Stefan Bernhardt-Radu

Profile

I studied environmental history and the history of medicine before embarking on a PhD in the history and philosophy of science.

In an era of calls for an ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’ (EES) that propose to go beyond reducing biology to evolution and genetics (or ‘the’ ‘Modern Synthesis’ [MS]), beyond, that is, naturally selected genes determining developmental processes, I show that we can be more thoughtful about which synthesis we choose to criticise. I argue that we should not read Huxley back from the 21^st century, nor should we read him so from his landmark book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942). Rather, Huxley’s aims and his ‘synthesis’ should be reconstructed from the place where he read and learnt biology: Oxford in the early twentieth-century.

More broadly, the literature on the history of biology has held that biology from that time was marked by a break between heredity and development. To accept this break, I claim, is to read Huxley backwards from the twenty-first century.

Using a variety of hitherto un- and less-explored sources, including undergraduate essays, reading notes, and correspondece, I weave together a different story. In it, we read about a group of Oxford biologists who rejected the view that life and its evolution can be reduced to the material parts of the cells (a trendy topic in the early 1900s). They instead defended an ‘epigenetic’ theoretical framework where life grew dynamically in time, relative to environmental contingencies, incorporating insights from genetics and cytology in that overall picture. I show that they trained Huxley to do the same. We read about Huxley’s endorsement of philosophical and biological views that hovered around what Huxley called the ‘epigenetic idea’ – such as an ‘organismal’ perspective, joined together with physiological ideas, in particular metabolism.

That central idea had several legacies in the story I tell. For one, we read about Huxley’s research at the Plymouth Marine Station with a formidable woman biologist who gave a name to a new experimental organism (Gammarus chevreuxi) which Huxley and his pupils used in their research centred on what Huxley would increasingly call ‘developmental physiology’. For another, Huxley’s multiple debates against his contemporaries – e.g. influential geneticists like William Bateson and T.H. Morgan – are better understood when seen from the perspective of Huxley’s time at Oxford. Last but not least, this view sheds light on Huxley’s long-lasting public image as a eugenicist and as the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) first director-general.

Research interests

History and Philosophy of Science

History and Philosophy of Biology & Evolution

History and Philosophy of Biological Individuals & Organisms

History of Eugenics

Environmental History

History of Medicine

Qualifications

• MA History of Medicine
• BA History