Generation, Classification, and Human-Plant Analogies in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on three pseudonymously published mock-scientific treatises on artificial generation from the 1750s, this article considers the roots and purposes of human-plant analogies in the period. The first half establishes how the texts express anxieties about human classification in light of Linnaean botany, treatments of liminal organisms such as the sensitive plant and the polyp, and unresolved theories about the function of the egg and sperm and the nature of the human embryo. The second half addresses the classification of the infant products of the fictional experiments and of the natural philosophers that present them. In the first case, it draws links between the cultivation systems advocated in these texts and the iatromechanical theories of Stephen Hales and George Cheyne. In the second case, it parallels the natural philosophers’ violence and immodesty with Abraham Trembley’s and Henry Baker’s experiments in the artificial reproduction of polyps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".