Between holism and reductionism : organismic inheritance and neo-Kantian biological tradition in Britain and the USA, 1890-1940

Anglophone biology at the start of the twentieth century tends to be remembered as ambitiously
reductionist. Yet it was also a time that saw the flourishing of a now largely forgotten Kantian
tradition. Drawing on archival as well as printed sources, this dissertation charts the
dissemination and appropriation of Kant's bio-philosophy in the UK and the USA in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. It was a tradition flexible enough to change as it encountered new
institutional and disciplinary contexts, yet stable enough to unite an international community of
biologists who were often in contact with each other and endorsed each others' work. The lives
and researches of some representative exponents of this community are examined in detail:
among the British biologists, J. S. Haldane, D' Arcy W. Thompson, E. S. Russell and J. H.
Woodger; among American biologists, F. R. Lillie, E. E. Just, C. M. Child and W. E. Ritter.
These men not only accepted a number of core tenets characterizing organismal biology but
appealed to them in criticizing Weismann's germ-plasm hypothesis, Mendelian genetics, and
other forms of what they saw as naive reductionism and simplistic mechanism. Moreover - and
in contrast with the socially conservative fate of Kantian biology in its German homeland -
their scientific views often became intertwined with support for progressive or leftist political
doctrines, eugenics included.