new problems: what is popula- tion genetics anyway? Nowhere in the text does Provine stand back from his case studies to give us an ideal definition. L. C. Dunn in his excellent A Short History of Genetics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965, p. 194) has made a try:

Population genetics deals with the fre- quencies and interactions of genes in inter- breeding populations, with agencies such as mutation, natural and artifical selec- tion, migrations, mixing of races and chance factors which tend to alter gene frequencies and thus to cause evolutionary changes. Its problems are stated in purely biological terms and are pursued by methods which are peculiar to genetics. Genes, and those chromosome structures which, like genes, retain their integrity over long successions of generations keep the abstract character which they had at the birth of genetics itself, that of elements which segregate without contamination,

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574 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 219 (1972)

and are thus units subject to mathe- matical treatment.

We note immediately that there are several items mentioned here which are not covered in the book under review; we recognize that population genetics is as much a method as a synthesis of theories. As such there are im- portant methodological issues which should be explored in detail - the mathematization of science, the confrontation of mathe- matical and mechanical models, and the role of experimentation in theory construc- tion. These, and others, must be examined explicitly before we can understand the deeper origins of population genetics.

Provine has done us an invaluable service by steering us down the road to a genuine intellectual history of genetics, but it will be a long trip for us all. The book is nicely printed and contains a functional index and a valuable appendix on Galton's and Pear- son's law of ancestral heredity. Finally, how nice it is to find footnotes on the bottom of the page!

FREDERICK B. CHURCHILL Department of the History and Philosophy of Science

Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47401

I MEDICINE

Owsei Temkin. The Falling Sickness. A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology. xiv + 467 pp., illus., bibl., index. Second edition revised. Baltimore/London:The Johns Hop- kins Press, 1971. $15.

The first edition of this remarkable work appeared in 1945 and was received with the universal acclaim it richly deserved. Un- fortunately it soon went out of print and secondhand copies rarely appeared on the market, developments which indicated the book's worth. For several years a second edi- tion has been expected. The first could, of course, have been reprinted with minor cor- rections, but fortunately Owsei Temkin elected to prepare a new version of it, modi- fied throughout.

As he points out, there is a very good reason for this choice, quite apart from the

opportunity it gives to emend and to include the results of recent historical research. Just as important is the need for recent neurologi- cal research to be taken into account. In the history of medicine, and in particular when dealing with diseases, our interpretation of the evolution of concepts will be colored by present-day knowledge. Thus the history of a disease of unknown cause will have to be re-evaluated when its etiology is elucidated. This, of course, is in addition to portraying the disease through the eyes of contemporary observers in each historical period considered. New scientific data continue to contribute to historical analyses, and this is why the medical historian working in the clinical or basic medical sciences must be in contact with modem research. Thus the history of syphilis, for example, may be altered when the spectrum of the trepanomatoses is taken into account.

During the twenty-six years that separate the two editions of The Falling Sickness con- siderable advances have been made in the understanding of epilepsy. New surgical, electrical, clinical, and pharmacological techniques and treatments have provided a large amount of fresh information as well as modifying interpretations. In order to make his history more meaningful in the light of modem ideas of epilepsy, Professor Temkin has therefore carried out very extensive research into recent developments and as a result has made substantial emendations, especially in the final part which deals with "The Nineteenth Century-The Age of Hughlings Jackson." Obviously our current understanding of temporal lobe epilepsy affects our appreciation of Jackson's work.

But despite a quarter of a century's pro- gress, the problem of epilepsy is still far from solution and, being unable to achieve historical objectivity at such close range, Professor Temkin has not changed the main structure of his book; thus reviews of the first edition continue to be of value. It is still concerned with the human and natural history of epilepsy in Western cultures from antiquity to the late nineteenth century, the end point having been advanced to about 1890. Not only is it a history of epilepsy; it is also an account of epilepsy in history.

There are corrections and additions throughout. Concerning the latter, the num- ber of footnotes has been increased from 1,721 to 2,073, the largest expansion being in

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