Word: loeb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mechanistic Conception of Life, Loeb describes his experiments on tropisms and fertilization with great clarity. Loeb wanted readers to understand his experiments--they were his tools to convince people of the correctness of his metaphysics...
...Loeb first attracted public attention by showing that tropisms govern some kinds of animal behavior as strictly as they had been shown to govern plant behavior by his teachers. (A tropism is an automatic, mechanical orientation of an organism in response to some controlling factor in its environment. A moth which can fly only toward a light and a plant which can grow only in the direction of light both show positive phototropisms...
...simple chemical alterations of the water in which marine organisms lived, Loeb caused tropisms in animals which, under normal circumstances, appeared to be acting "spontaneously." He concluded that all animal behavior was tropistic, or would be if we only knew the controlling physico-chemical forces...
Having "proved" behavior deterministic, Loeb moved on to fertilization, for he found that vitalists (who opposed mechanists) were always using the mystery of the process of fertilization to slip a soul into animals. In 1899, by chemical alterations in water containing sea urchin eggs, he was able to fertilize the eggs and cause them to develop into larvae without any male sperm at all. For this work he gained world renown. Professor Fleming's introduction recounts that maiden ladies stopped bathing at the sea shore for fear of what the water might do to them; barren couples earnestly entreated Loeb...
This jacketing of concrete experiments in metaphysical clothes, Professor Fleming points out, makes Loeb seem scientifically old-fashioned. The experimental procedures Loeb originated are now routine in biology, and many of his experimental results still stand, though viewed with a different emphasis; but Loeb's use of experimentals to divine general Truth has a fin-de-siecl air, and most scientists view similar attempts today with embarrassment...