On Genealogy: Biology, Religion, and Aesthetics in E.T.A. Hoffmann's <i>Elixiere des Teufels</i> (1815–16) and Erasmus Darwin's <i>Zoonomia</i> (1794–96)<sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first scientific works that describe corporeal and mental qualities as the result of hereditary transmission appeared around 1800. While the Enlightenment had assumed or posited a potentially free self, new findings in medicine and biology indicated an inherited burden which determines the individual. Reading E.T.A. Hoffmann's Elixiere des Teufels in the context of Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia, this paper suggests the necessity of opening a new dimension of the discourse on the novel by highlighting the significance of the heredity debate in the life sciences for both the novel's definition of the individual and the novel's self‐understanding. The paper argues that Hoffmann questions the empirically justified truth claim of the emerging scientific disciplines and rejects attempts to apply biological models to human psychological and moral behavior. E.T.A. Hoffmann's Elixiere are presented as a key moment in the formation of the novel as that area of the modern world which functions as a meta‐critical space for the sciences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".