Two new papers of mine 18 Aug 2009 Deflating genetic information – in which I argue that the only sense in which genes have “information” is the causal sense of specificity Darwin on species and heredity – in which I reprise some blog entries on this site about myths of Darwin. Both are under review, and hence neither are final or citeable. Epistemology Genetics History Metaphysics Philosophy Science Species concept Systematics
Biology Species: The evolution of the idea 5 Aug 2017 I have completed and submitted the manuscript now for my revision of Species: A history of the idea, now renamed Species: the evolution of the idea. I am publishing it with CRC Press, and it is due out next year. In addition to updating and revising the historical sections of… Read More
Philosophy A poignant obituary 18 Apr 2009 Geoffrey Midgley’s obit is in the Independent today. A comment online is, I suspect, from one of his sons. Read More
Administrative Are you a HPS scholar? 30 Apr 2011 If so I invite you to join our group blog Whewell’s Ghost, even if you already blog. You can either write for WG directly or repost some or all of your blog’s posts with alink back to your home blog, thereby increasing your readership. Contact me or the other WG… Read More
How many papers are you working on at the same time? Your output is prodigious. What exactly does “under review” mean?
I usually have around four of five projects ongoing (see my “What I’m Working On” page here). However right now is rather unusual because I put a half dozen projects on hold while I finished my books. So I’m clearing the decks with all those “in the drawer” projects. Some of them date back ten years. I must revise my functions paper too. “Under review” means I submitted them to a journal, but have received no response or acceptance. “Forthcoming” means they are accepted but unpublished.
A possible correction: you propose that the term “Lamarckian” for those who think heredity is acquired by an individual organism during the parental generation and then passed on to progeny, was coined by August Weismann (1904): Bowler’s ”Evolution” p. 236 says that “neo-Lamarckism” became popular in the 1890s, and appeared with that meaning in “Darwin and after Darwin” by Romanes, from 1892. http://www.archive.org/stream/darwinandafterd04morggoog/darwinandafterd04morggoog_djvu.txt p. 12 Romanes claims to have coined “Neo-Darwinian” and “Ultra-Darwinian” for Weismann’s ideas, p. 13 he turns “to the so-called ‘Neo-Lamarckian’ school of the United States” and says “members of this school believe that much greater importance ought to be assigned to the inherited effects of use and disuse than was assigned to these agencies by Darwin.” (ocr errors corrected) p. 53 he mentions “the self-styled Neo-Lamarckians” This goes a bit against Bowler’s p. 231 statement that some early advocates of the position didn’t realise that Lamarck had pioneered the idea, and a U.S. account of Lamarck and his writings was not published until 1901. So, neo-Lamarckism with the inherited use and disuse characteristics meaning goes back to the 1890s, it may have been coined by Weismann. Not sure if dropping the “neo” is a big issue.
What we now think of as Lamarckism is what the neo-Lamarckians pushed as the alternative to Darwinian variation: acquired inheritance. This became the central interpretation at about the time Romanes wrote. Weismann wrote a bit before Romanes, and Romanes was responding to him.