The history of Ervin Bauer's publications on the theory of life.

Ervin Bauer (1890-1938) made historical contributions to contemporary biology, provided a new definition of life, defined the contents of theoretical biology. He worked in different countries, perturbed by deep historical events. These historical events necessarily impacted his fate and finally led to the violent loss of his life and the life of his wife. His work and with it his theory of life had a no less complicated history than the history of his personal life. Bauer's main work "Theoretical Biology" was published in 1935 in Russian. The author and his wife Stefánia became victims of the Great Purge. They were executed in 1938, all their publications were banned and most copies of "Theoretical Biology" destroyed. Ervin and Stefánia Bauer were rehabilitated in 1956 but renewed publication of Bauer's works was delayed. The first reprint edition of "Theoretical Biology" of 1967 was not in Russian, but was a translation into Hungarian, the native language of Bauer. The first Russian reprint of "Theoretical Biology", in which the original Russian chapters are followed by short English summaries, was published in Hungary in 1982. This edition was prepared by Hungarian and Russian scientists. The best-known Russian edition of "Theoretical Biology" was published in 2002 in St. Petersburg. A complete English translation of Bauer's main work "Theoretical Biology" is still outstanding.

The emergence of theoretical biology: Two fundamental works of Ervin Bauer (1890-1938) in English translation.

Ervin Bauer (1890-1938) outlined the paradigm of theoretical biology from the perspective of biophysics and bioenergetics. His molecular-based biological theory is centered on the principle of sustainable non-equilibrium, which is continuously produced and maintained by all biological systems throughout their life. Ervin Bauer became the victim of Stalin's Great Terror. Here we present two of the fundamental works of Ervin Bauer in English translation: the paper "The definition of living beings on the basis of their thermodynamic properties, and the fundamental biological principles that follow from it" published in Naturwissenschaften (1920) and the excerpts from his magnum opus "Theoretical Biology" (1935). These works became a bibliographical rarity. A complete English translation of "Theoretical Biology" is an important task for the future.

Life and fate of Ervin Bauer (1890-1938), the eminent scholar and foundational theoretical biologist.

Ervin Bauer (1890-1938) was the first to build a general molecular-based biological theory. He defined the basic principles of theoretical biology from a thermodynamic perspective, focusing on the capacity of biological systems to produce and support the state of sustainable non-equilibrium. His central work "Theoretical Biology" (1935) was written long before modern advances in molecular biology, genetics, and information theory. Ervin Bauer and his wife Stefánia were executed in Stalin's Great Terror. This paper presents a brief introduction to Ervin Bauer's life and includes his short biography.

Ervin Bauer's concept of biological thermodynamics and its different evaluations.

The development of biological concepts in the 19th century was followed by the emergence of approaches to formulate the principles of theoretical biology. Ervin Bauer in 1920, and in more detail in 1935, suggested the basic principle that can be accepted as the fundamental law of biology: "The living systems are never in equilibrium; at the expense of their free energy they constantly perform work to avoid the equilibrium required by the laws of physics and chemistry under existing external conditions." Many researchers interpreted biology with the help of physical quantities but Bauer was the first to build a general and already molecular-based biological theory. The main point of Bauer's concept is not the non-equilibrium, but the function of organism producing the non-equilibrium, the capacity for self-adaptation, and the power for changing its functions in such a way that the system gets the state of non-equilibrium always anew. We will discuss Bauer's theorem, the contemporaneous objections, and the divergent opinions about his work by succeeding generations of scientists.

The institutionalisation of biology in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1866-1894 / A institucionalização da biologia na British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1866-1894

Abstract Biology, like most scientific disciplines, emerged in the nineteenth century. However, disciplinary institutionalisation processes are not linear; a concept can be proposed, but not develop. Biology originated in the presence of established traditions such as anatomy, physiology, botany, and zoology, which represent the thematic and practical diversity under which it was understood. Based on the records of the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the process by which biology emerged will be described. We will also recount how the discipline underwent changes throughout the century, where contrasting methodologies and theories were emphasized at different times.

Resumo A biologia, assim como a maioria das disciplinas, surgiu no século XIX. No entanto, os processos de institucionalização das disciplinas não são lineares; um conceito pode ser proposto, mas não ser desenvolvido. A biologia originou-se em meio a tradições estabelecidas, como a anatomia, fisiologia, botânica e zoologia, que representam a diversidade temática e prática sob a qual era compreendida. O processo do qual a biologia emergiu será descrito com base nos registros dos encontros anuais da British Association for the Advancement of Science. Relatamos também como a disciplina passou por modificações ao longo do século, em que metodologias e teorias contrastantes ganharam evidência em diferentes momentos.

The third-way third wave and the enduring appeal of bioexceptionalism.

We may induce from a longue durée examination of Anglo-American History of Biology that the impulse to reject reduc - tionism persists and will continue to percolate cyclically. This impulse I deem "bioexceptionalism": an intuition, stance, attitude, or activating metaphor that the study of living beings requires explanations in addition to exclusively bottom-up causal explanations and the research programs constructed upon that bottom-up philosophical foundation by non-organismal biologists, biochemists, and biophysicists - the explanations, in other words, that Wadding - ton (1977) humorously termed the "Conventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group, or cowdung." Bioexceptionalism might indicate an ontological assertion, like vitalism. Yet most often in the last century, it has been defined by a variety of methodological or even sociological positions. On three occasions in the interval from the late nineteenth century to the present, a small but significant group of practicing biologists and allies in other research disciplines in the UK and US adopted a species of bioexceptionalism, rejecting the dominant explanatory philosophy of reductionistic mechanism. Yet they also rejected the vitalist alternative. We can refer to their subset of bioexceptionalism as a "Third-Way" approach, though participants at the time called it by a variety of names, including "organicism." Today's appeals to a Third-Way are but the latest eruption of this older dissensus and retain at least heuristic value apart from any explanatory success.

Organic form and evolution: the morphological problem in twentieth-century italian biology.

This paper examines the efforts in evolution research to understand form's structure that developed in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it analyzes how the organic approach in biology and the study of organic form merged in the morphological research agendas of Giuseppe Colosi (1892-1975) and Giuseppe Levi (1872-1965). These biologists sought to understand form's inner composition and structure. First, I will briefly outline the morphological practices and frameworks used to study form changes and structures in the early twentieth century. Second, I will discuss what the Italian biologist Antonio Pensa (1874-1970) called the morphological problem. Third, I will examine Colosi's response to the morphological problem. Fourth, I will analyze Levi's morphological research program. As a result, this paper paves the way for a more nuanced and varied picture of the so-called "organicism movement" in the first half of the twentieth century by calling attention to morphology as practiced in Italian-speaking biology. In fact, alongside dialectical materialism and holistic biology, two of the main strands within organicism, the architectural approach to evolution as practiced in Italy and elsewhere had a profound impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century organicism specifically and on evolutionary biology generally.

From Organismic Biology as History and Philosophy to the History and Philosophy of Biology-the Work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in the German Context.

In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions-neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie-were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the "Spalten" and "Fugen"-the continuities and discontinuities-that this tradition left there.

An Epistemology of Scientific Practice: Positioning Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in Twentieth-Century History and Philosophy of Biology.

In this article, I first outline the professionalization of the history and philosophy of biology from the 1960s onward. Then, I attempt to situate the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger with respect to this field. On the one hand, Rheinberger was marginal with respect to Anglo-American philosophical tradition; on the other, he was very influential in building up an integrated history and philosophy of the life sciences community at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and beyond. This marginality results, I suggest, from three main sources: his use of concepts coming from continental traditions in the study of the life sciences, which are foreign to Anglo-American philosophers of science; his focus on practices instead of theories; and his research trajectory as a molecular biologist, which led him to be critical of disciplinary boundaries. As a first step in situating and historicizing Rheinberger's trajectory, this article invites comparative studies and calls for a history of "continental philosophy of biology" in the twentieth century.

The Kantian account of mechanical explanation of natural ends in eighteenth and nineteenth century biology.

The rise of the mechanistic worldview in the seventeenth century had a major impact on views of biological generation. Many seventeenth century naturalists rejected the old animist thesis. However, the alternative view of gradual mechanistic formation in embryology didn't convince either. How to articulate the peculiarity of life? Researchers in the seventeenth century proposed both "animist" and mechanistic theories of life. In the eighteenth century again a controversy in biology arose regarding the explanation of generation. Some adhered to the view that life is a physical property of matter (e.g. Buffon), others saw living entities as the result of the development of pre-existing germs (e.g. Bonnet). Naturalists, lacked a convincing account that could guide their research. In interaction with leading naturalists of his time Immanuel Kant articulated an approach to explaining generation. Kant's account, delineated in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the power of judgment) (1790), is a combination of Newtonian non-reductionist mechanism in explanation, and a concept of natural end comparable to Stahl's formal conception of organic bodies. It consists of two claims: a) in biology only mechanical explanation is explanatory, and b) living entities contain some original organisation, which is mechanically unexplainable. In the nineteenth century this approach influenced naturalists as Müller, Virchow, and Von Baer, in their physiological research. Dissatisfied with a sheer mechanistic or, on the other hand, a sheer teleological approach, they appreciated the Kantian account of mechanical explanation of natural ends. In Germany, in the second halve of the nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel reopened the debate about abiogenesis, which still continuous.

Cycles and circulation: a theme in the history of biology and medicine.

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent 'canonical icons', cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.

Croizat's dangerous ideas: practices, prejudices, and politics in contemporary biogeography.

The biogeographic contributions of Léon Croizat (1894-1982) and the conflictive relationships with his intellectual descendants and critics are analysed. Croizat's panbiogeography assumed that vicariance is the most important biogeographic process and that dispersal does not contribute to biogeographic patterns. Dispersalist biogeographers criticized or avoided mentioning panbiogeography, especially in the context of the "hardening" of the Modern Synthesis. Researchers at the American Museum of Natural History associated panbiogeography with Hennig's phylogenetic systematics, creating cladistic biogeography. On the other hand, a group of New Zealand biologists formalized Croizat's original concepts and soon began arguing with cladistic biogeographers over the relative merits of their approaches. In Latin America, panbiogeography and cladistic biogeography were incorporated as parts of an integrative approach. A recent development, molecular panbiogeography, is based on the use of molecular phylogenetic data. The current practice shows that some authors insist on considering panbiogeography as the only appropriate approach and vicariance as the only relevant process, whereas others accept Croizat's dictum "Earth and life evolve together" as a useful guide to understanding broad, general patterns, but recognize that dispersal also contributes substantially to biotic assembly. The framework of integrative pluralism allows to explain the complexities of the biogeographic processes involved in biotic assembly without the need of unification on a large scale. This historical analysis intersects with the existing historiography of the Modern Synthesis and may provide some insights on the dynamics of integrative pluralism, which may be especially relevant in the current development of the Extended Synthesis.