Modern Nature

The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany

Lynn K. Nyhart

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226610924
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

In Modern Nature, Lynn K. Nyhart traces the emergence of a "biological perspective" in late nineteenth-century Germany that emphasized the dynamic relationships among organisms, and between organisms and their environment. Examining this approach to nature in light of Germany's fraught urbanization and industrialization, as well the opportunities presented by new and reforming institutions, she argues that rapid social change drew attention to the role of social relationships and physical environments in rendering a society—and nature—whole, functional, and healthy.

This quintessentially modern view of nature, Nyhart shows, stood in stark contrast to the standard naturalist's orientation toward classification. While this new biological perspective would eventually grow into the academic discipline of ecology, Modern Nature locates its roots outside the universities, in a vibrant realm of populist natural history inhabited by taxidermists and zookeepers, schoolteachers and museum reformers, amateur enthusiasts and nature protectionists.

Probing the populist beginnings of animal ecology in Germany, Nyhart unites the history of popular natural history with that of elite science in a new way. In doing so, she brings to light a major orientation in late nineteenth-century biology that has long been eclipsed by Darwinism.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introducton: The Biological Perspective and the Problem of a Modern Nature
• Chapter 2. Bringing Life to Natural History
• Chapter 3. The World in Miniature: Practical Natural History and the Zoo Movement
• Chapter 4. From Practice to Theory: Karl Möbius and the Lebensgemeinschaft
• Chapter 5. The “Living Community” in the Classroom
• Chapter 6. Reforming the Natural History Museum, 1880–1900
• Chapter 7. Biological Groups, Nature, and Culture in the Museum
• Chapter 8. From Biology to Ecology
• Chapter 9. Museum Research and the Rise of Ecological Animal Geography
• Chapter 10. Modern Nature
• Bibliography
• Index