HISTORY AND STORIES OF LIFE
- Overview
- Assessment methods
- Learning objectives
- Contents
- Bibliography
- Delivery method
- Teaching methods
- Contacts/Info
No particular preliminary knowledge is required.
Only a final examination will take place. Some specific questions will be posed to the student in order to ascertain the acquisition of the above described knowledge and abilities. The final grade will be determined by the degree of acquisition of such expected knowledge and skills, with the following criteria which take properly into account of the interdisciplinary perspective characterizing the Degree Course: knowledge of the subjects dealt with (40%); synthetic and analytic skills (20%); ability to formulate autonomously a properly grounded critical judgment (20%); expression and language command (20%).
The very fast technical-scientific advances between the end of 20th and the beginning of 21th centuries, still going on, made Life Sciences (Biology) gain very often the center of the stage in public debates in which themes of great relevance both for individual and for society are discussed. Their understanding cannot leave aside knowledge of the history of ideas that followed each other, among which a particular role has been played, and it stills continues to be so, by the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin in the second half of the 19th century.
Peculiar of biology, in particular of the so-called “evolutionary biology”, is on the other hand the fact of being a “historical science”, since life is history or, better, histories: history of the sequence of living beings starting form about 4 billions of years ago (“biological evolution” or “phylogenesis”, history of the reproduction and development of each new individual (“ontogenesis” or, as it has been called for a long time from 17th to the end of 19th century, “evolution”), history of the appearance of life on Earth.
Chief aim of the course is thus to critically analyze the history of the ideas on “history/ies of life” that have been proposed from the end of 17th century to date, in a bi-directional journey between present and past: what the French historian Marc Bloch has called “judiciously regressive method”.
More, it will be discussed if and how this historical approach can be extended from events and ideas to the study of life itself, on which on the other hand many stories (narratives) have been written across the centuries, lately based on Darwinian ideas. We will then be able to possibly draw a parallel between the “historian’s craft” (Marc Bloch) and the work of the biologist, thus favoring a dialogue between scientific disciplines and the humanities within and outside the Degree course.
Among the expected learning outcomes, we point out to:
• knowledge of the meaning and of the historical development of the ideas on the evolution of living beings and of the related main biological concepts;
• critical knowledge of the concepts of regularity (determinism) and contingency (randomness) in their declination within biology and history;
• ability to transfer and integrate concepts, tools, methodologies between biology and history;
• ability to critically interpret current debates in which modern evolutionary biology plays or is expected to play a significant role.
The “meaning” of the course can be nicely summarized by some citations: “Biology sits in between the mountain of the physico-mathematical construction and the depth of the investigations in human historical sciences. By the experimental methods and the nature of observation, it is a science of nature, yet the relevance of history in its understanding opens the way to the peculiar analyses proper to historical disciplines, beginning with the relevance of knowledge (and measurement) of past events.” (Giuseppe Longo (2018) How the future depends on past and rare events in the history of life. Foundations of Science 23:443-474)
“To grasp meaning in our present, we need what many scientists and social scientists […] like to avoid: history, history, and again history, the neglected story of how we came to think in certain ways and rule out others […] archeological mission to excavate and problematize the sources of the present […]. (Maurizio Meloni, Political Biology. Science and Social Values from Eugenics to Epigenetics, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)
The course is divided in two interconnected, also from a temporal point of view, parts: the first part will deal with the history of the ideas on evolution in relation to the history of ideas on development and on heredity; the second part, consisting in approximately bi-weekly lectures, will progressively deal, whenever possible from an historiographical point of view, topics fueling contemporary debates where biology, particularly evolutionary biology, plays a key role. The main theme of historicity of biology will go through both parts, in a continuing dialogue with the ideas exposed by the historian Marc Bloch in his “The Historian’s craft”.
A)First part (approximately 40 h)
- Comparative anatomy and the chain of being: a static nature.
- The problem of generation and preformism.
- The idea of epigenesis and the birth of new species by means of hybridization.
- Buffon and Blumenbach: species degeneration and races.
- Lamarck and species transformation.
- The transformist debate in France and Great Britain in the first half of XIX century.
- Darwin and his theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
- The problem of variation according to Darwin.
- The difficulties of evolutionary theory, which becomes progressively more “non-darwinian”?
- Darwin’s anthropological works.
- Neo-darwinism in the rest of Europe between 19th and 20th century.
- Mendel, the birth of genetics and mutationism.
- Neo-Lamarckism
- The New Synthesis in the ‘30s of 20th century
- The Molecular Revolution and its integration in the new synthesis
- Evolutionary Developmental Biology (“Evo-devo”)
- Towards an “extended” Darwinian synthesis in 21th century?
B)Second part (approximately 24 h)
- Non-living/Living and the historical critics of “origins”
- Plant/Animal
- The role of chance in evolution
- An historical re-reading of Lamarck: not only heredity of acquired characters
- Lysenko and “Lamarckian” ideas in Stalin’s Soviet Union: a re-opening of the question?
- Darwinian ideas and eugenics’ eternal comeback.
- Animal/Human
- If Darwin did not formulate his theory, if Mendel had not been “re-discovered”: counterfactuals as a method of historical and scientific inquiry?
For each lecture, a specific detailed bibliography, referring to the course texts and to the supplementary material made available, will be published on the e-learning site as the course is progressing.
Course formative goals will be reached by means of lectures (for a total of 64 hours). Lectures will analyze course contents in an interactive way with students as well, by means of discussions and debates in the classroom. Lectures will be flanked, if it is the case, by some seminars dedicated to a closer examination of some topics, with students’ participation to conferences and meetings of particular interest, if any, for the topics treated during the course. A visit to the Civic Museum of Natural History in Milan is also planned during a weekend.
Students are welcome to come over anytime, by appointment to be fixed via e-mail, to the lecturer's office in the Departmental (DiSTA) building (via J.H.Dunant 3, Varese, third ("red") floor).