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Our understanding of the mutation process and how it impacts target populations has deepened steadily during the hundred years since 1919. Recent advances in engineering genetically determined social traits points towards the logical culmination of this knowledge.
In mid-19th century Britain the possibility of evolution and particularly the evolution of man from apes was vigorously contested. Among the leading antievolutionists was the celebrated anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen and among the leading defenders of evolution was Thomas Henry Huxley. The central dispute between them on human evolution was whether or not man's brain was fundamentally unique in having a hippocampus minor (known today as the calcar avis), a posterior horn in the lateral ventricle, and a posterior lobe. The author considers the background of this controversy, the origin and fate of the term hippocampus minor, why this structure became central to the question of human evolution, and how Huxley used it to support both Darwinism and the political ascendancy of Darwinians. The use of ventricular structures to distinguish humans from other animals appears to reflect an importance given to the ventricles that stretches back to ancient Greek medicine. This account illustrates both the extraordinary persistence of ideas in biology and the role of the political and social matrix in the study of the brain.
This article enumerates the congenital anomalies mentioned in the Bible and the Talmud, the two holiest and oldest texts in Judaism. Most of these conditions were described to regulate attributes that would disqualify a Priest from performing religious rituals in the Temple in Jerusalem. However, the cultural atmosphere in Biblical and Talmudical times was one in which physical deformity did not necessarily evoke a negative aesthetic reaction, an assumption of ill health, or the expectation of economic dependence.
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Since Malthus, several commentators have noted quantitative considerations in Plato's work, regarding him as a forerunner of demographic thinking. But how to explain several demographic contradictions between the Laws and the Republic? This paper brings out the consistency of Plato's thought, which cannot be demonstrated at a purely demographic level. His fascination for mathematics and the influence of the Pythagorean school should 1st be taken into account. However, the City, as an ideal concept and as a concrete social organization is the key to Plato's thought. Confronted with a basic problem of political philosophy, that of [power and justice, Plato proposed to restore the harmony between the City as a political body and the individual citizens. Hence policy measures which we regard unduly as eugenic and demographic, are in fact based on a conception of man quite different from ours.
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This case is part of a series of case studies used as an exercise within a program on research ethics education. The case involves research on genetic birth defects in a culturally distinct, closed religious community in which elders speak for the community. The case raises ethical issues of informed consent in such a setting; of collaboration with the community; of conflicts between the researchers' responsibilities to the community as a whole and to individual subjects; of the impact of the researcher's findings on the practices and values of the community and issues regarding how the researchers share findings with subjects and how the findings are stored.
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Focusing mostly on medicine, the author discusses evidence of the use of the experimental method in antiquity, particularly in the Western world. Instead of progressing toward a scientific revolution, however, the experimental method was abandoned after Galen. It is concluded that this was due to the shift of emphasis from physical to spiritual concerns fostered by Christianity.
Researchers are building their response to the attack by creationism on evolution as interest in Darwin memorabilia continues to grow.
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In 1873, Darwin replied to the second letter from a young Dutch admirer, Nicolaas Doedes, in which he had eagerly asked about Darwin's religious views. Darwin stated that he could not believe that "this grand and wondrous universe" had only arisen by chance, but also showed his doubts about the existence of God. In 1881, Darwin repeated a similar agnostic view. After the death of Darwin in 1882, Doedes incurred the wrath of Francis Darwin by publishing the confession of his father in a Dutch freethinking journal, thus revealing the sensitivity of the information Darwin shared with Doedes.