Herbert Spencer Jennings
Herbert Jennings | |
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| Born | Herbert Spencer Jennings April 8, 1868 Tonica, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | April 14, 1947 (aged 79) Santa Monica, California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Zoology, geneticism, eugenics |
Herbert Spencer Jennings (April 8, 1868 – April 14, 1947) was an American zoologist, geneticist, and eugenicist. His research helped demonstrate the link between physical and chemical stimulation and automatic responses in lower orders of animals (Behavior of the Lower Organisms, 1906).
Life
[edit | edit source]He was born in Tonica, Illinois, on April 8, 1868, the son of George Nelson Jennings and his wife Olive Taft Jenks.[1]
He studied at the University of Michigan graduating BS in 1893 then Harvard University where he gained a further AM degree in 1895 and a PhD in 1896. In 1906 he began a long and illustrious career at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he stayed until retirement in 1938.[2] He married twice: firstly in 1898 to Louisa Burridge and secondly in 1939 to Lulu Plant.
He died in Santa Monica, California, on April 14, 1947.
Career
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Jennings was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1907 and both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1914.[3][4][5]
Tracy Sonneborn would later write:
Jennings was so struck by the continued production of hereditarily diverse clones at conjugation, even after many successive inbreedings, that he undertook to examine the matter mathematically. As a result, general formulae for the results of diverse systems of mating were published in a series of papers between 1912 and 1917; these were one of the main seeds from which the whole field of mathematical genetics developed.[6]
In 1924, Jennings published an article in Scientific Monthly on "Heredity and Environment" which was prescient for anticipating the double helix, and provocatively liberal for its comments on racial differences and American immigration policy.[7]
Jennings was the recipient of the inaugural 1925 Leidy Award of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.[8]
After complaints about the documentary titled The Hereditarily Diseased, the Carnegie Institution of Washington appointed Jennings to review the work of Harry H. Laughlin at the Institution's Eugenics Record Office, then part of what has become the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Jennings found falsified data and manipulated conclusions, and Laughlin was forced out.[9] In 1930, he published The Biological Basis of Human Nature, discussing eugenics, genetic influence on human traits, and criticizing simplistic interpretations of heritability based on Mendelism, emphasizing gene-environment interaction & polygenicity; Sonneborn would describe the impact of The Biological Basis of Human Nature as widespread: "Probably no book by a geneticist has been so widely quoted by American workers in the fields of education, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. In spite of inevitable misquotation and misinterpretation, it has exercised a distinctly salutary effect on those fields and is to a large extent responsible for whatever they have assimilated in this country from modern genetics."
See also
[edit | edit source]References
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Footnotes
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- ^ Herbert Spencer Jennings, "Heredity and Environment", The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 19, No. 3 (September, 1924), pp. 225-238.
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- ^ Bill Bryson (2013), One Summer: America, 1927, New York: Doubleday, pp. 369-370, Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value). .
External links
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Works by or about [[:s:Lua error in Module:WikidataIB at line 482: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).|Lua error in Module:WikidataIB at line 555: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).]] at Wikisource- Works by H. S. Jennings at Project Gutenberg
- Works by Herbert Spencer Jennings at the Biodiversity Heritage LibraryLua error in Module:EditAtWikidata at line 29: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
- Works by Herbert Spencer Jennings at Open LibraryLua error in Module:EditAtWikidata at line 29: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
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- 1868 births
- 1947 deaths
- American eugenicists
- American geneticists
- 20th-century American zoologists
- Harvard University alumni
- People from Tonica, Illinois
- University of Michigan alumni
- Members of the American Philosophical Society
- Johns Hopkins University faculty
- Presidents of the American Society of Naturalists