Lidwell-Durnin John
Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, History Faculty, Oxford University, 41-47 George Street, Oxford, UK.
J Hist Biol. 2020 Mar;53(1):81-103. doi: 10.1007/s10739-019-09568-3.
In the nineteenth century, farmers, doctors, and the wider public shared a family of questions and anxieties concerning heredity. Questions over whether injuries, mutilations, and bad habits could be transmitted to offspring had existed for centuries, but found renewed urgency in the popular and practical scientific press from the 1820s onwards. Sometimes referred to as "Lamarckism" or "the inheritance of acquired characteristics," the potential for transmitting both desirable and disastrous traits to offspring was one of the most pressing scientific questions of the nineteenth century. As I argue in this paper, Carpenter's religious commitments to abolition and the temperance movement shaped his understanding of heredity. But this also committed him to a body of evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was coming under criticism for being untrustworthy. Carpenter used his popular treatises on physiology to promote these older, familiar ideas about heredity because they provided vital means of arguing for the unity of mankind and the hereditary dangers of intemperance. While early nineteenth century physiology has been seen by some historians as a challenge to religious authority, given its potentially materialist accounts of the body and the actions of the soul, this paper demonstrates how the missionary and institutional activities of the Unitarian church were ideologically supported by Carpenter's publications.
在19世纪，农民、医生以及广大公众对遗传问题有着一系列共同的疑问和担忧。关于损伤、残缺以及不良习惯是否会遗传给后代的问题已经存在了几个世纪，但从19世纪20年代起，在大众和实用科学出版物中，这些问题又有了新的紧迫性。有时被称为“拉马克主义”或“后天特征的遗传”，将优良和灾难性特征遗传给后代的可能性是19世纪最紧迫的科学问题之一。正如我在本文中所论证的，卡彭特对废奴运动和禁酒运动的宗教承诺塑造了他对遗传的理解。但这也使他执着于后天特征遗传的一系列证据，而这些证据正因不可靠而受到批评。卡彭特利用他关于生理学的通俗论文来推广这些关于遗传的古老而为人熟知的观点，因为它们为论证人类的统一性以及酗酒的遗传危害提供了至关重要的手段。虽然一些历史学家认为19世纪早期的生理学对宗教权威构成了挑战，因为它对身体和灵魂的行为有潜在的唯物主义解释，但本文展示了公理会教堂的传教和机构活动如何在意识形态上得到卡彭特出版物的支持。
