1. Just when biology emerged as legitimate and autonomous science has been a contentious issue for historians of biology. Though the term was coined in the early years of the nineteenth century, anautonomous science of life, I will argue, was not as strongly defensible until evolution was articulated. Only with evolution, which defied reduction to physics and chemistry because of its metaphysical components, at the same time that itintroduced a causo-mechanical agent for evolutionary change, could biology claim autonomy. This took place in Thomas Henry Huxley's England, and most likely in the thought of Huxley himself, who adopted the term “evolution.” Huxley had the following to say on the emergence of biology: “the conscious attempt to construct a complete science of Biology hardly dates further back than Treviranus and Lamarck, at the beginning of this century, while it has received its strongest impulse, in our own day, from Darwin” (The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, 4th ed. [London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1884], p. 4). Huxley may be viewed as a chief discipline builder for biology. My argument is supported by the recent work of Joseph Caron, “‘Biology’ in the Life Sciences: A Historiographical Cotribution,”Hist. Sci., 26 (1988), 223–268; see also Gerald Geison,Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). One could make a strong argument that Haeckel was as instrumental to biological discipline building in the German context.
2. TobyAppel, “Organizing Biology: The American Society of Naturalists and Its ‘Affiliated Societies,’ 1883–1923,” inThe American Development of Biology, ed. RonaldRainger, Keith R.Benson, and JaneMaienschein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 87–120.
3. Founded in 1947.
4. Hamilton Cravens has pointed out that the years 1920–50 also witnessed movements to support interdisciplinary scholarship in America. During this period institutional and intellectual networks were assembled to lend an increasing feeling of unity. See HamiltonCravens, “Behaviourism Revisited: Developmental Science, the Maturation Theory, and the Biological Basis of the Human Mind, 1920s–1950s,” inThe American Expansion of Biology, ed. Keith R.Benson, JaneMaienschein, and RonaldRainger (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 133–163.
5. This excerpt is taken from the preface to the first edition (1957) of George Gaylord Simpson, Colin S. Pittendrigh, and Lewis Tiffany,Life: An Introduction to Biology; reprinted in George Gaylord Simpson and William S. Beck,Life: An Introduction to Biology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965), p. v.