Biography:

Donna J. Drucker is adjunct assistant professor of history at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. She received her B.A. from Colorado College and her M.L.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her current research centers on an intellectual history of Alfred C. Kinsey from his earliest entomological research through Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953). She uses Kinseys work as a focal point for studying the historical development of twentieth-century disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and the effects of the organization of academe on knowledge formation about sexuality. Her broader interests include the history of life and human sciences, gender and sexuality theory, and the history of sex research. She has published articles in the Indiana Magazine of History and The Journal of Illinois History. She is a member of the Organization of American Historians and of the American Historical Association, and she is on the editorial board of Culture Frame, a new journal for interdisciplinary dialogue between the sciences and humanities.

Abstract:

Insular Species and Hopeful Monsters: The Work of Alfred Kinsey and Richard Goldschmidt on the Margins of the Evolutionary Synthesis

This paper assesses Alfred Kinseys and Richard Goldschmidts respective contributions to each others evolutionary science research and to the intellectual movement known as the evolutionary synthesis. Examining figures at the edges of new schools of thought reveals much about the extent of real consensus and diversity within the rank and file of scientific research communities and about the ways that scientists use disputes to rethink their research trajectories (Joseph Allen Cain, Common Problems and Cooperative Solutions, Isis, March 1993, 25). Kinsey (18941956) and Goldschmidt (18781958) spent decades studying gall wasps and gypsy moths, respectively. As the evolutionary synthesis developed in the mid-1930s, they attempted to contribute to it with Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips (1936) and The Material Basis of Evolution (1940). They used their entomological research to air conflicting theories on speciation and on macro- and microevolution that the synthesiss primary architects dismissed as unworkable. They also criticized each other as the synthesis expanded, and Kinsey vilified Goldschmidts 1916 theory of the relationship of intersexuality to homosexuality in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). Their ongoing arguments show that research on the borders of the synthesis nonetheless played a role in shaping itif only to serve as a foil for the synthesiss central figures. Their disagreements also reveal how differently scientists react to criticism. While Goldschmidt continued work on theoretical genetics and completed his memoirs after his evolutionary ideas were marginalized, Kinsey redirected his taxonomic skills and methods toward human sex research