Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-l4dxg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-27T22:31:22.859Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

30 - Biology and Human Nature

from PART IV - SCIENCE AND CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2009

By
Peter Bowler
Edited by
Peter J. Bowler  and
John V. Pickstone
Peter J. Bowler
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
John V. Pickstone
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access

Summary

In traditional Christian thought, the soul and the bodywere distinct from one another: If behavior was affected by animal impulses, this merely indicated that the soul did not have sufficient control over its fleshly garment. Descartes’ insistence that the mind existed on a separate plane from that of the body – the latter being conceived of essentially as a machine – continued the dualistic interpretation. In such a model, psychology and the social sciences would constitute a body of knowledge with no link to biology. The workings of the mind could be investigated by introspection without reference to the body. The dualistic perspective came under fire in the eighteenth century, as materialist philosophers such as Julien Offray de la Mettrie argued that the mind was affected by the body. They implied that the mind should be treated as nothing more than a by-product of the physical processes going on in the brain. For the materialists, human nature was essentially biological. The conflict between dualism and materialism was renewed in the nineteenth century as developments in biology began to offer a range of techniques for investigating human behavior. There was not, however, a complete triumph of the materialistic approach. Efforts to preserve the mind as a distinct level of activity have continued, partly in defense of the concept of the soul but increasingly as a means of creating a professional niche for psychology and the social sciences.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 563 - 582
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bannister, Robert C., Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
Barkan, Elazar, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Blitz, David, Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowler, Peter J., The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), chaps. 4 and 6.Google Scholar
Bowler, Peter J., The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).Google Scholar
Bowler, Peter J., Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);Google Scholar
Bowler, Peter J., Life’s Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life’s Ancestry, 1860–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), chap. 9.Google Scholar
Burrow, J. W., Evolution in Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966);Google Scholar
Cantor, Geoffrey, “The Edinburgh Phrenological Debate, 1803–1828,” Annals of Science, 32 (1975);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caplan, Arthur O., The Sociobiology Debate (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).Google Scholar
Chambers, Robert, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Cooter, Roger, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, “Nature and Nurture: The Interplay of Biology and Politics in the Work of Francis Galton,” Studies in the History of Biology, 1 (1977);Google ScholarPubMed
Danziger, Kurt, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 1;Google Scholar
Duffin, Lorna, “Prisoners of Progress: Women and Evolution,” in The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World, ed. Delamont, Sara and Duffin, Lorna (London: Croom Helm, 1978).Google Scholar
Easlea, Brian, Science and Sexual Oppression: Patriarchy’s Confrontation with Women and Nature (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981);Google Scholar
Fancher, Raymond E., Pioneers of Psychology (New York: Norton, 1979), chap. 2;Google Scholar
Francis, Mark, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Stocksfield, U.K.: Acumen, 2007).Google Scholar
Gilham, N. W., A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), chap. 5.Google Scholar
Grayson, Donald, The Establishment of Human Antiquity (New York: Academic Press, 1983);Google Scholar
Haller, John S., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975);Google Scholar
Haller, Mark H., Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963);Google Scholar
Hammond, Michael, “The Expulsion of the Neanderthals from Human Ancestry: Marcellin Boule and the Social Context of Scientific Research,” Social Studies of Science, 12 (1982);CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990).Google Scholar
Hawkins, Mike, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hofstadter’s, RichardSocial Darwinism in American Thought, revised ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).Google Scholar
Jones, Greta, Social Darwinism in English Thought (London: Harvester, 1980).Google Scholar
Jordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine (Hemel Hempstead: Wheatsheaf, 1989);Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Times of Barbara Mc Clintock (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1983).Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985);Google Scholar
Kevles, Daniel, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985).Google Scholar
Lewin, Roger, Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).Google Scholar
Mackenzie, Donald, Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982);Google Scholar
Maddox, Brenda, Rosalind Franklin (London: Harper Collins, 2002);Google Scholar
Magnello, Eileen, “Karl Pearson’s Methodological Innovations: The Drapers’ Biometrical Laboratory and the Galton Eugenics Laboratory,” History of Science, 37 (1999), 123–50.Google Scholar
Masson, J. M., A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986);Google Scholar
Morgan, Conway Lloyd, Emergent Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923).Google Scholar
Morss, John R., The Biologizing of Childhood: Developmental Psychology and the Darwinian Myth (Hove: Erlbaum, 1990).Google Scholar
Mulkay, Michael, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979);Google Scholar
Pickens, D. K., Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968);Google Scholar
Reader, John, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man (London: Collins, 1981);Google Scholar
Richards, Evelleen, “Huxley Finds Man, Loses Woman: The ‘Woman Question’ and the Control of Victorian Anthropology,” in History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. Moore, J. R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);Google Scholar
Richards, Evelleen, “Darwin and the Descent of Woman,” in The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, ed. Oldroyd, D. R. and Langham, Ian (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983).Google Scholar
Richards, Robert J., Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Ritvo, Lucille B., Darwin’s Influence on Freud (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russet, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Searle, G. R., Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900–1914 (Leiden: Noordhoff, 1976);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Secord, James A., Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Segerstrale, Ullica, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Shapin, , “Homo Phrenologicus”; Steven Shapin, “Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh,” Annals of Science, 32 (1975).Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven, “Homo Phrenologicus: Anthropological Perspectives on a Historical Problem,” in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barnes, Barry and Shapin, Steven (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979).Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1986).Google Scholar
Smith, Grafton Elliot, The Evolution of Man: Essays (London: Humphrey Milford, 1924), p..Google Scholar
Smith, Roger, The Fontana/Norton History of the Human Sciences (London: Fontana; New York: Norton, 1997).Google Scholar
Smith, Roger, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (London: Free Association Books, 1992), chap. 5.Google Scholar
Spencer, Frank, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (London: Natural History Museum; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Stanton, William, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1960);Google Scholar
Stepan, Nancy, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stocking, George W., Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987);Google Scholar
Sulloway, Frank, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (London: Burnett Books, 1979);Google Scholar
Theunissen, Bert, Eugene Dubois and the Ape-Man from Java: The History of the First “Missing Link” and Its Discoverer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).Google Scholar
Van Riper, A. Bowdoin, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Van Wyhe, John, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).Google Scholar
Watson, James D., The Double Helix (New York: Atheneum, 1968).Google Scholar
Webster, Richard, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London: Harper Collins, 1995).Google Scholar
Weikart, Richard, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yearley, Stephen, Science, Technology and Social Change (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).Google Scholar
Young’s collected papers, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Young, Robert M., “Darwinism Is Social,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. Kohn, David (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Young, Robert M., Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970),Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×