Staffan Mueller-Wille | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)

Publication List by Staffan Mueller-Wille

Papers by Staffan Mueller-Wille

History of the Human Sciences, 2024

The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry,... more The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry, and descent among humans are diagrams. For this reason, and at the same time to avoid a reduction to biology as transported by terms such as kinship, ancestry, and descent, we introduce the expression diagrammatics of relatedness. We seek to understand the enormous influence that especially tree diagrams have had as a way to express and engage with human relatedness, but hold that this success can only be adequately understood by attending to what in fact are broader diagrammatic practices. These practices bring to light that diagrams of relatedness do not simply make visible

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2021

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term them... more We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in me...

Die Nova Genera et Species Plantarum von Aimé Bonpland und Alexander von Humboldt werden oft als ... more Die Nova Genera et Species Plantarum von Aimé Bonpland und Alexander von Humboldt werden oft als Meilenstein in der Geschichte der Biogeographie benannt. Vor allem in der Einführung zum ersten Band, den "Prolegomena", für die Humboldt als Autor genannt wird, finden sich Überlegungen zur geographischen Verbreitung der Pflanzen. Unter anderem wird in den "Prolegomena" eine der ersten Tabellen gezeigt, die die Artenzusammensetzung verschiedener Floren – aus Frankreich, Deutschland und Lappland – numerisch nach "natürlichen" Pflanzenfamilien aufschlüsselt und vergleichend analysiert. Die Daten für diese Tabelle wurden, wie aus einer Fußnote hervorgeht, nicht von Humboldt selbst erhoben, sondern von Carl Sigismund Kunth. Letzterer war von Karl Ludwig Willdenow unterrichtet worden, der Humboldt freundschaftlich verbunden war und den er bereits in den 1780er Jahren an pflanzengeographische Fragestellungen herangeführt hatte. In diesem Beitrag wollen wir fragen...

The modern concept of race is usually traced back to proponents of a "natural history of man... more The modern concept of race is usually traced back to proponents of a "natural history of mankind" in the European Enlightenment. Starting from allegorical representations of the four continents in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the eighteenth-century visual genre of castas paintings, I suggest that these enlightenment conceptions of race were significantly shaped by diagrammatic representations of human diversity that allowed for tabulation of data, combinatorial analysis, and quantification, and hence functioned as "tools to think with." Accounting for racial ancestry in terms of "proportions of blood" not only became a preoccupation of scholars as a consequence, but also came to underwrite administrative practices and popular discourses. To contribute to a better understanding of the history of race relations, historians of the race concept need to pay more attention to these diagrammatic aspects of the concept.

The contain data generated by the recogito software (https://recogito.pelagios.org/) in processin... more The contain data generated by the recogito software (https://recogito.pelagios.org/) in processing the text of Peter Graves' translation. of Linnaeus's Laplandfic Journey (Edinburgh Universioty Press, 1995). Recogito allows to tag place names with UUIDs and correlate these with geolocation data (taken from geonames). Locations can then be displayed on a map that links them with correspondiong sections of the text. Files include a .csv file correlating UUIDs, place names and geonames URI, a GeoJSON FeatureCollection with confirmed geo-located places in the document, and the annotated text in a basic TEI/XML serialization.BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant SRG1819\19118

Handbook of the Historiography of Biology, 2018

Gregor Mendel's paper "Experiments on Plant Hybrids" (1866) has become a paradigmatic case in the... more Gregor Mendel's paper "Experiments on Plant Hybrids" (1866) has become a paradigmatic case in the historiography of the life sciences because production and reception of a "discovery" sharply fell apart, thus raising fundamental questions about the relationship between scientific achievement and "its" time. In this chapter, I am providing an overview of answers that have been given to these questions by various historians. In a first section, I cover commentators who have claimed that Mendel was "ahead" of his time, and that contemporaries failed to recognize his achievement. I then move on to scholars and scientists who argued against this position, claiming that Mendel was not anticipating twentieth-century genetics, but was in fact representative of an older research tradition. In a last step, I turn to the more recent cultural history of heredity according to which Mendel was embedded in a local culture that combined a variety of advanced and traditional strands of nineteenth-century life-sciences. Overall, I am arguing that one should not overestimate the coherence and dominance of presumed "paradigms", "epistemes" or "styles" in biology.

BJHS Themes, 2020

The rapid reception of Gregor Mendel's paper ‘Experiments on plant hybrids’ (1866) in the ear... more The rapid reception of Gregor Mendel's paper ‘Experiments on plant hybrids’ (1866) in the early decades of the twentieth century remains poorly understood. We will suggest that this reception should not exclusively be investigated as the spread of a theory, but also as the spread of an experimental and computational protocol. Early geneticists used Mendel's paper, as well as reviews of Mendelian experiments in a variety of other publications, to acquire a unique combination of experimental and mathematical skills. We will analyse annotations in copies of Mendel's paper itself, in early editions and translations of this paper, and in early textbooks, such as Reginald Punnett'sMendelism(1905) or Wilhelm Johannsen'sElemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre(1909). We will examine how readers used copies of such works to reproduce the logic behind Mendelian experiments, either by recalculating results, or by retracing the underlying combinatorial reasoning. We will place...

La rupture de la « grande chaine des etres » : la diversite en histoire naturelle, de 1758 a 1859

Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt “From Heredity to Genetics: Political, Medical, and Agr... more Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt “From Heredity to Genetics: Political, Medical, and Agro-Industrial Contexts” Final version before proofs; published as: Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt, “From Heredity to Genetics: Political, Medical, and Agro-Industrial Contexts,” in Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850-1930, edited by S. Müller-Wille and C. Brandt, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (= Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, edited by J. Z. Buchwald), pp. 3–25.

Akteure, Tiere, Dinge, 2017

Der Zeitabschnitt in der Geschichte der Naturgeschichte, für den ich die Bezeichnung "klassische"... more Der Zeitabschnitt in der Geschichte der Naturgeschichte, für den ich die Bezeichnung "klassische" Periode vorschlage, ist markiert durch das Erscheinen zweier Werke, die als Meilensteine der Geschichte dieser Disziplin gelten: Carl von Linnés zehnter Auflage seines Systema naturae (Stockholm 1758), ein systematischer Katalog aller zu der Zeit bekannten Mineralien-, Pflanzen-und Tierarten, sowie Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species (London 1859). 1 Während des Jahrhunderts, das zwischen diesen beiden Jahreszahlen liegt, nahm die Naturgeschichte eine Form an, die noch heute von Botaniker*innen und Zoolog*innen anerkannt ist-in dem Maße, dass die Werke dieser Zeit für die Forschung immer noch von unmittelbarer Relevanz sind. Zudem war die Periode von bedeutenden institutionellen, gesellschaftlichen und intellektuellen Entwicklungen geprägt-der Gründung zentraler Institutionen wie dem British Museum oder dem Muséum d'histoire naturelle, der Entstehung neuer professioneller Rollen und eines neuen Fachpublikums für die Naturgeschichte sowie der Ausbreitung von Evolutionstheorien. Doch wie all diese Entwicklungen zusammenhängen, ist noch kaum bekannt, und, die Periode als Ganzes ist wenig erforscht.

Osiris, 2017

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the transition from natural history to the... more The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the transition from natural history to the history of nature. This essay analyzes institutional, social, and technological changes in natural history associated with this epochal change. Focusing on the many posthumous reeditions of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae that began to appear throughout Europe and beyond from the 1760s onward, I will argue that Linnaean nomenclature and classification reorganized and enhanced flows of dataa term already used in natural history-among individual naturalists and institutions. Plant and animal species became units that could be "slotted" into collections and publications, reshuffled and exchanged, kept track of in lists and catalogs, and counted and distributed in new ways. On two fronts-biogeography and the search for the "natural system"-this brought to the fore new, intriguing relationships among organisms of diverse kinds. By letting nature speak through the "artificial" means and media of early systematics, I argue, new and powerful visions of an unruly nature emerged that became the object of early evolutionary theories. Natural history was an "information science" that processed growing quantities of data and held the same potential for surprising insights as today's data-intensive sciences. He gathered rocks, flowers, beetles of all kind for himself, and arranged them in series in manifold ways.-Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, 1802 1

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2007

Intellectual History Review, 2014

The development of paper-based information technologies in the early modern period is a field of ... more The development of paper-based information technologies in the early modern period is a field of enquiry that has lately benefited from extensive studies by intellectual historians and historians of science. 1 How scholars coped with ever-increasing amounts of empirical knowledge presented in print and manuscriptleading to the so-called early modern "information overload"is now being increasingly analysed and understood. 2 In this paper we will turn to an example at the close of the early modern period. Towards the very end of his academic career, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)best known today for his "sexual" system of plant classification and his binomial nomenclatureused little paper slips of a standard size to process information on plants and animals that reached him on a daily basis. From today's perspective, these paper slips look surprisingly like modern index cards. This is surprising, because throughout the early modern period, the medium of choice to cope with information overload was a different one: the commonplace book, promoted by humanists and philosophers such as Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and John Locke (1632-1704). Commonplace books usually took the form of bound manuscripts that were subdivided by headings indicating the particular topics under which information was to be subsumed. The collected information was thus brought into a fixed and permanent order, and an index was usually added at the end of the volume to provide access to this information. 3 One of the areas where information overload made itself felt in particular, and for which the commonplace book was adopted quickly, was natural history. As new worlds were discovered, and more species described, the circulation of information grew rapidly, in print and manuscript. Naturalists like Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) and Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) collected observations from specimens, annotated and excerpted new publications, and engaged in far-flung correspondence networks, all along developing their own common-placing techniques to process the information thus gained. 4 In the process, some scholars and naturalists occasionally strove to find more flexible ways of accessing, storing, and retrieving information than the bound and structured commonplace book. One such way was processing and communicating information in the form of simple, open-ended lists of key words or short factual statements. 5 Another, even more flexible way was to keep notes on loose pieces of papers, which enabled information to be shuffled around, collated, and rearranged readily. Thus Robert Boyle (1627-1691) kept his notes in a haphazard way on loose sheets and paper slips, apparently to prevent others from making sense of them, while Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) preferred to order his loose notes according to a contraption

Early Science and Medicine, 2014

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2010

The cell is not only the structural, physiological, and developmental, but also the reproductive ... more The cell is not only the structural, physiological, and developmental, but also the reproductive unit of life. So far, however, this aspect of the cell has received little attention by historians and philosophers of biology. I will argue that cell theory had far-reaching consequences for how biologists conceptualized the reproductive relationships between germs and adult organisms. Cell theory, as formulated by Theodor Schwann in 1839, implied that this relationship was a specific and lawful one, i.e. that germs of a certain kind, all else being equal, would produce adult organisms of the same kind, and vice versa. Questions of preformation and epigenesis took on a new meaning under this presupposition. The question now was whether cells could be considered as independent agents producing adult organisms of a given species, or whether they were the product of external, organizing forces and thus a stage in the development of the whole organism only. The question was an important one for nineteenth-century biology. As I will demonstrate, it was the view of cells as independent agents which helped both Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to think of differential reproduction as a lawful process.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2010

Although the cell is commonly addressed as the unit of life, historians and philosophers have dev... more Although the cell is commonly addressed as the unit of life, historians and philosophers have devoted relatively little attention to this concept in comparison to other fundamental concepts of biology such as the gene or species. As a partial remedy to this neglect, we introduce the cell as a major point of connection between various disciplinary approaches, epistemic strategies, technological vectors and overarching biological processes such as metabolism, growth, reproduction and evolution. We suggest that the role of the cell as a nexus forms the basis for a new philosophical and historical appreciation of cell biology. This perspective focuses less on the cell as a well-defined, stable object and places more emphasis on its role as a mediator of fundamental biological processes. 'the commodity-form of the product of labour', in analogy to the cell as studied by 'microscopic anatomy' (Marx, 1996 [1867], pp. 7-8). He made this suggestion in preference to the individual citizen, which the already popular metaphor of the organism as a cell state would have suggested (cf. Reynolds, 2007). If we invert Marx's metaphor, the cell as studied by biologists turns out to be a medium of global processes of exchange and reproduction, rather than a well-bounded and stable entity in its own right. Once this perspective is taken, it becomes less of a surprise that historical analyses of cell concepts show them to have been understood in many very different ways, and that tensions between such concepts have marked the history of cell theory. The multiplicity and ambivalence of how cells are understood makes them analogous to genes and their many

History of the Human Sciences, 2024

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2021

Handbook of the Historiography of Biology, 2018

BJHS Themes, 2020

La rupture de la « grande chaine des etres » : la diversite en histoire naturelle, de 1758 a 1859

Akteure, Tiere, Dinge, 2017

Osiris, 2017

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2007

Intellectual History Review, 2014

Early Science and Medicine, 2014

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2010

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2012

Natural History can be seen as a discipline paradigmatically engaged in 'data-driven research.' H... more Natural History can be seen as a discipline paradigmatically engaged in 'data-driven research.' Historians of early modern science have begun to emphasize its crucial role in the Scientific Revolution, and some observers of present day genomics see it as engaged in a return to natural history practices. A key concept that was developed to understand the dynamics of early modern natural history is that of 'information overload.' Taxonomic systems, rules of nomenclature, technical terminologies and even theories of evolution were developed in botany and zoology to catch up with the ever increasing amount of information on hitherto unknown plant and animal species. In our contribution, we want to expand on this concept. After all, the same people who complain about information overload are usually the ones who contribute to it most significantly. In order to understand this complex relationship, we will turn to the annotation practices of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). The very tools that Linnaeus developed to contain and reduce information overload, as we aim to demonstrate, 2 facilitated a veritable information explosion that led to the emergence of a new research object in botany: the so-called 'natural' system. Keywords Linnaeus Information overload Natural History Genus Natural System Paper technologies 1. Introduction: Linnaeus and data-driven research Early modern natural and experimental history, as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) called it, perhaps forms the prototype of what one could call 'datadriven' research. Fuelled by the revaluation of practical knowledge in court culture, the print revolution, and overseas discoveries and trade, Europe was flooded with accounts of particulars: manuals of military technology, collections of pharmacological recipes, medical case histories, descriptions of exotic plant and animal species (Long, 2001; Pomata and Siraisi, 2005; Cook 2007). Little of this early modern literature could be called hypothesis-driven in any conceivable sense. It aimed primarily at the compilation of facts, not confirmation of preconceived theories. Yet, as Bacon had already observed, heaping up bits of isolated knowledge would never be enough to achieve this aim. Compilation produced its own epistemological problems. 'Natural and experimental history is so various and scattered,' Bacon observed in Novum

History of Anthropology Reviw, 2024

This Special Focus Section originated from a workshop that we—Raphael Uchôa, Staffan Müller-Wille... more This Special Focus Section originated from a workshop that we—Raphael Uchôa, Staffan Müller-Wille, and Harriet Mercer—convened in September 2022 at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Our workshop brought together a diverse group of scholars from the fields of history and philosophy of science and anthropology. It was the culmination of three years of studies conducted within the context of the “Science and its Others” working group, hosted by the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos) and the Ethno-science reading group at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. Initially, our ambition was to historicize the whole suite of ethnosciences, but it soon became apparent that ethnobotany and to some extent ethnomedicine would form a suitable focus because of their paradigmatic status (on other “ethno-sciences” not discussed in this Special Focus Section, see Alves and Ulysses 2017; D’Ambrosio 1985; Martín 2011; Stiles 1977).

Shadow of the Tree, 2024

With kind per mis si on by the Lin ne an Socie ty of Lon don, www.lin ne an.org. Paul Die trich G... more With kind per mis si on by the Lin ne an Socie ty of Lon don, www.lin ne an.org. Paul Die trich Gise ke's ✵Ta bu la genea lo gi co-geo gra phi ca affini ta tum plan tarum," pub lis hed in 1792 as a fol dout tab le accom panying his edi ti on of lec tu res by the Swe dish botanist Carl Lin na eus. Cop per engra ving, 49 x 62 cm. In 1792, Paul Die trich Gise ke (1741-1796) pub lis hed an edi ti on of lec tu res on the ✵na tu ral orders" of plants given by Carl Lin na eus (1707-1778). The edi ti on was based on notes that he him self and the natu ra list Johan Chris ti an Fabri ci us (1745-1808) had taken whi le atten ding Lin na eus's lec tu res during visits to Swe den in 1767 and 1771. 1 The volu me con tai ned a lar ge fol dout tab le, entit led ✵Ge nea lo gi cal-Geo gra phi cal Tab le of Plant Affini ties" (Tabu la genea logi co-geo gra phi ca affini ta tum plan tarum) that today is remem be red as a miles to ne in the histo ry of gra phi cal rep re sen ta ti ons of bio di ver si ty. Buil ding on Lin na eus's famous apho rism that ✵all plants show mutual affini ties, like a ter rito ry in a geo gra phic map," it depic ted plant diver si ty not in a linear series, as the anci ent tra di ti on of a sca la natu rae had it, but spread out in two dimen si ons. 2 Help ful ly, Gise ke pro vi ded his rea ders with a detai led ✵com men ta ry" that exp lai ned how to read his tabu la. The cir c les rep re sent natu ral orders as ✵pro vin ces" (pro vin ciae). Their ✵width" (amp litu do) rep res ents the num ber of gene ra they con tain. And their rela ti ve posi ti ons express ✵af fini ties" mea su red in terms mor pho lo gi cal simi la ri ty. Thus some pro vin ces are Staffan Müller-Wille I/24

edition humboldt digital, hg. v. Ottmar Ette. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin. Version 5 vom 11.09.2019, 2019

Unter Wissenschaftshistorikern ist Alexander von Humboldt vor allem für die Einführung messender,... more Unter Wissenschaftshistorikern ist Alexander von Humboldt vor allem für die Einführung messender, quantifizierender und statistischer Verfahren in die naturgeschichtlichen und geographischen Disziplinen bekannt. Wissenschaft Humboldt’scher Prägung war wesentlich, wie der Ökologiehistoriker Frank N. Egerton formuliert hat, eine „Wissenschaft der Korrelationen“.[2] Dabei ging es Humboldt nicht einfach nur um die Registrierung empirischer Sachverhalte. In der Ermittlung von Verteilungen, Durchschnitten und Zahlenverhältnissen sah er vielmehr den Schlüssel zur Erkenntnis von Naturgesetzen, die die scheinbar chaotischen Erscheinungen der belebten und unbelebten Natur beherrschten, und deren Erkenntnis auch empirische Naturwissenschaften wie Botanik und Geognosie, Immanuel Kants Skepsis zum Trotz, auf mathematische Grundlagen zu stellen vermochte.[3] Ein Wissensfeld, auf das dieser Ansatz besonders befruchtend wirkte, war die Pflanzengeographie oder „botanische Arithmetik“, wie Humboldt selbst es nannte.[4] Neben Augustin Pyrame de Candolle in Frankreich und Robert Brown in England, gilt Humboldt als Begründer dieser Wissenschaft, die bis weit in die zweite Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts mit ihren avancierten statistischen und kartographischen Methoden so etwas wie die Königsdisziplin der Botanik bildete.

DNA fingerprinting, genetic therapy, gene editing: we often talk about genes, but do we know what... more DNA fingerprinting, genetic therapy, gene editing: we often talk about genes, but do we know what they are? The science of genetics began in the early twentieth century, but it was inspired by a paper published in 1866 by Gregor Mendel who never used the word himself. Philosophers and historians are still arguing about what exactly Mendel discovered. Here we introduce a stunning new online translation, published in the British Society for the History of Science new BSHS Translations series. The translation opens a window onto Mendel's original text in German, the language he used, and the world he inhabited. It shows that this Moravian friar did not work in solitary seclusion, but was deeply engaged with the intellectual, economic and political currents of his time.

Alexander von Humboldt: Geographie der Pflanzen. Unveröffentlichte Schriften aus dem Nachlass (edition humboldt print; Reihe III: Forschungen im Umfeld der Reisen, Band 1), hg. von Ulrich Päßler. Berlin: J.B. Metzler/Springer Nature, 2020

Der Band dokumentiert ein Lebensprojekt: Für Alexander von Humboldt war die Geographie der Pflanz... more Der Band dokumentiert ein Lebensprojekt: Für Alexander von Humboldt war die Geographie der Pflanzen empirisches Forschungsprogramm und ästhetische Anschauungswissenschaft zugleich. Seine in den amerikanischen Tropen gewonnenen biogeographischen Erkenntnisse verstand er als Grundlage einer Wissenschaft der gesamten Erde. Zahlreiche nun erstmals ediert vorliegende Manuskripte, Notizen und Briefe veranschaulichen Humboldts jahrzehntelange Arbeit an diesem Vorhaben. Sie dokumentieren Humboldts Lektüre- und Schreibpraktiken und zeigen wie er weltweit Daten sammelte sowie Forschungen und Gelehrte vernetzte. Wissenschaftshistorische Beiträge begleiten die Edition. Sie gehen Ursprüngen und Kontexten der Humboldt'schen Biogeographie nach und fragen nach weniger bekannten Vorläufern, Zeitgenossen und Kritikern.

Research Seminar, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, 2020