| Paul Kammerer | |
|---|---|
Paul Kammerer, 1924
|
|
| Born | 17 August 1880 Vienna |
| Died | 23 September 1926 Puchberg am Schneeberg Suicide |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Known for | Lamarckian theory of inheritance, herpetological research |
Paul Kammerer (17 August 1880, in Vienna – 23 September 1926, in Puchberg am Schneeberg) was an Austrian biologist who studied and advocated the now abandoned Lamarckian theory of inheritance – the notion that organisms may pass to their offspring characteristics they have acquired in their lifetime. He began his academic career at the Vienna Academy studying music but graduated with a degree in biology.
Contents |
Kammerer undertook numerous biology experiments, largely involving interfering with the breeding and development of amphibians. He coerced ovoviviparous fire salamanders to become viviparous, and viviparous alpine salamanders to become ovoviviparous. In lesser-known experiments, he manipulated and bred olms. He made olms produce live young, and he bred dark-colored olms with full vision. He supported the Lamarckian theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics, and experimented extensively to prove this theory.[1]
Kammerer succeeded in making midwife toads breed in the water by increasing water temperatures, and reported that his midwife toads were exhibiting black nuptial pads on their feet. While the prehistoric ancestors of midwife toads had these pads, Kammerer considered this an acquired characteristic brought about by adaptation to environment.[1] Claims arose that the result of the experiment had been falsified. The most notable of these claims was made by Dr. G. K. Noble, Curator of Reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History, in the scientific journal Nature. Noble claimed that the black pads actually had a far more mundane explanation: it had simply been injected there with Indian ink.[2] Six weeks later, Kammerer committed suicide in the forest of Schneeberg.[1]
Interest in Kammerer revived in 1971 with the publication of Arthur Koestler's book, The Case of the Midwife Toad. Koestler surmised that Kammerer's experiments on the midwife toad may have been tampered with by a Nazi sympathizer at the University of Vienna. Certainly, as Koestler writes, "the Hakenkreuzler, the swastika-wearers, as the Austrian Nazis of the early days were called, were growing in power. One center of ferment was the University of Vienna[3] where, on the traditional Saturday morning student parades, bloody battles were fought. Kammerer was known by his public lectures and newspaper articles as an ardent pacifist and Socialist; it was also known that he was going to build an institute in Soviet Russia. "An act of sabotage in the laboratory would have been…in keeping with the climate of those days."
Kammerer had previously exhibited the toad in England, where it had been inspected by eminent zoologists, all of whom doubted the validity of Lamarckism, and none of them detected the irregularities later discovered by Noble. Since the injected ink was rather conspicuous, this suggests that the possible sabotage had been committed shortly before Noble's visit to Vienna, when Kammerer was no longer working at the Institute.
Kammerer had already experimented with sea squirts, salamanders and other animals and believed that these experiments provided evidence of Lamarckian inheritance. He regarded the possible inheritance of a pad on the foot of a male midwife toad as of relatively minor significance in the argument. Many biologists from all over Europe visited him in Vienna and photographs and reports of his work were widely available. He approved the inspection of the specimen which was found to have been tampered with and expressed great astonishment when this was made known to him.
As a consequence of Noble's refutation, interest in Lamarckian inheritance diminished except in the Soviet Union where it was championed by Lysenko. The contemporary view in biology remained that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited and that every case documented by Kammerer falls in the broad category of phenotypic plasticity.
Sander Gliboff of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University has commented that, though Kammerer's conclusions proved false, his evidence was probably genuine and that he did not simply argue for Lamarckism and against Darwinism as those theories are now understood. Rather, if we look beyond the scandal, the story shows us much about the competing theories of biological and cultural evolution and the range of new ideas about heredity and variation in early 20th-century biology and the changes in experimental approach that have occurred since that time.[4]
In 2009 Alexander Vargas, an evolutionary developmental biologist, suggested that the inheritance of acquired traits (Lamarckian inheritance) that Kammerer observed in the Midwife Toad could be real and could be explained by epigenetics.[5] Kammerer could be the true discoverer of non-Mendelian, epigenetic inheritance. The mechanism of epigenetic inheritance is a chemical modification of DNA (e.g. DNA methylation) that can be passed on to subsequent generations. Furthermore, the parent-of-origin effect, which was confusing at the time, can be explained today because similar effects have been discovered in other organisms.
Kammerer's other passion was collecting coincidences. He published a book with the title Das Gesetz der Serie (The Law of the Series; never translated into English) in which he recounted some 100 anecdotes of coincidences that had led him to formulate his theory of Seriality.
He postulated that all events are connected by waves of seriality. These unknown forces would cause what we would perceive as just the peaks, or groupings and coincidences. Kammerer was known to, for example, make notes in public parks of what numbers of people were passing by, how many carried umbrellas etc. Albert Einstein called the idea of Seriality "interesting, and by no means absurd", while Carl Jung drew upon Kammerer's work in his essay Synchronicity. Koestler reported that, when researching for his biography about Kammerer, he himself was subjected to "a meteor shower" of coincidences - as if Kammerer's ghost were grinning down at him saying, "I told you so!"[6]