The organic memory concept in 19th-century biology and its implications for current biological thinking
Abstract
The concept of organic memory, i.e., the analogy between heredity and memory, was particularly vivid in 19th-century biology, linked to Lamarckian philosophy (Hering 1870; Haeckel 1876; Butler 1910) and to the heredity of acquired characters. The concept also helped to explain how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, therefore even Haeckel himself introduced his organic memory concept.
But the first scientist who explicitly attributed the faculty of memory to all organic matter (without involving consciousness) and provided a general definition of organic memory was the physiologist Ewald Hering. He believed that all traits of an organism, hereditary as well as acquired, are stored step-by-step in the organism and further distributed as memory traces available to future generations.
In my presentation, some basic aspects of organic memory concepts from the 19th century will be presented. The organic memory ideas at that time floundered between vitalistic (Butler 1910) and rather materialistic or mechanistic conceptions (Haeckel 1876).
The former attributed some psychological features to cells or memory particles; the latter were based on physics or in Cartesian doctrine, and described memory as essentially localized as a kind of storage of traces or patterns of physical waves. The concepts were generally rather vague in terms of the concrete definition of traits inheritance.
I would like to argue that the term memory is not a mere synonym for the term heredity (as in the neo-Darwinian tradition) and has its own semantic field in current science. I will further argue that in the light of current knowledge about hereditary processes other than genetic inheritance, the organic memory concept gains value and relevance in current biological thinking again.
And that especially when interconnected with so called organic selection (Hoffmeyer & Kull 2003), with the inheritance of acquired epigenetic variation (Jablonka & Lamb 1989) and examples of developmental plasticity.