Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire – UMR 7219, laboratoire SPHERE

H&P Bio is a seminar on the history of the life sciences, with no restrictions on theme or period. Its aim is to present themes and issues specific to the history of biology, distinguishing and linking them to the philosophy of biology and the life sciences.

Organisation : Laurent Loison (CNRS, SPHere), Caroline Angleraux (INSERM U 1253)

Sessions take place one or two Thursdays a month, from 10.30am to 12.00pm, in room 646A (Mondrian) of the Condorcet building, Université Paris Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante, 75013 Paris.
For those unable to attend, a zoom link will be provided with each session announcement. Contact: C. Angleraux

PROGRAM 2023-2024

• Thursday, 14th September 2023
  « Paleogenetics, a history of the study of ancient molecules », Flora Vachon - (Cermes 3, SPHERE, Paris)

• Thursday, 19th October 2023
  « Gradualism and insensitive variation: a forgotten debate in Darwinism », Mathilde Tahar - (Université de Lille)

• Thursday, 14th December 2023
  
  « Genealogy and heritability issues. Ronald Fisher, eugenics and analysis of variance », Luc Berlivet - (CNRS, Cermes 3)
  Abstract :
  Discussions and controversies regarding the assumed "heritability" level of various traits still constitute one of the main aspects of the public debate on what has been referred to as biological determinism. For example, the extremely positive reception by certain media outlets, including in France, of behavioral geneticists from psychology or cognitive sciences (notably observed in numerous pages dedicated by L’Express, Le Point, and Le Figaro to the successive release, in the spring of 2023, of French translations of works by Robert Plomin and Kathryn Page Harden). The political significance that the notion of heritability has gained, less obvious than it may seem, throughout the past century lies in its central role in scientific endeavors aiming to precisely assess the specific/relative roles of heredity and the environment. While heritability has been extensively used in animal genetics, its origin lies in a series of debates concerning the "weight" of heredity in the human species. Its calculation is based on an approach developed by R.A. Fisher in one of the most cited articles in scientific literature: "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance," in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 52 (part 2), 1918-19, p. 399-433.
  The purpose of my intervention will be to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the preparation, writing, and publication of this text, as well as some of its scientific and political uses. This will provide an opportunity to revisit Fisher’s eugenic involvement, which has recently been the subject of numerous public comments and political mobilizations. I will also discuss collective reflections initiated in 2018 by a French collective of researchers in biology, biomedicine, and social sciences, aiming to initiate a public discussion, within scientific arenas and beyond, regarding the various assumptions and biases associated with the "Fisher model" and "heritability."

• Thursday, 11th January 2024
  Ideology and Methodology in the Search for Protoplasmic Structure, 1850-1899 , Daniel Liu - (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München)
  Abstract :
  The theory that a fluid “protoplasm” was the material bearer of life took shape in the 1850s, and over the course of the 1860s it became a biological dogma on par with Darwinian evolutionary theory and the early cell theory. Historians and philosophers have correctly focused on the impact of protoplasm theory as a doctrine and for its impact in European cultural modernism. In this presentation I will focus instead on the attempts to study protoplasm itself, and the methodological debates generated by the theory, especially in the decades after 1869. I will show how the so-called “structure of protoplasm” became an intractable problem for microtechnique and microscopic methodology, precisely during the years of its greatest rhetorical success.

• [Cancelled] Thursday, 1st February 2024

• Thursday, 14th March 2024
  Pierre-Olivier Méthot - (Université Laval, Québec)
  « Darwinism is more than a scientific theory » : Jacques Roger and the history of Darwin’s evolution theory
  
  Abstract :
  A great specialist in 18th-century biological thought, and Buffon in particular, historian Jacques Roger (1920-1990) also wrote extensively on Lamarck, transformism, the history of geology and the methodology of the history of science. From the mid-1970s onwards, Roger devoted several texts and lectures to Darwin’s work, its reception and recent theoretical extensions, particularly sociobiology. In 1980, he also organized a colloquium on "R.A. Fisher and the history of population genetics". Two years later, he took part in the Charles Darwin Centenary Conference in Florence, alongside some of the greatest historians and philosophers of biology. Shortly before his death, Roger completed L’homme et l’évolution (1700-1989), a work that remains unpublished, but whose ideas he had outlined during a lecture on "Les grandes étapes de l’histoire de la théorie de l’évolution" at Geneva’s Faculty of Medicine in 1987.
  
  

• Thursday, 4th April 2024
  Presentism in medicine: the case of phage therapy, Thomas Bonnin

• Thursday, 16th May 2024
  « Mobilising science against epidemics. The management of cholera and plague in Japan in the era of the rise of bacteriology and imperial mobilisation », Shiori Nosaka - (EHESS-Cermes 3)

• Thursday, 13th June 2024
  « Rethinking Vital Function and Agency at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century », Joan Steigerwald - (York University, Canada)