21 found
Order:
Disambiguations
Mary P. Winsor [12]Mary Winsor [6]Mary Pickard Winsor [4]
  1. The Creation of the Essentialism Story: An Exercise in Metahistory.Mary P. Winsor - 2006 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28 (2):149 - 174.
    The essentialism story is a version of the history of biological classification that was fabricated between 1953 and 1968 by Ernst Mayr, who combined contributions from Arthur Cain and David Hull with his own grudge against Plato. It portrays pre-Darwinian taxonomists as caught in the grip of an ancient philosophy called essentialism, from which they were not released until Charles Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species. Mayr's motive was to promote the Modern Synthesis in opposition to the typology of idealist morphologists; (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   55 citations  
  2. Non-essentialist methods in pre-Darwinian taxonomy.Mary P. Winsor - 2003 - Biology and Philosophy 18 (3):387-400.
    The current widespread belief that taxonomic methods used before Darwin were essentialist is ill-founded. The essentialist method developed by followers of Plato and Aristotle required definitions to state properties that are always present. Polythetic groups do not obey that requirement, whatever may have been the ontological beliefs of the taxonomist recognizing such groups. Two distinct methods of forming higher taxa, by chaining and by examplar, were widely used in the period between Linnaeus and Darwin, and both generated polythetic groups. Philosopher (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   52 citations  
  3.  6
    Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum.Mary P. Winsor - 1991 - University of Chicago Press.
    Reading the Shape of Nature vividly recounts the turbulent early history of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the contrasting careers of its founder Louis Agassiz and his son Alexander. Through the story of this institution and the individuals who formed it, Mary P. Winsor explores the conflicting forces that shaped systematics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Debates over the philosophical foundations of classification, details of taxonomic research, the young institution's financial struggles, and the personalities (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  4. Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life: Issues of Nineteenth-Century Science.Mary P. Winsor - 1978 - Journal of the History of Biology 11 (1):219-220.
  5.  42
    Linaeus' biology was not essentialist.Mary P. Winsor - 2006 - Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 93 (1):2-7.
    The current picture of the history of taxonomy incorporates A. J. Cain's claim that Linnaeus strove to apply the logical method of definition taught by medieval followers of Aristotle. Cain's argument does not stand up to critical examination. Contrary to some published statements, there is no evidence that Linnaeus ever studied logic. His use of the words “genus” and “species” ruined the meaning they had in logic, and “essential” meant to him merely “taxonomically useful.” The essentialism story, a narrative that (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  6. Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum.Mary P. Winsor & Ronald Rainger - 1995 - Journal of the History of Biology 28 (1):151-166.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  7.  89
    The English Debate on Taxonomy and Phylogeny, 1937-1940.Mary Pickard Winsor - 1995 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 17 (2):227 - 252.
    Between 1937 and 1940 the Taxonomic Principles Committee of the newly-founded Association for the Study of Systematics in Relation to General Biology (later the Systematics Association) attempted to define the relationship between evolution and taxonomy. The people who took part in the discussion were W.T. Calman, C.R.P. Diver, J.S.L. Gilmour, J.S. Huxley, W.D. Lang, J.R. Norman, R. Melville, O.W. Richards, M.A. Smith, T.A. Sprague, H. Hamshaw Thomas, W.B. Turrill, B.P. Uvarov, A.F. Watkins, E.I. White, and A.J. Wilmott. Most of the (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  8.  46
    Cain on Linnaeus: the scientist-historian as unanalysed entity.Mary P. Winsor - 2001 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32 (2):239-254.
    Zoologist A. J. Cain began historical research on Linnaeus in 1956 in connection with his dissatisfaction over the standard taxonomic hierarchy and the rules of binomial nomenclature. His famous 1958 paper ‘Logic and Memory in Linnaeus's System of Taxonomy’ argues that Linnaeus was following Aristotle's method of logical division without appreciating that it properly applies only to ‘analysed entities’ such as geometric figures whose essential nature is already fully known. The essence of living things being unanalysed, there is no basis (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  9.  33
    “I would sooner die than give up”: Huxley and Darwin's deep disagreement.Mary P. Winsor - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-36.
    Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  10.  25
    Darwin’s dark matter: utter extinction.Mary Pickard Winsor - 2023 - Annals of Science 80 (4):357-389.
    Species that died without leaving descendants Darwin called ‘utterly extinct’. They far outnumber the ancestors of all living things, so they resemble the dark matter of modern cosmology, which far outweighs visible matter. He realized in 1837 that their absence is what creates the groups in a natural classification. In his Notebook B he combined the idea that species multiply with the idea that ancestors' relatives must mostly be extinct. The fossil Megatherium was utterly extinct. The iconic branching ‘I think’ (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11.  30
    Eloge: Ernst Mayr, 1904–2005.Mary Winsor - 2005 - Isis 96 (3):415-418.
  12.  27
    J. B. S. Haldane's Darwinism in its religious context.Gordon McOuat & Mary P. Winsor - 1995 - British Journal for the History of Science 28 (2):227-231.
    Early in this century, only a few biologists accepted that natural selection was the chief cause of evolution, until the independent calculations of John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964), Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher demonstrated that ideal populations subject to Mendel's laws could behave as Darwin had said they would. Evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith, a student of Haldane's, has raised the question of why Haldane, who was no naturalist, took up the subject of evolution, and he suggests that the (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  13.  61
    The J. H. B. Bookshelf.Ronald Rainger, Joy Harvey, Mary P. Winsor, Joe Cain & Keith R. Benson - 1997 - Journal of the History of Biology 30 (2):303-315.
  14.  27
    The Joint Atlantic Seminar in History of Biology.Mary Winsor & Leonard Wilson - 1999 - Isis 90 (S2):S219-S225.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15.  18
    The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to OparinJohn Farley.Mary Winsor - 1980 - Isis 71 (1):163-164.
  16.  72
    The Practitioner of Science: Everyone Her Own Historian. [REVIEW]Mary P. Winsor - 2001 - Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2):229-245.
    Carl Becker's classic 1931 address "Everyman his own historian" holds lessons for historians of science today. Like the professional historians he spoke to, we are content to display the Ivory- Tower Syndrome, writing scholarly treatises only for one another, disdaining both the general reader and our natural readership, scientists. Following his rhetoric, I argue that scientists are well aware of their own historicity, and would be interested in lively and balanced histories of science. It is ironic that the very professionalism (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  17.  69
    Species, demes, and the omega taxonomy: Gilmour and the newsystematics. [REVIEW]Mary Pickard Winsor - 2000 - Biology and Philosophy 15 (3):349-388.
    The word ``deme'' was coined by the botanists J.S.L. Gilmour and J.W.Gregor in 1939, following the pattern of J.S. Huxley's ``cline''. Its purposewas not only to rationalize the plethora of terms describing chromosomaland genetic variation, but also to reduce hostility between traditionaltaxonomists and researchers on evolution, who sometimes scorned eachother's understanding of species. A multi-layered system of compoundterms based on deme was published by Gilmour and J. Heslop-Harrison in1954 but not widely used. Deme was adopted with a modified meaning byzoologists (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  18.  25
    Andrew Hamilton . The Evolution of Phylogenetic Systematics. viii + 311 pp., illus., bibls., index. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. $65. [REVIEW]Mary P. Winsor - 2015 - Isis 106 (4):982-983.
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19.  34
    (1 other version)Anna Marie Roos. Web of Nature: Martin Lister , the First Arachnologist. xx + 478 pp., illus., bibl., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011. $177. [REVIEW]Mary Pickard Winsor - 2014 - Isis 105 (2):442-443.
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20.  27
    The Expansion of American Biology by Keith R. Benson; Jane Maienschein; Ronald Rainger. [REVIEW]Mary Winsor - 1993 - Isis 84:408-408.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21.  9
    The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology by Philip R. Rehbock. [REVIEW]Mary Winsor - 1985 - Isis 76:252-253.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark