Degeneration, Regeneration and the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics: The Steinach-Kammerer Collaboration

University Of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro NC

Investigators

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the cultures of Europe and America eagerly and often used the biological world as a metaphor for explaining the social and psychological. Among the most prominent of the biological concepts used to structure society was the concept of degeneration. Degeneration was believed to be a fundamental physiological process that produced the gradual decay of life, a process by which inherently progressivist processes such as evolution, growth and development, could be reversed by an equally powerful and immanent process of decay. Conceived in terms of heredity and physiology, the concept dominated society during an unprecedented period of growth in biology, and by the1890s, the full authority of the science of degeneration had been extended from biology to people. Many-- homosexuals, the mentally retarded and mentally ill, non-European indigenous cultures, alcoholics, the poor, women-were considered degenerate. The same period also saw much scientific analysis of regeneration, degeneration's less well-known biological opposite. But there were few social 'regenerates': the concept of regeneration rarely saw social application. Analyses of the socially degenerate were linked to the study of heredity. Social scientists and policy makers believed that degenerate individuals displayed damaged and progressively deteriorating heredity. And their damaged heredity, it was thought, could contaminate their children and, indeed, the entire human species. This assumption was widely associated with belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, a concept hotly debated in biology from 1880-1930. Within the sciences of heredity, however, debates on the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the process of degeneration were matched by debates on the process of regeneration. But most physicians, psychiatrists and social thinkers ignored regeneration in their efforts to save humankind. The scientists working from 1904-1925 at the Institute for Experimental Biology in Vienna were an exception. The proposed project will explore the social, political and intellectual influences that led to their emphasis on regeneration and its application to society. The proposal focuses on the collaboration between Paul Kammerer and Eugen Steinach. Their research dealt with sexuality, a traditional bastion of the concept of degeneration. The emphasis will be that the rejection of nationalism, class, and race theory associated with Kammerer's socialist and communist views led to an equally strong emphasis on regeneration produced by the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He viewed use inheritance as a process that could counter the negative effects of degeneration and, through regeneration, restore and improve society. Kammerer and Steinach's research on climate and masculinity was an empirical attempt to enact this restoration. Few issues in science have seen more debate among both experts and policy makers than the nature-nurture issue. Growth in contemporary knowledge of genetics and the publication of the genome project have once again placed these issues in the forefront, as several approaches now challenge the relationship between genotype and phenotype implied in Crick's central dogma. The word is no longer used, but, as philosopher Ian Hacking notes, the degeneracy research program is still in evidence: "Biological stigmata of degeneracy are back, not as Lombrosian physiognomy, but as serotonin depletion or genetic markers. . . . Only in one respect is . . . the degeneracy program significantly different from earlier days. It comes from the cachet of genes" (2001, p. 152). Complicated scientific and ethical issues are raised by the application of biology to important human problems. One of the most informative ways to address them is through the historical perspective offered by thinkers who illustrate how social influences have altered the solution of similar problems in the past.