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Summary History of Biology - Lecture 4
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History of Biology - Lecture 4
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History of Biology – Lecture 4: The experimental style in biology28-02-18
The experimental style in biology:
- Ideal: explaining the world through laws, testing theories.
- Finding knowledge: through experimentation, using instruments.
- Performed in specific organizations: laboratories
- Validity is a matter of competently performed, reproducible experiments.
- With important social/economical applications for 19 th c biology in new
industries:
o Medicine: vaccines, bacteriology
o Food production and food processing
o Others..
Roots of the experimental style in biology, are: alchemy and instruments.
What is a laboratory?
A controlled environment:
- Excludes factors considered disruptive and monitor conditions inside
- As ‘nature’ is brought into the lab and is ‘questioned’ through the use of
instruments which results in registrations aimed at reproduction outside the
lab, in different circumstances.
A lab can be seen as ‘a machine for taming nature’.
Roots: alchemists’ workshops:
Precursor of labs were alchemists’ workshops;
- Alchemists introduced laboratory techniques that are still used today.
- Alchemists created e.g. better metallurgy.
Alchemy: tension between micro- and macro cosmos.
Alchemists’ experiments always had to be performed with e.g. the right phase of the
moon alchemists believed that these kinds of factors would influence experiments.
Instruments became crucial to a laboratory.
Roots: the 17th c. experimental style in ‘natural philosophy’:
In the 17th c. experiments became a celebrated way to create and test theories
places to display in public certain theories.
For biology, laboratories became important in the 19 th c.:
- Newton’s experiment with two prisms.
The home of experiments: Academies:
Laboratories came to universities quite late; people had to go to specific academies,
in order to study science.
Experiments were not immediately accepted as means to achieving knowledge
the new style met with resistance.
Instruments became crucial:
e.g. airpumps or microscopes.
, Two examples on the invention and importance of instruments:
1. Robert Hooke (1635-1703):
- He was a royalist in the English Civil War.
o Loyal to the king got support from the king.
Hooke as an instrument maker:
- Hooke was versatile: an experimentalist, architect, inventor of clocks.
- He tried but failed to live from patents.
- Prepared demonstrations, made telescopes.
o But draft was less appreciated than theory.
- Invented the double-lensed microscope.
Hooke’s observations:
Hooke’s microscope allowed for exceptional observations, such as of cells or insects.
Hooke eventually became a proud full member of the Royal Society.
2. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723):
- Traded in cloth and textile
- Needed a magnifying glass in order to improve cloth quality, which led to
the microscope.
Antonie improved magnifying glasses saw micro-organisms and nobody believed
this. The British delegation came over in order to see prove, after which
Leeuwenhoek became member of the royal society.
- His microscopes could magnify hundreds of times.
- Van Leeuwenhoek believed in animalcule.
Animalcule: the organism was already developed and pre-formed in sperm cells, or in
the egg cell.
Critics: organism grows gradually, from a simpler form: epigenesis.
Preformationism vs. epigenesis (genetics vs. epigenetics).
Origin of biomechanics: Giovanni Borelli
- Calculated forces
- Made reproductions of the body, in order to understand how it works (e.g. arm
model)
The old answer: vitalism
- Spontaneous generation of life, from dead matter.
Isaac Newton (1643-1727):
- Prism experiment
- English physician
- Laws of Newton
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